by Alfred Adler
His mother is tired of the trouble he causes her; and now he really begins to experience what it is like to be no longer loved. He was fighting for his mother's love and the result is that he loses it. He felt pushed into the background and the effect of his actions is that he really is pushed into the background. He feels himself justified. " I knew it," he feels. The others are wrong and he is right. It is as if he were in a trap: the more he struggles, the worse his position becomes. All the time his views of the position are being confirmed. How can he give up the fight when everything tells him he is justified?
In every case of such a fight, we must inquire into the individual circumstances. If mother fights back at him, the child will become high tempered, wild, critical and dis obedient. When he turns against his mother, it often happens that his father gives him a chance to renew the old favorable position. He becomes interested in his father and tries to win his attention and affection. Oldest children frequently prefer their fathers and lean towards their side. We can be sure, wherever a child prefers his father, that this is a secondary phase: at first he was attached to his mother, but now she has lost his affection and he has transferred it to his father as a reproach against her. If a child prefers his father, we know that he has previously suffered a tragedy; he has felt slighted and left out of account; he cannot forget it and his whole style of life is built around this feeling.
Such a fight lasts a long time and sometimes it lasts through a whole life. The child has trained to fight and resist and he goes on fighting in all situations. Perhaps there is no one whose interest he can engage. He then becomes hopeless and imagines that he can never win affection. We find then such characteristics as peevishness, reserve and inability to join in with others. The child trains himself for isolation. All the movements and expressions of such a child are directed towards the past, the bygone time when he was the center of attention. For this reason oldest children generally show, in one way or another, an interest in the past. They like to look back and to speak of the past. They are admirers of the past and pessimistic over the future. Sometimes a child who has lost his power, the small kingdom he ruled, under stands better than others the importance of power and authority. When he grows up, he likes to take part in the exercise of authority and he exaggerates the importance of rules and laws. Everything should be done by rule and no rule should ever be changed. Power should always be preserved in the hands of those who are entitled to it. We can understand that influences like these in childhood give a strong tendency towards conservatism. If such an individual establishes a good position for himself, he is always suspicious that other people are coming up behind him with the intention of taking his place from him and dethroning him.
The position of the oldest child offers a special problem, but it is one which can be well met and turned into an advantage. If he has already been trained for cooperation when the younger child is born, he suffers no injury. Among such oldest children we find individuals who develop a striving to protect others and help them. They train to imitate their fathers or mothers; often they play the part of a father or a mother with the younger children, look after them, teach them and feel themselves responsible for their welfare. Sometimes they develop a great talent for organization. These are the favorable cases, though even a striving to protect others may be exaggerated into a desire to keep those others dependent and to rule over them. In my own experience in Europe and America I have found that the greatest proportion of problem children are oldest children; and close behind them come the youngest children. It is interesting that these extreme positions provide the extreme problems. Our educational methods have not yet successfully solved the difficulties of the oldest child.
The second child is in a quite different position, a situation that cannot be compared with that of the other children. From the time he is born, he shares attention with another child; and he is therefore a little nearer to cooperation than an oldest child. He has a greater circle of human beings in his environment; and if the oldest is not fighting against him and pushing him back, he is very well situated. The most significant fact of his position is something different. Throughout his childhood he has a pacemaker. There is always a child ahead of him in age and development and he is stimulated to exert himself and catch up. A typical second child is very easy to recognize. He behaves as if he were in a race, as if someone were a step or two in front and he had to hurry to get ahead of him. He is under full steam all the time. He trains continually to surpass his older brother and conquer him. The Bible gives us many marvelous psychological hints and the typical second child is beautifully portrayed in the story of Jacob. He wished to be the first, to take away Esau's position, to beat Esau and excel him. A second child is irritated by the feeling that he is behind and struggles hard to overtake the others.
Often he succeeds. The second child is often more talented and successful than the first. Here we cannot suggest that heredity has any part in this development. If he goes ahead faster, it is because he trained more. Even when he is grown up and outside the family circle, he often makes use of a pacemaker; compares himself with someone whom he thinks more advantageously placed and tries to go beyond him. It is not only in the waking life that we see these characteristics. They leave their marks on all expressions of the personality and they are easily found in dreams. Oldest children, for example, often have dreams of falling. They are on top, but they are not sure that they can keep their superiority. Second children, on the other hand, often picture themselves in races. They run after trains and ride in bicycle races. Sometimes this hurry in his dreams is sufficient by itself to allow us to guess that the individual is a second child.
