Last summer, my family went to visit my brother and his family in TX who I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. My parents and some of my siblings came as well. Not having seen my brother in 10 years, there was a lot of reminiscing. During the course of the conversation, something came up about raising a family. As one of the oldest children, I had plenty of stories to contribute.
My brother has a very dry wit, and said, “This is my second family I’m raising.”
Many people wouldn’t understand what he was saying. But I did.
We come from a VERY large family. 11 kids in all. I’m the oldest and he comes in at 3rd oldest. As an older child of a large family, you are basically second parents. We absolutely helped raise our siblings, I agree with him. Now that we have our own families, we are raising our “second families.”
One night a friend and I were talking while waiting on our kids. We’re both the oldest in large families and we were talking about how as the oldest, no matter how old we or our siblings get, it’s our responsibility to take care of them. We make sure they’re falling into line, making good choices, talking them through the hard times, and handing out advice, and occasionally lecturing.
Sounds like parenting right?
And it’s not just us butting our way into situations. (While, admittedly, we do sometimes.) It’s them coming to us asking for it.
As we talked, I observed a young girl, also the oldest in her family, corralling her younger brother and making him behave. It was just one more example of the role the oldest child plays in a family.
We get told we’re bossy, mean, and are butting our heads in where they don’t belong. But we’ve always been asked and expected to since we were very young. We were trained to do this.
