According to a study published in the Journal of Human Resources, there is a possibility that firstborn children may have better thinking skills than their siblings. The reason for this is that they received more mental stimulation during their early stages of development.

This means that in addition to having the privilege of being the one who gets everything brand new – firstborn kids have yet another advantage over their younger siblings!

A group of University of Edinburgh, the Analysis Group and the University of Sydney Researchers have found that children who were born first typically scored higher on IQ tests than their younger siblings.

These Researchers say that the findings could help to explain the so-called “birth order effect”, that when children born earlier in a family enjoy better wages and more education in later life.

For the purpose of the study, researchers used data from the U.S. Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on nearly 5,000 children. The children were monitored from pre-birth to the age of 14. Every two years, the children in the longitudinal survey were assessed on a number of categories which included reading, vocabulary assessment and matching letters.

The results indicated that firstborn kids typically perform better than their siblings as early as age 1 and this could be due to how parents treat subsequent children.

The study says that parents were less likely to partake in mentally stimulating activities with their younger children which means they may not have developed the same thinking skills as the older sibling has.Ana Nuevo-Chiquero, of the University of Edinburgh School of Economics, said in a statement. :

 “Our results suggests that broad shifts in parental behavior are a plausible explanation for the observed birth order differences in education and labor market outcomes”