The sibling effect

Your brothers and sisters can have a powerful effect on your adult behaviour.

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You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but you don’t get to choose your family of origin. Our parents provide the genetic material and make powerful early role models. But even more influential in determining the kind of adult you will turn out to be are your siblings. They occupy a position of unique intimacy in our lives and cast a longer shadow than many realise or are prepared to acknowledge.

By turns enraging and lovable, at once familiar and mysterious, they are the human beings who people our first social relationships. And as Dr Jan Pryor, director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families at Victoria University, points out, a sibling relationship is the longest relationship most of us will ever have.

Surprising new research has found that  siblings can exert a powerful influence on the confidence of our parents: a firstborn who is difficult and high-maintenance may cause poorer parenting of later children. Dr Gene Brody, a child and family development specialist at the University of Georgia, has studied the interplay between the personality of children and parenting styles. “Children with active or emotionally intense personalities receive different, usually more negative, parenting than do children with calm and easy-going personalities,” he writes.

Brody studied a group of African-American families for four years and found that having older children who do well in school and are well liked by other children leads to parental “basking” – increasing mothers’ self-esteem and reducing their depressive symptoms. This in turn is associated with more positive parenting of younger children, who display better self-control and lower levels of behavioural problems than their peers. The researchers concluded that parents who get a difficult first child may in turn experience a negative spiral of household tension, lower parental self-esteem and poorer parenting of a later child. Similarly, a 1998 study found that negative experiences with an early-born child led parents to question their parenting abilities and lower their expectations of subsequent children.

All Black halfback Piri Weepu is a legendary hard man but at least some of his tough temperament on the rugby field was forged long ago in the hallway of his home in Wainuiomata. His older brother Billy started crash-tackling little Piri when he was just four – to “harden him up”. It seemed to work: Piri followed his brother in playing for the under-sevens league team in Wainuiomata before he even started school.

Prime Minister John Key’s older sisters, Liz and Sue, were the proving grounds for the future Prime Minister’s competitiveness and debating skills. Sue, three years his senior, battled John at Monopoly and Scrabble – and made him play with her dolls. At the dinner table all three children were expected to be able to hold a conversation and debate current affairs with their mother, Ruth.

Best-selling novelist Lloyd Jones didn’t have high intellectual expectations of himself, growing up a welder’s son and the youngest of five children in Naenae. But older brother Bob urged him to go to university, paying him $10 a week to do so. It was “a life-changer”, Lloyd Jones has said. There are as many such stories as there are families: in the formative hothouse of the family, siblings can amplify – or confound – the powerful force-fields of parents, genetics and personality already at work.

It starts with birth order, which determines play roles:  the firstborn leader, the middle-child mediator and the rebellious youngest. These are roles that can stick for life. Later, siblings sniff out different niches in the maze of family relationships, in the search for a unique edge in the contest for parental attention.

We all know friends or colleagues whose childhood speciality has become a lifelong calling: whether as the workhorse, the sulk, the prodigy, the know-all, the wild child, the drama queen or the helpless one. Increasingly, researchers are documenting other ways in which siblings leave their mark, as early teachers and protectors, or as blithe tormentors who can leave behind lifelong anxiety or self-doubt in their victims.

Could it be that your annoying big sister, with whom you would fight over a speck of dust, but whom you see only occasionally now, influences the way you live your life today? For exhibitionistic British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, sibling disgust helped fuel her drive to leave her rural upbringing and seek a larger stage. The arrival of her younger sister, Olga, infuriated the firstborn Vivienne. She vowed to “dead her and put her in the dustbin”.

“I was outraged. I didn’t know I was going to get her. I was three and from then on I decided I wanted to be grown up as soon as possible,” Westwood is reported as saying. The birth of a younger brother made matters even worse, “further thwarting Vivienne’s desire to be the centre of attention”, says her biographer, Jane Mulvagh. Westwood’s resentment of her younger sister was such that some say it contributed to the fashion designer’s lifelong difficulty in getting on with women.

Clinical psychologist Claire Cartwright says our early experiences in childhood, including jostling for position with siblings, help develop beliefs about ourselves.

“These core beliefs or early schema are based on our experiences. Children are constantly evaluating how their parents are seeing them, interpreting their parents’ responses to them and drawing conclusions from that. They’re also comparing how their parents are responding to other siblings in the family.

“As well as that, they’ve got their experiences at school and experiences with friends. We develop beliefs about ourselves in terms of what we might be good at, what we might be not so good at and how others view us. Perceptions that, for example, another child in the family is seen as more intelligent than you or perhaps more lovable than you are going to impact negatively on how a child sees themselves.

“I’ve seen clients who have believed, and it might not have been true, that they have been treated differently from their siblings, that one or two children in the family have been apparently preferred over the others. They believed the judgments on them were harsher, and that they were the ones that always got into trouble.”

Later, in the workplace, such a person might be particularly defensive, be alert for harsh judgments from the boss and co-workers, and therefore behave in a way more prone to attracting such judgment. Cartwright says being Mummy or Daddy’s favourite has its own traps. If you were the easy-going, co-operative one at home, you probably excelled at pleasing parents and, later on, bosses. But you might face different challenges, such as finding it hard to be assertive or stick up for yourself. Children who win the role as the “good” one can be so intent on pleasing authority figures that they haven’t got a clue what they want or need.

“I’ve had clients where one of their challenges is they tend to live their lives through other people. They have difficulty knowing what would be best for them, or even if they do have an idea of what they like, they might find it difficult to put that forward and go for that.” On the other hand, the sibling typecast as disruptive and annoying may be able to reinterpret the role, turning those attention-seeking qualities into strengths. “They could end up stronger and more determined and have leadership qualities. There’s not just one route this can take.”

