5 Bizarre Ways Your Siblings Made You Who You Are
About 80 percent of you have at least one brother or sister, and science says their influence goes way beyond whether or not you had someone to play catch with or just had to silently bounce a ball off the garage door in the driveway.
Whether or not you have siblings--and whether they were born before or after you--goes a long way toward determining what kind of person you are.
#5.
Older Brothers Can Turn You Gay (Seriously)
Guys, remember the torment that your older brothers put you through when you were growing up? If you are the oldest (or only) brother in your clan, then you're lucky. You didn't have a bunch of quarterbacks pulling your arms behind your back, stealing your glasses and calling you a pencil-necked little gaynerd.
Plus, your younger brothers provided ample punching practice.
If your mother spat out a few boys already before you came along, then you know the pain of having your older brothers constantly questioning your sexuality. You may be interested to learn that, according to science, they were right to do so: Having older brothers increases the probability that you will be gay.
It's called the Fraternal Birth-Order Effect, and it's quite clearly documented. For each son a woman produces, the chances that the next one will be spending his first 20 years inside a closet increase by 28 to 48 percent. By the fourth or fifth, you might begin to notice a puzzling affinity for musical theater.
Now, keep in mind the base rate of homosexuality is low already, you would need over 10 brothers before your probability of being gay propelled over 50 percent. Still, it's estimated that one in seven gay men can attribute their sexuality to this effect.
And they can take one hell of a photo.
Scientists think that this phenomenon is caused by a mother's body reacting to her son's foreign dude-proteins, and making antibodies to fight them. Each time another boy passes through a woman's system, these antibodies get stronger, and their target is your masculinity. We wish we were making that up. Before you're even born, your older brothers actually gang up on you and attempt to beat the straight out of you for nine months.
#4.
They Can Make You Shorter
There are many benefits to having older brothers and/or sisters: they provide a reliable source of advice, they keep the bullies off your back and they can help you build up a healthy alcohol and cigarette dependency long before it's legal to do so. Now it turns out that older siblings give you someone to look up to. Literally.
Science has proven that having older siblings noticeably stunts your growth. A scientific study following 14,000 British children found that those with three siblings were, on average, one inch shorter than their peers, the youngest being the shortest.
Tom Cruise: third child out of four.
Why? They think one factor is that, along with stinky second-hand clothes and a beat up backpack, the youngest has to make do with a stretched-out, hand-me-down uterus. As a mother goes through multiple pregnancies, she tends to put on weight, has worse blood sugar and generally stops giving a fuck.
"Screw it. The other two are smart enough."
It's like making three pizzas. The first one gets all the best ingredients, arranged carefully in a perfect ratio across every slice. For the second one, you find that you've run out of cheese halfway through, and you kind of just throw everything on there. For the third, you shit on the pizza just to see how it turns out. If you're the youngest in your family, you are that third pizza.
Then, after you're born, it turns out that not only do your parents love your older siblings more than you, they also spend more of their household's available resources on them. There is simply less time, money and attention available to a family's youngest child.
In big families, parents cannot provide proper nutrition to their youngest children, presumably because after years of responsible child rearing, they decide that owning a feral scavenger might be a fun change of pace.
"Honey, I think I know how we can save some money on our grocery bills..."
It's for similar reasons that...
#3.
Older Siblings are Smarter Than You
Anyone with an older brother or sister has shared this pain. No matter how hard you try, your older sibling always seems to come out ahead. Upon realizing that your parents actually went to that sibling's athletic events, hugged them and even gave them real meals rather than your two daily bowls of expired dog food, you decided that, if you hit the books hard enough, you could at least surpass your elders academically. Curing cancer will show them all!
Great science is driven by deep fear of inadequacy.
Nope, sorry. In a recent study analyzing over 240,000 subjects, researchers found that, on average, the eldest sibling scored three points higher on an IQ test than their younger kin. Three points may not seem like much, but it can be the difference between receiving a nice fat acceptance envelope from Yale, and having them send you a rejection letter nailed to a dead possum.
We've already explained how your older kin get the lion's share of your family's resources, but it turns out that they also get the best education during the crucial infant years. Before you and the other homewreckers came along, your eldest sibling secured your parents' undivided attention for however long they were Mom's #1. Logically, each subsequent child divides this attention, and you only wind up with half, or a third, or a quarter of the time and dedication that the golden child ever had.
