Posted on 01/18/2017 3:19:45 PM PST by nickcarraway
When I was 7, I told my 4-year-old brother that his real sister was taken to “Land Kazoozoo,” and I was her replacement, a witch who could look like anyone she wanted. I can still remember the beat of fear in his big brown eyes, and to this day I’m not sure he’s fully dismissed the possibility that I’m an evil imposter.
At 8, I called my older sister a “seed head”—an improvised jab at her shiny dark hair and the shape of her head. At the time, I thought the lame insult had died on contact, and I would have forgotten it entirely had my sister not exhumed it; on her wedding day, no less. She said she still thinks about it every time she puts her hair up.
We are clay when we first meet our siblings, says Jeffrey Kluger in a Ted Radio Hour podcast “How We Love,” and “practically set and kiln fired by the time we meet most of our friends and our spouses. But our siblings shape us, we learn from our siblings.”
I’d been thinking about all of this a lot while visiting my siblings over the holidays and simultaneously reading Kluger’s book The Sibling Effect, which shines a light on some of the interesting science around the sibling bond, much of which has only come out in the last 15 years.
Kluger says it’s not necessarily shared genetic material that makes sibling relationships so powerful, but rather shared experiences. My own brood of three, which I’m wedged in the middle of with a couple of years on both sides, is like a poster-case for birth order stereotypes—the achievement-driven oldest (a trait shared by only children), the straying middle, and the outgoing, funny youngest. The studies are so compelling and numerous that I plan a follow-up column on the subject.
What’s amazing to me, though, is that after so many years of tumult—bickering, name calling, fighting that sometimes turned violent—my siblings and I seem to like each other now. It’s both a testament to the resilient nature of sibling relationships, and a small consolation for parents grief-stricken by their children’s inability to get along.
And it may be more common than you’d expect. Studies have found that pairs of siblings aged 3-7 engage in more than 2.5 conflicts on average during a 45-minute play session, which works out to one every 17 minutes. For children 2-4 years of age, hostilities can break out 6.3 times per hour, or every 9.5 minutes. Interestingly enough, the most common catalyst for conflict is property, and studies as far back as 1980 have consistently found fights between siblings to be the most common type of family violence, writes Kluger.
Interested in the lingering effects of childhood battles, psychologist Victoria Bedford studied adult siblings over a 22-year period and found that of the 75 percent who fought “somewhat frequently” to “extremely frequently” as children, 87 percent said that once they grew up, arguments with the same siblings occurred “hardly ever or not at all.” Obviously, not living in the same house anymore seems like an important factor here.
“Having siblings and not making the most of those bonds is, I believe, folly of the first order,” says Kluger. “If relationships are broken and are fixable, fix them. If they work, make them even better. Failing to do so is a little like having a thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. Yes, you can always get your food at the supermarket. But think what you’re allowing to lie fallow. Life is short and it’s finite, and it plays for keeps. Siblings may be among the richest harvests of the time we have here.”
As resilient and powerful as the sibling bond may be, it’s not indestructible, writes Kluger. Barring unforgivable abuses, though, for adult siblings who have drifted away from each other, whether in apathy or estrangement—and I know of many—reconciliation is always a possibility.
Any advice coming out of the rabid leftist county of
Santa Cruz does not deserve an audience.
Oh, brother.
Bad sibling relationships can be exacerbated, if not downright created, from selfish parents who like to do things for show, rather than for caring directly about them.
God cares, of course. A lot of bad consequences can be reaped through sibling bickering. If siblings give each other the devil, then they get the devil from one another too. It’s inexorable. This isn’t letting a field be fallow, this is sowing it with poison.
And actually? If they do stumble across a truth, they might be more likely to embrace it than know-it-alls who don’t think certain “people groups” could ever know anything about that truth... in fact than people who are politically correct in a different manner.
One factor not mentioned is sibling spouses.
It can be a most unpleasant experience, for example, if a sibling has married someone who is liberal, or otherwise out of step with other family members.
We all met our siblings in law as adults; there is no shared childhood connection with them.
Point being, in family gatherings, holidays, any family event, these siblings in law, with whom you never had any bonding, are there, and will affect the family dynamic and interaction.
You might have had the finest relationship with your sister, for example, but if she marries an opinionated know it all liberal, you aren’t going to enjoy the family visits.
Yup. I have an ahole of a bil.
Prejudiced, I see. Too bad, you’ll miss a lot.
Your post is one of best I have ever read on the subject. It is the absolute truth what you claim about bad sibling relationships. My siblings and I were always given the message that family was the enemy; just because my father wasn’t willing to live with the choice he made.
My husband’s parents favored one of three, no apparent reason (Middle one). There is absolutely no bond between oldest/youngest and the favored one, quite the opposite.
I was wondering if the left was moving from letting trannies into girl’s rooms to pushing incestuous marriages - but I think their next ‘liberation’ target is going to be pedophiles - maybe sibling sex after that.
I guarantee you there are bad siblings. There are bad, evil people in the world. Sometimes they have brothers and or sisters who are saddled with them. I speak from brutal, painful experience.
My mother’s older sister died this week. Their relationship over nearly 80 years ranged from outright hostility to cautious amity, settling on, I think, distant but sincere goodwill. In spite of everything, there’s a real gap when someone who was your sister that long is gone.
My aunt was also largely estranged from her two children, especially her daughter, which made choosing sympathy cards difficult. I settled on the blandest, “Praying for you at this difficult time,” and figured it’s mostly the fact of sending it that counts.
I don’t send cards. I’d guess I haven’t sent a card for any reason, including Christmas, for over 15 years. I suppose I’m bad.
My mother was a comic genius for crafting homemade cards. I do that on occasion. Not for condolences, of course.
I make cards sometimes. If there’s anything comic, it’s probably my lack of artistic ability!
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