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Siblings - The longest relationship of all

20.11.2017

Translation: machine translated

Until recently, psychology has paid little attention to the relationship between siblings. Yet no one accompanies us through life longer than our brothers and sisters. Parents can strengthen the bond between their children - but they can also strain it.

What psychologists have not already analysed the difficult relationship between daughters and their mothers, what advice books have not been written to encourage a more constructive culture of conflict with our partners. But the bond with those people who are already there before we fall in love or make friends for the first time and who are still with us when our parents have long since passed away has long remained strangely unexplored. Yet even young children often spend more time with their siblings than with their parents; together they learn to play and comfort, argue, share and negotiate.

Spoilt, spoilt, responsible

Are middle children missing out? Is the youngest spoilt on principle and is the oldest always praised for their sense of duty? The influence that where you stand in the sibling line has on your life was one of the first research questions that psychology finally turned its attention to, and it is still a much-discussed topic today. A few things cannot be completely dismissed: First-borns are more likely to be found in leadership positions than later-borns, and there are more of them among surgeons, priests and astronauts. The one, two or three years in which eldest children have the undivided attention of their parents can therefore have the effect of a stirrup for a later career.

It is perhaps no coincidence that sixth-born Mark Twain and, just over a century later, eleventh-born Stephen Colbert made humour their greatest strength as a writer and comedian respectively. If all your siblings can write, do maths and walk better than you simply because they are a few years older, you probably start looking for another area to score points.

Everybody's niche

The search for a niche is a very useful strategy for securing your share of the scarce resource called parental attention in a family, as the Swiss psychologist Jürg Frick says in his book "I like you - you annoy me". However, it is important to allow children to try out new and different roles again and again. After all, how a child experiences its role in the family is much more formative than the birth order.

Daily disputes and poisoned relationships

Most parents can tell you a thing or two about it, and sometimes even sob: siblings argue. Often. But brothers and sisters are also always negotiating new compromises, and they have usually made up long before we parents even understand what the scuffle was about. However, if the relationship between siblings is permanently disrupted or even broken, the responsibility for this usually lies with the parents. There is nothing that drives a wedge between siblings like mothers and fathers who favour one of their children over the other or even turn them into a substitute partner. "The alliance with one parent practically always poisons the relationship between siblings," writes Frick. Why? No child will direct their anger towards their parents in the long term, even if they feel left out. After all, they are dependent on them. Instead, they will blame the favoured sister or brother.

This doesn't mean, however, that we can't sometimes feel closer to one child or pay more attention to one child than the others. After all, a newborn is more dependent on its parents in the first few months of life than its big brother, and a mother may feel particularly sorry for her middle daughter when she talks about her difficulties in making friends at school because she once experienced this herself. Children are certainly not always happy when their older brother is allowed to stay up late or their sibling with a disability is treated differently. But they can learn to deal with it if the reasons for this are explained to them and if the unequal treatment seems justified, as Frick writes. It's not about treating every child exactly the same - but equally.

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Ümit Yoker

uemityoker@gmx.net

A passionate journalist and mother of two sons who moved from Zurich to Lisbon with her husband in 2014. Does her writing in cafés and appreciates that life has been treating her well in general. <br><a href="http://uemityoker.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">uemityoker.wordpress.com</a>

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