Middle child...middle finger?

[Chad32]

I was the second child of two, and more or less treated as the baby in the family when I was a kid. Though as I grew up it started feeling like I was the bottom rung of the ladder. My dad's unfavorite, though my mother and grandmother still love me, and my mother claims that dad loves me. I get the short end of the stick in many things. Beds in particular. My dad also gets mad at me when we go to a party, and I make a beeline for the food. I don't know why, but he's a smartass who goes out of his way to be annoyed at me.

[Angrboda]

I'm the youngest of four. The middle children were twin girls, and everybody adored them. Those middles got all the attention.

[Athene]

I'm the youngest of four.  The middle children were twin girls, and everybody adored them.  Those middles got all the attention.

As a novelty, multiples are definitely an exception....a Special Case, if you will. People are just mesmerized by them.

[Bob Kelso]

Seems I'm the only "only child" here so far- unless I missed a post- I didn't have siblings until I was an adult, step-siblings at that, so I'm not sure that counts in this conversation. 

As the single child I experienced the best and the worst of being the Golden Child and the Fuck Up, so growing up with my mother, and her second husband, was paradoxically rough yet easy: 

Rough because my stepfather was an intolerable, pseudo-intellectual, mysophobe, jackass who could never be wrong. For as long as I can recall (he was around since age 4 to 18) if there was something wrong in the house, it was me. The way I played with my toys, or dressed, or ate, slept, studied... you get the gist. He was the type of man that censored everything I got to see in the media, and wouldn't allow anything Pokemon or Digimon related into the household. You know, cos Evilution.   

There were more than a handful of times he would get violent with me, and as I got older I'd strike back. It was a shitty relationship since I could acknowledge it as such with perhaps a moment or two of peace, and a shaky one at that. 

My mother on the other hand made things easy at times because she was always loving and helped me through the shitstorm that was the vast majority of my childhood. She always praised my work at school, even when it got steadily shittier as time went on and my self-confidence and attitude plummeted, and allowed me to go out and do things I knew my stepdad would never allow for completely irrational reasons. I even have a sneaking suspicion that in my later years of teenage disobedience-sneaking out and all that jazz- she enabled me quite a few times and kept things from my stepdad. I've asked but she denies it. There were just too many close calls of sneaking back in for me to have been that lucky. xD

[Aroura]

First, I'm sorry to hear some of the heart wrenching stories, or even just comments here about parents.  Losty and MTL, yikes.  

I'm the eldest of 2, and I was totally treated as the golden child.  To this day I have serious guilt issues when dealing with my dad and brother, because I feel my brother was often treated unfairly by my dad.
Apparently, I was a perfect baby (I doubt this, though even other relatives say I rarely cried or fussed, to the point my mom actually took me to the doctor worried about how quiet I was).

My brother came along when I was just 1.5 years old, and he had jaundice.  He cried a LOT, and he fussed a LOT, and my father automatically disliked him, I think, right from the moment he was born.

I think my mother treated us as equally as she could, but she's a patient women with mothering in her blood.
In the eyes of my dad, however, I could do no wrong, and my brother could do no right.  If my brother and I were rough housing, and we broke a lamp or something, it would end up being my brother's fault, and he would get punished, not me.  Obviously this was harder on my little bro than it was on me, but I'm a VERY empathetic person and I love my brother, so after a while, I started taking the blame for everything I could.  This only made things worse, because my poor bro, already full of resentment and anger, found he could act out more and let me take the fall (since the most I got was a head shake, or more often, a nothing at all).  Anyway, turns out my mother and I both ended up enabling my brother's bad behavior in an attempt to make up for my asshole of a dad.

