The New York Times recently reported on a study that showed older children tend to have higher IQs than younger children. I'm the oldest of four children in my own family, so I wasn’t surprised by the results. I’ve known this for a long time.
For me, the real question is why older children are smarter. Is it because the 1st child has the undivided attention of his parents? Are parents are more focused with the first child? Does the gene pool deteriorate with time?
There are two common ways to answer this question of why older children are smarter. The scientific approach would be to identify and study a group of siblings, looking at factors like family income, the IQ of the parents, the school teachers they had, and the effects of peer pressure. The study group would have to be large enough to establish a correlation between IQ and the various factors to eliminate random fluctuations. The other method is the journalistic approach. If you are a journalist, you start with your conclusion, then write about an anecdotal experience that proves your viewpoint. I don’t really have time to do a scientific study, so today I will be a journalist. Watch me and learn.
First, here is my conclusion: eating vegetables makes you smart.
Now I will prove my point with a story about a family I know very well – my own.
There are four children in my family. David (that’s me), then Steve, Diana and Jeff. We know from the New York Times that it is a fact that the older you are in a family, the higher your IQ. So I should be the smartest and Jeff the dumbest. But in reality, we all have about the same IQ. How do you explain that? Obviously, it is vegetable intake.
When I was a kid, I hated tomatoes. My mother tried to make me eat them and in desperation I pointed out that everyone who ate tomatoes eventually died. It was an argument I had read in Mad Magazine. Even though my parents were English majors in college, they could see the fallacy of my logic. My mom quite rightly suspected that I just didn't like tomatoes. This lack of tomato input limited my IQ development and brought me down to the level of my siblings.
Similarly, my next younger brother Steve had his IQ stunted because he didn’t eat enough vegetables. He hated peas. But he saw that my Mad Magazine argument was ineffective, so he came up with a method that worked much better. He made sure that peas caused him to gag. None of the rest of us wanted to eat while Steve was gagging, so Mom didn’t make him eat his peas.
By all rights Diana should have been intellectually challenged. After all, she was the third child, she was a girl, and on top of all that, she had two older brothers tormenting her. But she always ate her vegetables and I am sure that is why she turned out so well.
By the time my youngest brother Jeff was born, my mom was worn out so he got to eat whatever he wanted. In fact she fixed him a separate meal for dinner every night. I never did see him eat vegetables. But the darkest day in our family’s history happened when Jeff was four. Steve stayed home from school with the flu, and Jeff and Mom were home with him. Around 10 a.m. a bread truck drove down our street, stopped in front of our house and honked. Steve could see Mom was nervous and she tried to pretend that she didn’t hear anything. But Jeff ran outside and two minutes later, he came through the door with a glaze doughnut.
“Hey, how come Jeff gets a doughnut and I don’t?” Steve protested.
Before Mom could answer, Jeff said, “The bread man gives me a doughnut everyday.”
The ugly secret was out. While the rest of us went to school, endured boring lectures, took grueling tests, and were served mysterious meats and smelly vegetables in the school cafeteria, the bread man delivered a glaze doughnut to Jeff every morning! It was a shocking revelation. I am still in therapy trying to cope with the rejection I felt.
Well, Jeff turned out fine too, and some of you may think this disproves my theory that eating vegetables make you smart. But that is why I am the journalist and you are not. You see, I know that eating vegetables makes you smart. What this proves is that glaze doughnuts are a vegetable.
David LeSueur lives in Littleton with his wife. He always eats the tomatoes in his salads but doesn’t really like ketchup very much.