Birth order can affect what kind of life you have. Even though I am technically an older sister, I cannot earnestly claim the strife that older sisters in large families claim. My younger sister is only two and a half years younger than me, and I was never expected to take care of her. For much of our childhoods, she was actually the more responsible one. When people meet us as adults, they claim that she has the vibes of being the older sister. When you don’t have that many siblings and have parents who don’t put the responsibility of child rearing on siblings, birth order feels entirely incidental. 

Some eldest children see their parents in the worst light because they’ve been there the whole time. There’s a difference between parents growing and improving from their 1st to their 4th kid and being foolish and negligent no matter how many kids they have.