We must say, however, that there are no fixed rules in this way. It is not only an actual oldest child that can behave like an oldest. The situation counts, not the mere order of birth. In a large family a later child is sometimes in the situation of an oldest. Perhaps there were two children born close together; for example, a long time intervened before a third was born, and then two other children followed. The third child may show all the features of an oldest. So, too, with a second child; a typical second child may appear after four or five children have been born. Always where two children grow up close together and separated from the others they will show the characteristics of an oldest and a second child.
Sometimes the oldest is beaten in the race; you will then find that the oldest child offers a problem. Sometimes he can keep his position and push back the younger; it is then the second child that gives trouble. It is a very difficult position for the oldest child when he is a boy and the second is a girl. He runs the risk of being beaten by a girl, which, in our present conditions, he will probably feel as being a serious disgrace. The tension between a boy and a girl is higher than the tension between two boys or two girls. In this struggle the girl is favored by nature; till her sixteenth year she develops more quickly, bodily and mentally, than a boy. Such an older boy gives up the fight, grows lazy and discouraged. He looks around for tricks and underhand means of conquering; he boasts or lies, for example. We can almost guarantee that in such a case the girl will win. We shall see the boy taking to all kinds of mistaken paths, while the girl solves her Problems with ease and progresses astonishingly. Such difficulties can be avoided; but the danger must be known be forehand and steps taken before damage has been done. Bad consequences can be avoided only in a family which is a unity of equal and cooperative members, where there is no sense in rivalry and no ground for a child to think he has enemies and spend his time fighting.
All other children have followers; all other children can be dethroned; but the youngest can never be dethroned. He has no followers but he has many pacemakers. He is always the baby of the family and probably he is the most pampered. He faces the difficulties of a pampered child; but, because he is so much stimulated, because he has many chances for competition, it often hap pens that the youngest child develops in an extraordinary way, runs faster than the other chi
ldren and overcomes them all. The position of the youngest has not changed in human history. In the oldest stories of mankind we have accounts of how the youngest child excelled its Brothers and sisters. In the Bible it is always the youngest who conquers. Joseph was brought up as a youngest. Benjamin came seventeen years after Joseph; but Benjamin played no part in his development. Joseph's style of life is exactly typical of the style of life of a youngest. He is always asserting his superiority, even in his dreams. The others must bow down before him; he outshines them all. His brothers understood his dreams very well. It was not hard for them, since they had Joseph with them and his attitude was clear enough. The feelings which Joseph aroused in his dreams they also had felt. They feared him and wanted to get rid of him. From being the last, however, Joseph became the first. In later days he was the pillar and support of the whole family. The youngest child is often the pillar of the whole family and this cannot be accidental. Men have always known it and told stories of the power of the youngest. He is, in fact, in a very favorable situation; helped by his mother, his father and his brothers; with so much to stimulate his ambition and effort; and with no one to attack him from behind or distract his attention.
And yet, as we saw, the second largest proportion of problem children comes from among the youngest. The reason for this generally lies in the way in which all the family spoils them. A spoiled child can never be independent. He loses courage to succeed by his own effort. Youngest children are always ambitious; but the most ambitious children of all are the lazy children. Laziness is a sign of ambition joined with discouragement; ambition so high that the individual sees no hope of realizing it. Sometimes a youngest child will not admit to any single ambition, but this is because he wishes to excel in everything, he wishes to be unlimited and unique. It will be easily understood, also, from what inferiority feelings a youngest child can suffer. Everyone in the environment is older, stronger and more experienced.
The only child has a problem of his own. He has a rival, but his rival is not a brother or sister. His feelings of competition go against his father. An only child is pampered by his mother. She is afraid of losing him and wants to keep him under her attention. He develops what is called a "mother complex”; he is tied to his mother's apron strings and wishes to push his father out of the family picture. This, too, can only be prevented if the father and mother work together and let the child be interested in both of them; but, for the most part, the father is less occupied with the child than the mother. Oldest children are occasionally very much like only children: they want to conquer the father and they like people who are older than themselves. Often an only child is scared to death lest he should have brothers and sisters following him. Friends of the family say, “You ought to have a little brother or sister”, and he dislikes the prospect immensely. He wants to be the center of attention all the time. He really feels that it is a right of his and if his position is challenged he thinks it a great injustice. In later life, where he is no longer the center of attention, he has many difficulties. Another point of danger for his development is that he is born into a timid environment. If, for organic reasons, the parents cannot have more children, we can do nothing but apply ourselves to solving the problems of an only child; but we often find these only children in a family where we could expect more children. The parents are timid and pessimistic. They feel they will not be able to solve the economic problem of having more than one child. The whole atmosphere is full of anxiety and the child suffers badly.
