Self-Esteem in Relation to Sibling Order

¶ … mental health is an ever-Expanding arena. The experts continue to debate many of the issues that impact self-esteem. Self-esteem is something that can create a confident productive life, or it can be a destructive insidious problem that plagues adult life. One of the things that has been examined for many areas of mental health is the order in which one is born within his or her family.

Sibling birth order has been credited for how one lives their childhood, how they develop as adults, how various things impact them including parental alcohol and drug abuse and how much money one will make in a lifetime. This paper presents a research proposal about sibling birth order and how it impacts the development of self-esteem. The proposal explains the importance of understanding the issue, some of the literature that has already been published in the area and a suggested methodology for conduction the study.

The proposal also provides a proposed outcome. For many years mental health professionals have known that self-esteem significantly impacts life. Whether it is a child who is in school, a teen away at college, or an adult making his or her way through life, a person's self-esteem plays a role in what that person's life is going to be like. Low self-esteem has been known to create many different problems. It can strip confidence and it can set the person on a path that is self-destructive.

People who have low self-esteem often are drawn to relationships that are abusive or destructive. The drug and alcohol abuse issue is often about underlying self-esteem trouble. When a person has low self-esteem it is not uncommon for him or her to be under employed, under educated and in poor relationships. Because of the impact that self-esteem has on overall quality of life experts in the field of mental health have studied its components extensively.

It is known now that self-esteem plays an integral part in the total personality development of a person. The next step is to determine exactly what elements contribute to the development of self-esteem. The order of one's birth has been examined for aspects of being an adult child of an alcoholic, how well one succeeds in life, and what type of personality one is most likely to have. Sibling birth order may also have a part to play in the development of a person's self-esteem.

If birth order does have something to do with self-esteem development future work can be done on how to circumvent any negative birth order issues in the self-esteem arena. For example, if research determines that being born last sets the stage for the development of poor self-esteem issues because of being largely ignored because of the needs of the other siblings, training and education can be provided to parents to be sure to combat that possibility.

Literature Review There have been many studies and books published about sibling birth order in the past. Birth order has emerged as an important element of total personality. One study focused on how birth order affects education. This is an important study because the results can be extrapolated to incorporate birth order and self-esteem. Often times one's self-esteem plays a factor in how far they go in school as well. This particular study examined how first born children faired educationally compared to later born children.

First born children tend to fare much better educationally than younger siblings (BIRTH ORDER AND EDUCATION http://clearinghouse.mwsc.edu/manuscripts/17.asp).The study concluded it is because of the attention and the opportunities that are provided for the first born. This proposal addresses similar hypothesis only it is about how that attention and opportunity impacts the development of self-esteem. Another study about sibling birth order looked at procrastination and how the order one is born impacts the ability to stay on task.

A comparison of the different characteristics of firstborn, middle born, last born, and only children. Firstborn and middle born children are more driven towards work and competition whereas lastborn children are more socially oriented and expect people to do things for them (THE EFFECTS OF BIRTH ORDER ON PROCRASTINATION LESLIE ADAMS (http://clearinghouse.mwsc.edu/manuscripts/14.asp)." The results concluded that the order one is born within the family impacts the ability to get things done.

This may also tie to the proposed study because self-esteem is also believed by many to impact ability to progress and handle life tasks. Birth order is thought to play a large role in people's lives and how they act. Birth order is a concept that has been studied for many years and it is thought to play a role in the way people behave. There are many different characteristics associated with the order a person is born.

Some of the characteristics of first-born children are their need for precision and their desire to be right. The need to please may represent the first child's motives for helping and protecting others around them (White, et. al., 1995).

Firstborns, through competing for attention, gain the drive to strive for achievement and success in education and their occupations (THE EFFECTS OF BIRTH ORDER ON PROCRASTINATION LESLIE ADAMS (http://clearinghouse.mwsc.edu/manuscripts/14.asp)." Several possible instruments were examined for the purpose of this proposed study and it was decided that the best instrument will be a survey. A survey is a questionnaire that provides freedom and purity of a study.

It removes the subjective nature of in person interviews and it removes the problems with interaction differences in the same setting. Case studies are another instrument that are common to research but in this study it would not garner enough data for analysis. The survey will be set up to ask several generic questions about birth order, family structure and other things that can impact life. Then there will be a section asking many personality questions about how the person perceives certain situations.

This part of the survey will help establish where the participant's self-esteem is on the mental health barometer. The data will be collected over a three-month period and will then be analyzed. The participants will be drawn from college students who range in age from 18 to 55 years old. The surveys will be discarded if any question is answered twice, or if they arrive after the cut off date. They will also be discarded if.