14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts from the University of Notre Dame has determined that siblings who are born at least 2 years apart from each other tend to have higher scores in reading and math than their peers who are born closer together.
The data the group collected will be published in an upcoming issue of the esteemed Journal of Human Resources. The information were extracted from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which covers about 12,686 individuals who were aged 14 to 22 back in 1979.
The survey also monitored the test subjects' children, which is how the team had access to the data they sought. “Our results indicate that longer gaps improve test scores for older children, and have no effect on the scores of younger children,” UND expert Kasey S. Buckles explains.
This interesting result could be explained by the fact that the first sibling receives more parental attention during the first critical years of life than they otherwise would, Science Blog reports.