The Affectionate, Ambiguous, and Surprisingly Ambivalent Relationship Between Siblings
Episode Stats
Summary
Siblings are some of our most complicated relationships. While little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, about one fifth classify them as negative, and a quarter say their feelings about their siblings are decidedly mixed. In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Greif, a professor of social work and the author of the book Adult Siblings, shares how our brothers and sisters shape us, and how our relationship with our siblings changes as we move from childhood to old age.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.980
For most people, their siblings will be the longest lasting relationships of their lives,
00:00:15.700
potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents.
00:00:19.720
Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our
00:00:23.620
most complicated relationships. While little over half of people describe their relationships
00:00:27.840
with their siblings as positive, about one-fifth classify them as negative, and a quarter say
00:00:32.580
their feelings about their siblings are decidedly mixed. Here to take us on a tour of the complex
00:00:37.340
landscape of siblingdom is Jeffrey Greif, a professor of social work and the author of
00:00:41.940
the book Adult Siblings. Today on the show, Jeffrey shares how our brothers and sisters shape us,
00:00:46.840
and how our relationship with our siblings changes as we move from childhood to old age.
00:00:51.180
We discuss how the perception of parental favoritism affects the closeness of siblings,
00:00:54.900
and how a parent's relationship with their own siblings affects the relationship between
00:00:58.760
their children. Jeffrey explains how most sibling relationships are marked by the three A's,
00:01:03.040
affection, ambiguity, and or ambivalence, and how the relationship can also become very distant
00:01:08.160
or outright severed. We end a conversation with Jeffrey's advice on developing a good relationship
00:01:12.140
between your children and reconnecting with your own siblings. After the show's over,
00:01:15.920
check out our show notes at aom.is slash siblings. All right, Jeffrey Greif, welcome back to the
00:01:36.200
show. Thank you for having me. So we had you on several years ago to talk about the nature of male
00:01:43.180
friendship. You've also done research and writing about the nature of another type of relationship
00:01:49.220
that has a big impact on our life, and that is the sibling relationship. As a professor who studies
00:01:56.520
this stuff, how would you describe a sibling relationship? Like, what makes it unique?
00:02:01.240
Sibling relationships are the longest relationships we have. They're with us when we are born often. If we're
00:02:09.640
the oldest or older sibling, it could be the person with whom we spend most of our lives, we have these
00:02:16.320
relationships longer than we do with our parents, longer than we do with our partners, spouses.
00:02:24.660
Maybe if there's a big age gap between you and your sibling or siblings, you may have a friend
00:02:32.040
that you meet in kindergarten or something. But for the most part, these are the longest,
00:02:37.420
and I would argue probably the most important relationships that we have in our lives because
00:02:44.800
they are so long and they define us in so many ways, both in relation to our parents, in relation
00:02:53.440
to them. They're the first intimate relationship we have, and they are there for us throughout the
00:03:02.400
good times and, if we have them, the bad times. So, you've done research on friendship. How is the
00:03:08.440
sibling relationship similar and different to a friendship? One of the things that happens with
00:03:13.480
friendships, of course, is we can pick them up and drop them. If I have a toxic friendship or a
00:03:21.580
friendship that turns toxic, I can decide to drop that friendship. A sibling is like a shadow
00:03:29.880
throughout your whole life. Whether or not you are close or distant from that shadow slash sibling,
00:03:38.040
they are always with you, and you do not have a choice about having them in your life, and maybe
00:03:45.180
you don't have a choice if they are out of your life.
00:03:48.900
And so, siblings' relationship, it could be like a friendship. Some siblings are just like best friends.
00:03:53.840
Others, not. They're just indifferent, or maybe they have a really bad relationship. But you also talk about
00:03:59.780
how the sibling relationship is interesting because it is horizontal, right? It's like you have this
00:04:03.740
vertical relationship with your parents. But then even sibling relationships can sometimes resemble a
00:04:09.140
vertical, you know, kind of parent-child type of relationship, correct?
00:04:13.560
Sure. If there's a big age gap between siblings that they can, or even a small age gap, a two- or three-year age
00:04:20.420
gap, they can certainly be a vertical or almost an intergenerational. If we think about parents up the
00:04:27.440
line and grandparents up a line, that would be a vertical relationship, whereas a horizontal relationship
00:04:34.420
going across in your general age or in your general family hierarchy would be a sibling, it could be a
00:04:43.940
partner, it could be a friend. Those would all be, of course, horizontal. And if you have children,
00:04:50.020
that could be a vertical relationship with you at the top of that hierarchy. So it's this interesting
00:04:57.480
mix of with siblings is you're dealing with somebody both from a horizontal point of view,
00:05:04.600
but you have to come together when your parents age, perhaps, and become ill and deal with the
00:05:11.840
vertical relationship. So it's this fascinating intersection of the two that we all have to struggle
00:05:18.620
with if we have siblings. And that's what makes it sometimes really complicated.