Scientists think that this head-start leads to higher vocabulary and reasoning abilities, and because the younger children are increasingly faceless members of a growing litter, they never have a chance to develop the same brainpower. It's called the dilution hypothesis.
But there's more. As the family grows, older siblings begin to take on some of the responsibilities of their fed-up parents. This means often that they become makeshift tutors for their dumb-as-a-brick brothers and sisters. Ironically, because teaching something is the best way to learn it, this benefits them more than it does you.
By this logic, teachers are the most selfish people on the planet.
It may seem altruistic that they would act as your mentor, but what they're really doing is reinforcing the fact that you will never be better than them. Ever.
Well I may be the exception to some point in this article. I'm #10 out of 14 total children. I have 2 older brothers, 7 older sisters, 1 little sister and 3 younger brothers.
ReplyI was the first to go to college.
I am the tallest (and was the largest born at 10lbs 6oz)
I am straight and married
Overall (and so far) I'm pretty healthy but all my siblings are still alive so I don't know about our life spans, but so far so good so I'm not all that concerned about how long I'll live.
I have a vast network of close friends
I also sex up the wife woman every other day (on average but we're still under being married for 5 years so maybe we still just have the newlywed hormones going). Still, I guess they got this point correctly, but I don’t track my older siblings’ sexual habits so who knows?
All my sisters are married (to guys) but only my oldest brother and I are married. He has kids, I don't. All my other brothers are currently single but all have been in good loving relationships with women in the past and as far as I know, nobody is gay. I currently do have a brother in the Navy though...but I'm fairly confident he is straight.
Yes I'm kind of bragging, but I just wanted to point out that there are exceptions to these theories...thank God.
I only scored two points higher on the ACT than my brother. But he wound up married and manager of a cafeteria, with me still single. So I'm not sure what the point is of this study.
ReplyI did get more tail than my older brother, but he didn't outlive me...passed away 8 months ago at the age of 23. Wish you could always be right, Cracked...
ReplySorry to hear that. My bro died at 18. Unfortunately the law of averages have extremes on either end.
A lot of these boil down to the older sibling getting the most attention during the crucial first year or two. I suppose that's why none of these apply to my family. My mother freely admits she hadn't a clue what to do with me when I was born, it wasn't til my siblings came along that she started to get the hang of this mothering malarkey - so they got the most attention, educational toys, better food etc. Also I was born when my parents were at their most skint - my siblings spent their earliest years eating organic food in the fresh air of a small farm. I spent mine in a 2 bed council house next to a busy road, eating my mothers infamous 'everything from the reduced price aisle in one pot' stew.
ReplyI agree with number 1 whole heartedly, my older brother is still a virgin, where as my parents think im an insomniac like my dad, when in reality the only time i get sleep is when my gf is on her period
Replyalso im way funnier than my wanna-be physicist brother and much more creative
and so modest too.
It's okay. He'll stop getting sex once the women around him realize there are actual men in the world and not self-absorbed little boys.
I am the youngest of the three children in my family, have two brothers before me, and as one last eternal kick in the balls to my existence, I am the only female child to have been produced in my father's lineage for 300 f*****g years.
ReplyI am currently a writer/director for videogames, have an average IQ of 184, and I'm only 17. What are my brothers doing? One is jobless and living with my mom, the other is a bass player for a bunch of s****y bands.
Take THAT, genetics!
It is physically impossible to have an IQ that high. Have you been taking online IQ tests? You'd think someone with your IQ would be more socially adept and would sound somewhat more modest.
I must point out that as the second child and the biggest of the four at birth, I am currently the shortest of the older three, I have 12 years on the youngest so I don't know yet. I'm also the smartest.
ReplyUm .... I have one problem with this. It's actually mostly true, especially the part about the third child being the "shitty" experiment pizza, but as a second child who is far smarter and better looking than the oldest, I have to disagree with the part about division of attention.
ReplyThen again, after my mother shat out my older brother, she decided to give him someone to play with almost immediately, then decided to spend a few years with the cute one before shitting out some more, so I got nearly 4 years of uninterrupted mommylove, while my brother was basically ignored (he deserved it).
TL;DR, First the Worst, Second the Best.
HAHA, I used to say that I am no good at school because I had a disorder called "SECOUND CHILD SYNDROM".... man I have a grate sense of humor
ReplyGrate spelling, too.
Middle children have it worst... More likely to develop psychological disorders, commit suicide, and I believe get murdered.