If there is a big space of years between the birth of children, each child will have some of the features of an only child. The situation is not very favorable. I am often asked, “What do you think would be the best spacing of a family?” "Should children follow each other very soon or should there be a longer distance between them?” From my experience I should say that the best distance is about three years. At the age of three a child can cooperate if a younger child is born. He is intelligent enough to understand that there can be more than one child in a family. If he is only one-and-a-half or two, we cannot discuss it with him; he cannot understand our arguments. We shall not be able, therefore, to prepare him rightly for the event.
An only boy brought up in a family of girls has a hard time before him. He is in a wholly feminine environment. Most of the day the father is absent. He sees only his mother, his sisters and the maidservants. Feeling that he is different, he grows up isolated. This is especially true where the women-folk make a joint attack on him. They think they must all educate him or they want to prove that he has no reason to be conceited. There is a good deal of antagonism and rivalry. If he is in the middle, he is probably in the worst place of all — attacked from both sides. If he is the oldest, he is in danger of being followed by a girl who is a very keen competitor. If he is the youngest, he is made into a pet. The type of an only boy among girls is one which no one likes very much. The problem can be solved if there is a social life in which the children share and in which he can meet other children. Otherwise, surrounded by girls, he may behave like a girl. A feminine environment is quite different from a mixed environment. If the apartment is not just standardized but furnished according to the taste of the people in it, you may be sure that an apartment where women live will be neat and orderly, that the colors will be chosen with care, and that attention will have been paid to a thousand details. If there are men and boys about it is not nearly so neat; there is much more roughness and noise and broken furniture. Such a boy among girls is apt to grow up with feminine tastes and a feminine outlook on life.
On the other hand, he may fight strongly against this atmosphere and lay great stress on his masculinity. He will then always be on his guard not to be dominated by women. He will feel that he must assert his difference and his superiority; but there will always be tension. His development will proceed by extremes, he will train to be either very strong or very weak. It is a situation which de serves study and inquiry; it is not met with every day; and before we say much about it we must examine more cases. In a rather similar way, an only girl among boys is apt to develop very feminine or very masculine qualities. Frequently she is pursued through life by feelings of insecurity and helplessness.
Wherever I have studied adults, I have found impressions left on them from their early childhood and lasting forever. The position in the family leaves an indelible stamp upon the style of life. Every difficulty of development is caused by rivalry and lack of cooperation in the family. If we look around at our social life and ask why rivalry and competition is its most obvious aspect — in deed, not only at our social life but at our whole world —then we must recognize that people are everywhere pursuing the goal of being conqueror, of overcoming and surpassing others. This goal is the result of training in early childhood, of the rivalries and competitive striving of children who have not felt themselves an equal part of their whole family. We can get rid of these disadvantages only by training children better in cooperation.
VII. SCHOOL INFLUENCES
The school is the prolonged arm of the family. If parents were able to undertake the training of their children and fit them adequately for solving the problems of life, there would be no need for school education. Often in other cultures a child was trained almost completely in the family. A craftsman would bring up his sons in his own craft and teach them the skill he had acquired from his own father and from his practical experience. Our present culture, however, makes more complex demands on us, and schools are necessary to lighten the work of parents and carry on what they have begun. Social life needs a higher degree of education from its members than we can give them in the home.
In America schools have not gone through all the phases of development which have taken place in Europe; but sometimes we can still see relics of an authoritarian tradition. At first, in the history of European education, only princes and aristocrats received any schooling.
They were the only members of society to whom a value was accorded: others we
re expected to do their work and aspire no higher. Later on, the limits of society were enlarged. Education was taken over by religious institutions and a few selected individuals could be trained in religion, art, the sciences and professional disciplines.
When industrial technique began to develop, these forms of education were quite insufficient. The struggle for a wider education was long drawn out. The schoolmasters in the villages and towns were often cobblers and tailors. They taught with a stick in their hands and the results were very poor. Only the religious schools and the universities gave instruction in the arts and sciences and sometimes even emperors did not learn to read or write. Now it became necessary for the workers to read and write, do sums and draw, and the public schools as we know them were founded.
These schools, however, were always established in accordance with the ideals of the government; and the governments of the time aimed at having obedient subjects, trained for the benefit of the upper classes and capable of being turned into soldiers. The curriculum of the schools was adapted to this end. I myself can remember a time in Austria when these conditions, in part, survived; when the training for the least privileged classes was to make them obedient and fit them for talks appropriate to their status. More and more the insufficiencies of this type of education were seen. Freedom grew; the working classes became stronger and made higher demands. The public schools adapted themselves to these demands; and now it is the prevailing ideal of education that children should be taught to think for themselves, should be given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with literature, the arts and sciences, and should grow up to share in our whole human culture and contribute to it. We no longer wish to train children only to make money or take a Position under the industrial system. We want fellow men. We want equal, independent and responsible collaborators in the common work of culture.