ABSTRACT
Adult society has different degrees of inequality based on wealth, power, prestige—whatever is scarce that adults value highly. If adults have class and status rankings, siblings have a hierarchy based on the order in which children were born. The preservation of oldest child status with a biological parent may help in an otherwise difficult loss of status. The oldest twins referred to may have had the easiest time, since they underwent the loss of status together, and were always the same age anyway. Age order is a source of power in children's ranking systems that cannot be distributed equitably; the only circumstance in which this is possible is for twins, and even then there may be one who is identified as first born. The age interval between siblings is also fixed by the order in which they are born; the distance in age between a child and other siblings is simply a function of when he was born.