ReplyHmm, I always find that the youngest sibling of a family is the most spoiled and favored. Older siblings are always complaining "WTF, I never got THAT when I was his age!"
ReplyAnd I always thought of the oldest child as the "practice" child; the shit-pizza if you will.
My older brother (the first child) was the result of not enough lube and a therefore broken condom. And boy was he a shit-pizza.
Hurhurhur
i disagree, my parents wanted to have kids but my mom was told she couldnt, so when my brother came along she was her little miracle, of course as anyone would do she doted on him until he became a dilhole by age 2, i was the accidental s**t pizza and was everyday told i was found under a rock cause i didnt compare to my brother, who's had 6 cars, no job, skipped school constantly, flunked everything, never did homework or chores and never got in trouble for it, where as i was forced to take up my parents financial burden with jobs that litteraly to this day still cause me back pain, my only car i just got last year, anything else i had to borrow my brothers truck, and pay him back for the gas, which he didnt pay for anyway, if i complain im an a*****e, if my bro complains he's got a problem and we shouldnt yell at him cause he's liable to commit suicide, although he's never tried it, or talked about it or even been withdrawn like you'd expect, meanwhile ive tried to off myself 6 times, 6 failures, 5 of which my parents didnt find out about until i tried foolishly talking to my brother about it who proceeded to mock my weakness in front of my mom who then slapped me for being a "punk b***h whiner"
i should mention im the youngest of 6 kids, 3 brothers and two sisters the oldest 4 are my dad's kids not my moms and im also being held up to the yard stick of people 35 years older than me who had an easier life growing up than i did, but i still kick all my emotional baggage to the curb and somehow find the strength to make others life everyday, make sure my gf is taken care of sexually and emotionally, fight of suicidal thoughts of the futility of life and how i compare less than s**t to the turds my family flushes down the toilet and manage to go to art school where everyone thinks im rich cause i "lucked" into having a working car and because of a few stolen macabre sketches my family thinks im ungrateful for all the wondrous things i have, like the inability to pick something off of the floor with out sounding like a car skidding out on a gravel road
There seem to be a lot of exceptions to these statistics, but, I guess that's what you get with statistics any way, at least 51 percent true, but there's still the possibility of 49 percent false, not saying I completely disagree, there are just a substantial amount of exceptions.
ReplyThat last picture and caption made me spit my drink all over my laptop from laughing.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesGood job, Cracked.
Also, I'm the Little brother. All of these are true except the smarter and homosexual ones.
So, all of them are true.
My little brother is the youngest of four and we're like 90% sure he's gay.
But he's 11, he's always got the chance to turn it around, right? Right?
sure booboobs just make sure you take him to as many man on man sporting events as possible, cram homoerotic imagery down his throat and im sure he'll c*m around ;) lol
I am the youngest of four daughters. The eldest would be in her late forties and I'm the youngest at 17. I'm the only daughter to have graduated high school and the only one who hasn't turned out a complete failure like the second sister who is nearly 40.
ReplyThe bit about the shitting on the pizza reminded me of that episode of Drawn Together where Spanky and Princess Clara pranked the pizza guy by taking the pizza, shitting on it then handing it back and saying they didn't order one with a sausage on it.
ReplyGuess I'm not average then, none of these apply to me and I'm the youngest. Except the last two, anyway, I don't know about those. I'm taller than my eldest sibling, and has since I was 12, and I haven't taken a IQ test since I was 11, but it was at 137, so I'm also smarter than both of my siblings.
Reply146, bitch. :)
My mother is the youngest out of 10 siblings. I am now incredibly depressed.
ReplyShouldn't this be "5 bizarre ways your older siblings are better than you?"
ReplyJust saying, my older sister f*****g more than me doesn't really make me who I am.
....and for the record, she's not having more sex than I am. Really, she isn't.
#1 is saying that having older siblings helps the younger sibling develop more socially, thus leading to a higher chance that they'll be f*****g more. Or did you not even bother reading that part?
Scarily, all of these are true in regards to me (the oldest) and my third younger brother.
ReplyCracked, you've hit it on the nose this time.
I'm a twin and my mother and father never had any kids before or after my brother and I.
ReplyWHAT DO I DO?!?!?!
kill your twin, eat his heart and you will assume any I.Q. points he may have had, + add how long he would've lived to your own thus doubling your life span, and you will get laid forever!