BYU study finds first-borns have big edge in attention

PROVO — More bad news for younger siblings: a new study out of Brigham Young University suggests that first-born children get thousands of hours more attention from their parents.

This latest study follows recent national reports that first-born children make more money, have more education and score higher on IQ tests.

The findings were published last week in the Journal of Human Resources.

Joe Price, an assistant professor who teaches economics at BYU, says first-born children get about 3,000 more hours of quality time with their parents between ages 4 and 13 than the next sibling gets when they pass through the same age range.

"Most parents probably don't even know they are doing it," Price said, adding the difference is about 20 to 30 minutes of attention more per day for first-borns.

He used data from the American Time Use Survey, a federal government study involving 21,000 people.

The amount of time parents spend with their children on a daily basis declines as families get older. First-borns get more quality time simply because they pass through childhood when there is more overall family time to be shared, Price said.

Perhaps the most disturbing piece of Price's study is that not only do parents spend less total time with the younger children, but more of that time is spent on activities not considered to be quality time — such as watching television.

Price discovered the younger siblings actually watch more TV with their parents between the ages 4 and 13 than the first-born kids do when they pass through the same age range.

The professor says it's simply a result of parents becoming lazy as the years go by. "Rather than getting a book off the shelf to read to their children, they pop a video into a machine," Price said.

The professor says this is typical of most all parents. They have big ideas and grand goals for raising their first-born, from what foods the child will eat to how cautious they are with the baby.

Price points to a cartoon someone sent him. It shows a mother spider, saying how, with her first 100 children, she had to find just the perfect bug. By the time the next 100 baby spiders came along, it was just whatever she could find to feed them.

"We're all so gung-ho with our first child," he said. He and his wife, Emily, now have four children.

Price came up with the idea for the study when he was in graduate school and was concerned about spending enough time with his kids. He admits he does spend less time reading to his third-born daughter than he did to his oldest child at the same age.

"It's important to realize this is a natural pattern," he said.

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