Using data from Bangladesh, this paper examines how the birth order of a child influences parental decisions to place children in one of four activities: ‘study only’, ‘study and work’, ‘neither work nor study’ and ‘work only’. The results of the multinomial logit model show that being a first-born child increases the probability of work as the prime activity, or at least a combination of school and work, rather than schooling only. The results confirm that later-born children are more likely to be in school than their earlier-born counterparts.