My dad hit my little brother when he was a baby.  My mother told me she left him for about a week, but RELIGION drove her back.  That is, she's was the wife, and it was up to her to obey her husband.  That and the idea of being a single mom apparently scared her more than an abusive husband (he never hit my mom, he's a small man, but he was verbally abusive to an extreme.  When I was small, my mom was still an active women.  Horseback riding, camping, fishing.  As I grew older, she withdrew more and more from all of us, until she basically locked herself in her room.  She's pretty much never came out again, figuratively speaking).
She coddled my brother when he was little  to try and make up for it, but nothing can fix an abusive parent except getting away from them.  

Anyway...not sure this is even related to birth order. I suspect if my brother had been born first, my father would have been more tolerant, but I could be completely wrong.

More on topic:
My husband is a middle child, elder sister was always in trouble but got a ton of attention, baby brother got all the rest of the attention.  I've heard stories. He locked himself in his bedroom as a teenager once, and his parents DID NOT NOTICE for 2 days.  He also says he did not homework for nearly a whole year in 8th grade, and his parents did not know until the teacher called them at the end of the year to tell them he was failing everything.
I've seen it even as adults.  His siblings get smothered with positive attention, he's lucky to get a phone call once a year.  It's gotten better since he has a child of his own now, his parents give him lots more compliments about being a good parent, but it really feels like far too little, too late.  

So yeah, I think there actually is something to being in the middle, or even just second.

[Pyrrho]

Don't worry everyone is a guy on the internet until they say otherwise.
...

They are guys even then.  Have you learned nothing from the release of information from Ashley Madison?

So, all of you are men (or boys), and we know that if you say otherwise, you must be lying.  That is because there are no women on the internet.  Therefore, anyone saying online that they are women must be lying.

This applies even if you post nude photos of "you."  Nude photos of women are common online, and one can pretend to be any one of them.

Some men get a twisted thrill from suckering other men into believing they are women.  I cannot relate to that, but there are many things that other people do to which I cannot relate.

[Losty]

Don't worry everyone is a guy on the internet until they say otherwise.
...

They are guys even then.  Have you learned nothing from the release of information from Ashley Madison?

So, all of you are men (or boys), and we know that if you say otherwise, you must be lying.  That is because there are no women on the internet.  Therefore, anyone saying online that they are women must be lying.

This applies even if you post nude photos of "you."  Nude photos of women are common online, and one can pretend to be any one of them.

Some men get a twisted thrill from suckering other men into believing they are women.  I cannot relate to that, but there are many things that other people do to which I cannot relate.

What about those of us who have had skype calls with other members? Perhaps we are all in on the scheme

[Pyrrho]

They are guys even then.  Have you learned nothing from the release of information from Ashley Madison?

So, all of you are men (or boys), and we know that if you say otherwise, you must be lying.  That is because there are no women on the internet.  Therefore, anyone saying online that they are women must be lying.

This applies even if you post nude photos of "you."  Nude photos of women are common online, and one can pretend to be any one of them.

Some men get a twisted thrill from suckering other men into believing they are women.  I cannot relate to that, but there are many things that other people do to which I cannot relate.

What about those of us who have had skype calls with other members? Perhaps we are all in on the scheme

Some of you guys are pretty clever and go to great lengths to live the lie.  But it is still a lie.

[BrokenQuill92]

Okay being the youngest and only girl and being ill half the time I will admit my parents let me get away with murder. Though I'm a princess through and through it did get a little lonely being confined to the nursery. My brother and stepbrothers have twelve years on me. So I tend to be evil one who almost never got caught and I did I cried my way out of trouble. When my teen years hit me and mom didn't do so well, she thought daddy spoiled me. We were forever at it! I was a door slamming and foot stomping, psuedo goth!

[TheRealJoeFish]

I am the oldest of three brothers. I have seen references to a study that purported to find that the birth of a third child causes, on average, a decrease in the second child's life earnings, education, and success, more than would be expected just accounting for the splitting of parental resources between one more child. Now, of course, this is the kind of study that no one cares about or thinks actually means anything, but I just cite it to show that "middle child syndrome" just might be true.

In my family, both of my parents were middle children (out of 3), but my dad was 14 when his little brother was born.