The Middle Child of Recounts

     Recount fever has swept the nation, and nowhere has it hit harder than in my home state of Florida. But there’s a call for a Florida recount that, not surprisingly, isn’t getting any attention. And it has nothing to do with politics for a change. This recount centers around a 2017 study which, as reported by the website DoYouRemember.com, found that “Middle Children Are Most Likely To Be Troublemakers.”
     When I read that headline, I found it so outrageous it made me want to break one of my mother’s good vases. But a team of researchers from MIT, Northwestern University, the University of Florida and Aarhus University in Denmark concluded that “in families with two or more children, second-born boys are on the order of 20-40 percent more likely to be disciplined in school and enter the criminal justice system compared to first-born boys.”
     Like it wasn’t bad enough other studies have already found we don’t do as well in school as our older siblings, we have lower IQs and make less money than them, too. We needed this like we needed a hole in the head.

     The study cites all sorts of reasons for this phenomenon, but that’s a discussion for another post. As the ranking member of the Middle Child Party, I’m having a hard time accepting these findings. Oh, did I forget to mention the name of the study? “Birth Order and Delinquency: Evidence from Denmark and Florida.” Yeah, FLORIDA! You know, the people who brought us the hanging chad. I should just accept the accuracy of the data they collected from Florida!? I think not. So I’m doing what any red-blooded Floridian Middle Child would do. I DEMAND A RECOUNT!