Mattthew Brauer Brauer itibaren Tikri, Himachal Pradesh 176319, India
A fascinating collection of research and anecdotes delving into the oft-neglected and misunderstood world of the middle-child. A lot of birth-order researchers have previously focused on first and last-born, so this researcher, Catherine Salmon, felt compelled to investigate and write about the middle child. At times, it felt the author was manipulating her display of statistics in order to prove her point, rather than the other way around. She frequently cites stats like "52 percent of US Presidents have been middle-borns". While this may be true, she never discusses the percent of the population which are middle-borns and the comparison to other birth orders. It seems that particularly when looking at history, when families were often much larger, there would be a higher percentage of middles than firsts or lasts, simply based on mathematics. Despite this flaw, I was still deeply engaged in the writing and I do feel I learned a lot. I'm currently parenting two middle-children who have personalities that are night and day. It was interesting to see how they both demonstrate traits of middle-children, just in wildly different ways.