How is it that full siblings, despite sharing DNA, can turn out so differently? And how is it that some siblings can have such fiercely different views from each other on their parents’ strength and weaknesses? One answer is that in fact each sibling grows up in a different family, a unique micro-environment. The firstborn is, for a while, an only child, and therefore has a completely different experience of the parents than those born later. The next child is, for a while, the youngest, until the role is snatched away by a new arrival.

The mother and father themselves are changing and growing up too, weathering hardship or good fortune, so the atmosphere of the home can change over the years from nourishing to toxic and back again. One sibling might experience stability and closeness in the first few years, another might be raised in the midst of family crisis, with a distracted mother or an angry father.

Freud identified sibling rivalry as an important shaping force as early as 1918. But more recently, researchers have found many ways in which brothers and sisters are a force for good in each others’ lives. Annette Henderson, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, says firstborn children shoot ahead in picking up vocabulary, reaching milestones such as their first 50 or 100 words more quickly than their siblings.

“The hypothesis is that the later children aren’t getting the same one-on-one time with parents. But that doesn’t mean that the younger children are in for problems with language development.” Later-borns don’t have as much verbal interaction with parents, but instead they harvest lessons from bigger brothers and sisters, learning entire phrases and an understanding of social concepts such as the difference between “I” and “me”. One 2007 Norwegian study similarly showed that firstborns on average have an IQ three points higher than their siblings, partly as a result of cornering their parents’ undivided attention early on.

Sibling rivalry is maddening for parents, but it is thought to accelerate social understanding in children. A Cambridge University study of 140 children found that even when there is much sparring, siblings create a rich world of play that extends them developmentally. Love-hate relationships were common among the children. Even those siblings who fought the most had just as many positive interactions as the other sibling pairs.

Sibling conflict is particularly intense in households where the parents are fighting, where parents are negative towards the children or where there is favouritism by the parents for one or more children. Favouritism, that great taboo of family life, is more widespread than parents like to admit. John Key’s sisters have said their mother, Ruth, was quite open in her favouritism of their brother. However, that is unusual – most parents don’t even like to admit to themselves that they might have a favourite. Californian academic Katherine Conger studied almost 400 sibling pairs and their parents, visiting and videotaping them three times over three years. Despite efforts by the parents to mask preference, Conger found in her 2005 paper that 65% of mothers and 70% of fathers showed a preference for one child, usually the older one.

One way children angle for more parental attention is by making themselves different from their brothers and sisters, particularly if they are close in age or the same gender. Researchers have found that the first two children in a family are typically more different from each other than the second and third.

Girls with brothers maximise their differences by being more feminine than girls with sisters. And marking out separate spheres of identity seems to work. A 2003 research paper studied adolescents from 185 families over two years, finding that those who changed to differentiate themselves from their siblings were successful in increasing the amount of warmth they gained from their parents.

Today’s families tend to be smaller and closer together, so relationships with peers tend to be stronger than for children from big or widely spaced families, where older siblings act as authority figures. Being an older sibling with responsibility for care of younger children offers a rich range of opportunities for learning and leadership that can shape future identity. In larger Maori and Pasifika families there is a particularly strong tradition of care of younger children by older ones.

Research has found that older siblings who take on teaching or caregiving roles tend to score more highly in reading and language, gaining confidence and self-esteem as a result. They also learn more about balancing their needs against others, compared to older siblings who don’t take on a caregiving role.

However, there are downsides. ­Care­giving responsibilities that are too heavy can damage older childrens’ school performance and behavioural adjustment. Older siblings can also buffer younger children from turmoil in the family. Younger children whose older brothers or sisters give them emotional support, such as caring, acceptance and bolstering of self-esteem, during bouts of conflict between parents show fewer signs of behavioural or emotional problems than children who have not had that support. Teenagers with mental health problems recover more easily if they have a sibling who listens to them and supports them.

And a 2010 American study found that having a sister, whether younger or older, meant 10-14-year-olds were less likely to feel lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious or fearful. The same study found that having a loving sibling of either gender promoted good deeds, such as helping a neighbour or helping other kids at school. Having loving parents helped, but the effect of having affectionate siblings on fostering charitable attitudes was even stronger. Sisters generally have been found to have closer relationships with each other than brothers do with each other.

It seems that the older sibling doesn’t have to be perfect for the younger sibling to benefit from a supportive elder. Younger siblings who experienced a balance of support from and conflict with older siblings have more positive peer relationships than children who lack this experience, according to a 1998 study.

However, an oppressive older brother or sister can blight a younger child’s life. Those with aggressive older siblings have a higher risk of developing conduct disorders, having problems at school and having few positive experiences with peers. A 2009 Italian study found children with older male siblings were most likely to be bullied at home and more likely to also be bullied at school. It’s no surprise that older sisters and brothers can also act as “agents of socialisation”, showing the way for smoking and drinking. Other research has found that teenage girls are more likely to get pregnant if they have an older sister who is a teenage mother.

The sibling relationship is, as Jan Pryor notes, a very long one. And it can change over time. By adulthood, a 1989 study found, 77% of adult siblings consider at least one of their siblings to be a close friend. Strong sibling bonds are associated with benefits for physical and mental health, and brothers and sisters can be an important source of support in times of need. Again, sisters are particularly important. Those with close bonds to a sister have fewer symptoms of depression later in life. One study found that siblings were the second most likely source of support after parents, with 68% of respondents receiving emotional support from siblings.

“My strong impression is that often those sibling ties weaken in adulthood, and then almost come back stronger later on,” says Pryor. Often adults reconnect with their siblings after their own children have grown up and left home, “and they actually begin to realise those brothers and sisters are quite important. I’ve seen that happen a lot.”

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