Both passages of Forer and Wither emphasizes the importance of birth order in one's personality. Forer asserts that by becoming a part of the family hierarchy, whether one becomes the only child, oldest child, middle child, or youngest child differs in characters. Furthermore, Wither claimed that best and worst couple matches can be decided by birth order. In my opinion, I partially agree that birth order effects a person's nature. However, I believe that birth order is only one of the factors, and many other variables contribute in forming one's character.
To begin with, I agree that parent's different attitudes toward their children depending on birth order can affect children's personalities. Forer suggested that later children benefit from experienced parents. Which means, later children are nurtured by parents who have knowledge about children by bringing up their first child. Therefore, parents mostly do not excessively hover around their later children or get worried about minor stuff compared to the first child. I believe these distinct treatments among children contributes in forming sibling's dissimilar personalities. To speak of my experience, as a youngest child I grew up in a rather comfortable environment compared to my sister's childhood. My sister was the apple of my parent's eyes when she was young, but as my sister grew up my parents experienced that children can also deal with their own worries and gave me sufficient time to solve my own difficulties than getting anxious. This resulted me to think that "time is going to solve everything" while my sister thinks exactly the opposite. Thus I think that birth orders partly effect personalities, since parents may provide different environments to each children by whether they are the only child, oldest child, middle child, or youngest child.
Nonetheless I believe that the writers overlook the possibilities of other variables such as socialization. Socialization is a concept that includes relationships and education which takes through one's whole life. Thus in my opinion, socialization has a big impact on one's personality than birth orders. Nevertheless Wither and Forer both define as if people only have characters as they classified. Therefore I disagree in Wither and Forer's opinion on how they described each child's characteristics. Especially as the youngest child, I disagree with the writers which claim that youngest children are highly dependent on other people. According to Forer, since youngest child's have both parents and siblings to turn to, they tend to think that there is always help around them. Which results in making the youngest child dependent on others. However in my case, even with the support of my sister when I was young, as I went through socializing I became independent. For example by meeting tired people who were overly dependent or doing assignments gave me the thought that I should take responsibility of myself.
Consequently, I think it is hard to say that merely birth order decides an individual's personality. As people live their lives, they will experience various things besides only family, and their characteristics have the possibility to change going through them.
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