Not everyone knows the pain of being the younger sibling, but for those of you who do, you will agree with me completely that, although it's amazing having a role model to look up to, being the younger child utterly sucks. I don't know what it's like to have "middle child syndrome," or what it's like to be an only child, but what I know is being the youngest child. Sometimes it's the greatest, other times it sucks.
1. Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Yep, your older sibling got mad at you one day and taunted you with something that they knew and you didn't. This was the day you realized that maybe everything your parents told you was a total lie. Not only was the lack of trust in your parents an awful feeling, but the fact that you were naive enough to believe in these make-believe creatures felt even worse. Looking at your peers in school and wondering which ones still believed and which ones knew the truth was something that became routine to you. This was ultimately the downfall of your childhood.
2. Traditions stop earlier.
Now, I know parents don't mean to do this intentionally, but sometimes because the other children are getting older and less involved in holiday traditions, parents stop traditions earlier. Things such as Easter egg hunts is something enjoyable to little people, but if their siblings are "too cool" or "too tired" to look for little plastic eggs around the house, odds are, within the next few years, the tradition will stop. This is something that parents try to avoid because they truly want to make holidays special for all of their children, but it's beyond their control how siblings will act. This is something that a lot of youngest children of the family distinctly remember happening to them. They get the least amount of traditional holiday activities.
3. School.
Having older siblings can influence your school experience greatly. Whether they were a star athlete, a prestigious student or someone who laid low all have an impact on who you are when you get into high school. Not only does it have a social impact, but it could actually have an academic impact on you, as well. Teachers might have higher or lower expectations of you, depending on how your siblings have done in their classes. Unintentional, but hard for teachers to not do. This can impact schooling greatly, because one may not get graded hard enough because their siblings weren't as focused, or they could get graded too hard because teachers have set too high of expectations because their siblings had been very smart.
Either one could affect grades, but the really big impact is at home. Depending on how your siblings did in school, your parents also had expectations, no matter what. If your siblings did well in school, you have to do even better. If they did bad in school, you can't be like them, and you must have all A's, no matter what. There's no winning in this situation.
4. Starting life.
Having older siblings means that, while you're still stuck in school, they're out getting jobs and moving on with their life. This is something that affects the younger children dramatically. There's nothing that you can do about your age, but you feel like you're losing your best friend, with whom you've been side-by-side since the day you were born. There's no way to stop your siblings from growing up, but watching it all happen while you're not a big part of it can really suck. You start to see them less and less, and then talk to them less, as well. The distance between you and your siblings continues to get greater, but your appreciation for them grows.
Don't get me wrong here. I love my older brother more than anything, and he's done so much for me that I will never be able to thank him enough. Sometimes being the younger sibling just sucked, but other times, it was a blessing. I got to learn from his mistakes, and also my parents became more lenient with rules with me. They got to learn a lot from raising my brother and what parenting techniques worked, so when it came to me, they were dead on.
They realized that they can't shelter us and drown us in rules, although there still were rules (many of which got broken multiple times). They did a great job raising us. They made raising us fun and brought us to so many music festivals, concerts and really made our childhood very enjoyable, urging my brother and I to be best friends. This is something that I will never regret in life. Being my brother's little sister is one of the best things to have happened to me.
