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[quote=Anonymous]Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at Princeton, has a book on this called The Pecking Order.  He was doing research on inequality, and found a lot of inequality within families.  He found a number of conclusions.
1) Kids are worse off the more children the parents have, even controlling for religious beliefs about family size
2) Middle kids do have it worse, as they never experience life as an only, so they never have a period when all of their parents' resources are focused on them.
3) Many families have a favorite child, and the kids generally agree on who it is.
4) The inequality is worse in poorer families, as they have fewer  resources to begin with.  They may focus resources on the kid who has the best chance of making it, or if one kid is the favorite, the baseline for the other kids is lower.
5) There is a lot of idiosyncrasy. He mentions both of the processes that previous posters have mentioned:  younger kids who have better lifestyles, as their parents are more successful later in life, or parents who have a professional setback or health crisis, so the younger ones end up having fewer advantages in childhood.

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