Birth order and youth delinquent behaviour testing the differential parental control hypothesis in a French representative sample

Studies on delinquent behaviour have frequently shown that firstborn children are less involved in delinquency than middle-born children. We Suggest that differential parental control of the children depending oil their ordinal position might account for this phenomenon. The Study, carried out with a French representative sample (n = 1129), indicated that firstborns were more supervised than middle-borns. Firstborns reported less minor offences and serious offences than middle-born children. However, when sibship size and parental Supervision were controlled in a subsequent analysis of covariance, the effect of ordinal position on serious offences disappeared, whereas the birth-order effect on minor offences declined but remained significant. It is concluded that ordinal position plays a moderate role in delinquent behaviour and that this effect is partly induced by differential parental control.