Middle Child Syndrome Characteristics and Personality

If there are three or more children in the family, the middle one often feels neglected or less attaining the love & affection by the parents. This syndrome is commonly known as ‘middle child syndrome’. The middle ones feel that the first ones get a fair share of everything as they are the eldest and the last one too gets their wants fulfilled as they are the youngest. Generally, the middle ones are not given much of importance and thought just member of the family.  So they go out of way to get the attention of the parents. Naturally different kids in one family have own nature according to birth order.

Middle child characteristics & developmental symptoms

Like youngest child syndrome characteristics, middle children also have some specific behavioral traits during childhood and also when they grownup:

• Children suffering from middle child syndrome feel lack self confidence. They would prefer to be followers rather than leaders. They don’t have the focus or the drive to achieve anything in life. They just take life as they come and don’t make special efforts to do anything.

• They don’t mingle much with people and don’t have many friends. They don’t believe in relationship. Even if they try to maintain one, they are hardly successful due to lack of interest.

• They are little shy and don’t like to be the center of attention. But they would ensure that they do enough to keep things going. This attitude can be seen at school and at work place.

• All is not negative about the middle syndrome people. They would be extremely artistic and creative. If they get the right direction they can do wonders in the world of art and literature. They are not good at working under pressure nor do they like monotonous work.

• They should try to take up jobs in writing or journalism. In these fields they would get a chance to bring out their pent up feelings. The pressure would be less as they are flexible in terms of hours of work and variety would be their in projects as well.

Surprisingly, when the middle ones are paired up youngest they get along very well.

Important note

Still there are lots of other factors which are responsible for a child’s personality. Only being a middle child does not ensure that the child would have lack of confidence and other negative things in nature. Many other things like family background, parents education, social and financial conditions also affects the characteristics of a middle child.