Key insights into birth order help readers understand themselves and improve their marriage, parenting, and career skills.

Why do people raised in the same families often differ more dramatically in personality than those from different families? What made Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire uniquely suited to challenge the conventional wisdom of their times? This pioneering inquiry into the significance of birth order answers both these questions with a conceptional boldness that has made critics compare it with the work of Freud and of Darwin himself. During Frank Sulloway's 20-year-research, he combed through thousands of lives in politics, science and religion, demonstrating that first-born children are more likely to identify with authority whereas their younger siblings are predisposed to rise against it. Family dynamics, Sulloway concludes, is a primary engine of historical change. Elegantly written, masterfully researched, BORN TO REBEL is a grand achievement that has galvanised historians and social scientists and will fascinate anyone who has ever pondered the enigma of human character.

Studies show the most reliable scientific predictor of personality is birth order-your place among your siblings. The Birth Order Book of Love is the first guide to consider this factor when finding the perfect mate. Why do firstborns often find romance with lastborns? Who's the worst match for an only child? Cane examines the 12 personality/birth order types (older brother of brothers, younger sister of sisters, etc.), revealing why certain birth orders are more compatible and which ones can present communication challenges (and how to overcome them). Cane has analyzed the birth order of 6,000 celebrities, historical figures, and modern couples. Readers will learn what birth order says about them, which celebrity they'd be most compatible with, and who their best match is in real life.

This study appears at a time when a decisive turn is due in the research on personality development. After many years of stagna tion and misguided research in this field, this book should lead to a thorough revision and a better understanding of current views on the factors which have an influence on personality. Let us consider the unsatisfactory aspects of the recent develop ments in personality studies. At the beginning of this century, the revolutionary insight gained ground that personality is susceptible to various influences, in particular to those resulting from human interaction. This insight swept away many of the old scholastic concepts and gained special importance in the fields of pedagogics and psychotherapy. How ever, in the wake of every great discovery we find inherent dangers. For years, various claims and creeds on the malleability of personality have been put forward as if they were proven facts. Lay literature, too, was permeated with wrong and distorted information on factors which might endanger child development.

There are many factors affecting a child’s personality and the adult they become, but the least understood is birth order. Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the reader’s understanding of birth order theory, including the impact of a child’s broader social environment and the rise of the standard two-child family, where the second-born is simultaneously the last-born. It will enable you to delve a little deeper and look for the constellation of positions within a family, giving you a clearer picture of your own quirks and ambitions, along with those of your siblings, children, partner, workmates, friends and colleagues. Addressing multiple births, children with a disability, genetic engineering, blended families, gender balance, only children and birth-order balance in the workplace, parenting expert and father of three Michael Grose challenges parents to raise each child differently according to his or her birth order.