Eat Drink Man Woman 1994

Picture obtained from http://doramax264.com/2173/eat-drink-man-woman-movie/

From this film, we could clearly see the different roles that each daughters have. The three daughters have a very different personality from one another despite living under the same roof and having the same father. This could be explained from The Birth Order Effect in the field of psychology.

The youngest daughter, Jia Ning has to work part time job while studying in college. Blake (1981) recommended that younger children have lesser resources (the “resource dilution” model) than their older siblings (Pavan, 2016). This might explain the reason for Jia Ning to work part time. However, even though the youngest child might not receive as much from their parents, there is high possibility for the youngest to receive resources support from the elder siblings. Jia Ning's character is more carefree and bubbly. She is easy going and make her decision based on what she is interested. Even after finding out that she is pregnant, she is not afraid of the judgement of her family members. Instead she made he decision right away to live and to get married with her boyfriend.

The second daughter, Jia Chien got to spend the most time with the father because her father used to bring her to his work kitchen. At certain scene, the eldest daughter, Jia Jen mentioned that Jia Chien does not understand their parents' relationship as she does because she has spent more time with their parents. Price (2008) has found that parents spend more quality time with older siblings overall because they tend to split equally their time across existing siblings (Pavan, 2016). Other than that, according to Adler (1928), second children are more advantageous, easy going, and rebellious (Adler, 1928, as cited in Damian & Roberts, 2015). In the movie, we could clearly see that Jia Chien has a mind of her own and wants to leave the house to have her own freedom.

The eldest sister, Jia Jen is also said to be a parentified sister by Jia Chien since their mother passed away. It is also mentioned that since then Jia Chien could not talk much to Jia Jen as Jia Jen would be lecturing her. Through this, we could see the shift of the responsibility as an eldest sister to a parentified sister. The responsiblity of elder siblings is usually more. On the other hand, youngest child will have more lax personality. The first children often have more of the “traditional” aspects, by being a creditworthy, prevailing role-model, who worries about parent-pleasing (Damian & Roberts, 2015). In the movie, Jia Jen mentioned that she is the one who will have to stay back to take care of their father at the end of the day. She is worried of her father being alone once everyone else leaves and she holds the responsibility of taking care of her father when that day comes.

Since the personality of each children matches The Birth Order theory, it is understood that the directing team of this movie has indeed done a great job in researching on the personality of children of different orders. This part of the movie is worth crediting.

References:
Pavan, R. (2016). On the production of skills and the birth-order effect. The Journal of Human Resources, 51(3), 699-726. doi:10.3368/jhr.51.3.0913-5920R

Damian, R. I., & Roberts, B. W. (2015). The associations of birth order with personality and intelligence in a representative sample of U.S. high school students. Journal of Research In Personality, 5896-105. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2015.05.005