Being a First Child

By Mustopha Ogunshola
^{∙ Lagos Baptist Senior Secondary School, Orile-Agege ∙}

Every human being belongs to a family. Nobody descends from the sky without being born into a family. Initially, a couple lives alone at home after which they may welcome a bundle of joy into their midst. This simply means they have a new born baby in the family. Automatically, they become a father and mother. The new born is the first child of the family. He or she would be warmly welcomed by both parents, the neighbours and the extended family members.

The first child begins to have responsibilities when he has a sibling or siblings. Then he has a major role to play in that family because he or she is eldest and relatively, the leader of all the children in the family. Taking up a responsibility is an avenue for an individual to build his leadership quality. Leadership is a big task for every human being. One can learn to be a leader through different means. It could be from the home, from school, or in the community where one lives. An adage says that “Charity begins at home”. A child could develop his leadership quality from his family which may be as a result of being a first child.

Though a first child often receives more attention, caring, love and affection from the parents. Mostly, the parents would be addressed as Mama and Papa X, such that X is the name of the first child. This is one of the benefits of being a first child. On the contrary, the arrival of other siblings may bring a change of attitude of the parents towards the first child. Parents begin to presume that he or she should act maturely and be perfect in doing. At this stage, he or she may be over-laboured and still take all the blames and scolding for any wrong things.

Actually, all these treatment makes him/her to be independent and become more responsible. For an individual to be successful, he needs to sacrifice some things because “no pain, no gain”. However, what baffles me a lot is that most parents blame the eldest child for the wrong doing in the family irrespective of the fact that the wrong doing might be done by the young ones in the family. This reveals the fact that, much is expected from the first child by the parents. My advice to our parents is that they should give all children equal treatment irrespective of their position in the family – for partial treatment may bring enmity among the children in the family.