Looking UP to your siblings…

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.

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 crap.

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.