Lol, I am the youngest person in my family.

Wow, obviously they didn't survey my family. My brother was always touted as the brilliant, perfect child who never did anything wrong, despite the fact that he drank, smoke, did drugs, and I always outperformed him on just about every academic mark imaginable (although I did this several years after then him, so nobody cared).

However, yes, I'd say as a generalization this has been true in most families I've seen. It seems to be a combination of the "set a good example," the overprotectiveness/overworry that goes with the first child, and the "protect the baby" attitudes that are very common.

Like many young people of my generation, I had to develop my own kind of mental and emotional dodge ball skills of a sort of mentally and emotionally switching gears or train of thought tracks in order to escape extreme parental punishment in the form of my much bigger and stronger mother or father when they pulled off their pants belt to use like a bull whip on my body. Once, when my father was stationed in Darmstadt in the former West Germany, I found out what the slang word for sex meant, the f**k word, my father made me tell him where I had learned of that word and proceeded to beat me for a solid eternity it seemed like to me in my small bedroom in the apartment our family lived in on post there. It was entirely legal then to beat your kids, or any other parents kids too, or for a husband to slap his wife around too if she "misbehaved". It affected me so much that I totally withdrew and became extremely introverted and to this day I cannot have a successful male/female relationship because if it and their attitudes they beat into me a total abject terror or parental punishment. I helped to end legal wife or female beating in Germany, Texas and Georgia some years ago, helping to get it made illegal because it is torture, deliberate physical torture that creates permanent psycholocal and emotional harm in human beings or any other animal similar to us in biology.

Parents may be more strict with the older kids, but the younger kids get pushed around a lot by their older siblings, so it's not like they get a free pass. At least in my family it was very hierarchical by age, with the youngest squarely at the bottom of the totem pole.