00:05:24.760
Yes, because if we get along well with siblings, even then things can become complicated. Parents
00:05:33.020
may live closer to one sibling. Parents may pull on one sibling differently than another sibling.
00:05:40.200
So there are grounds for things becoming very complicated depending upon how intergenerational
00:05:48.160
patterns in families have been handed down and how current patterns are being acted out either de
00:05:56.360
novo or as a reflection of previous family patterns.
00:06:01.340
So what I like to do in this conversation is talk about how the sibling relationship sort of changes from
00:06:06.100
childhood to young adulthood to midlife, then also how those relationships with our siblings affect us.
00:06:12.100
So let's talk about sibling relationship and childhood. What factors influence whether siblings
00:06:18.880
in childhood are going to be close or there's going to be acrimony? What are some of the factors you found
00:06:23.820
I think some of this is, of course, luck. So while we can say people carve out their own relationships,
00:06:30.240
I think there's a certain amount of luck. Sometimes siblings born in the same family just
00:06:36.180
adhere to different values, like doing different things, have different natures. And so those
00:06:43.780
siblings may or may not struggle more to find common ground aside from the common ground that they have
00:06:50.740
from birth. Obviously, there are people that are born with greater disabilities, and that can cause
00:06:57.880
hierarchical swings as to who is taking care of whom. There are gender issues that can be revisited in
00:07:07.600
families. If you're from a culture that values men more than women, you may have a different status,
00:07:14.520
even if you're the oldest girl or the oldest boy. Families may wait for the firstborn boy to come
00:07:21.840
along. Or if you have parents that have always wanted girls, and they have a series of boys,
00:07:27.100
the girl that comes along third or fourth may get special status. So there are a lot of things that
00:07:33.680
even have nothing to do with the behavior that someone chooses that can imprint upon siblings some
00:07:41.800
of the things that can affect you. Of course, people are born with different talents. We're all not the
00:07:49.160
same. Some people are better at writing. Some people are better at math. Some people are better in
00:07:55.200
sports. Some people are better in chess, etc. So the way that we develop our talents may configure
00:08:03.980
more closely with one parent or the next or with neither parent. So there are fundamentally so many
00:08:12.720
different variables that can come in to affect these relationships. Do children share rooms? Are they
00:08:19.580
close in age? If they're one year apart, they're more apt to share friends in school and to be in
00:08:26.180
closer competition than if they're three or four years apart and are not the same sex. So there are
00:08:32.140
many, many factors that can come into play that begin a trajectory that maybe continues with them
00:08:40.180
through life or at least influences them through life. Though I believe you can always change the
00:08:45.820
trajectory you're on. One of the factors I thought was interesting you talk about in your book about
00:08:49.920
adult sibling relationships, about childhood sibling relationship, is that birth order can
00:08:54.940
influence sibling relationships. So the firstborn might have this expectation to be like, well,
00:09:00.560
I'm in charge. I got to take care of everybody. It's sort of like George Bailey looking out for his
00:09:05.720
kid brother. And then even the birth order can affect... Parents are different based on birth order,
00:09:12.280
right? Like the first time parents have a kid, they don't know what they're doing. They're going
00:09:15.780
to pay a lot of attention. Then the next kid comes along and they don't pay much attention to the
00:09:20.820
second kid. And then that can affect the relationship between the first and second kid.
00:09:25.700
Correct. The first child usually has more attention paid and maybe more, a more intense kind of
00:09:32.840
attention for better and for worse. Of course, the other things that happen that affect the time with a
00:09:39.700
child and the way the child is raised is what's happening in the parent's marriage, what's
00:09:43.960
happening in the parent's work life. The thing that a third or fourth child may benefit from is that
00:09:50.880
over the course of time, many people begin to earn more money. So a family's financial situation may
00:09:59.140
improve or of course the reverse may happen. Somebody may lose a job and that will have an impact on
00:10:05.100
the family situation where the family lives, how often the family moves. So all these kinds of
00:10:10.920
things can affect the parent's ability to focus. You also talked about the fact that, and this happened
00:10:18.960
in my wife's family, she's the oldest of three daughters. Her father was a middle child and focused on my
00:10:29.420
wife's next younger sister. So he being a middle child felt much more sympathy and much more support
00:10:38.860
for her because of his struggles as a middle child. He connected and supported her. My wife's mother was
00:10:46.420
an oldest child and focused more and was more supportive of my wife. And that left the third daughter to kind
00:10:54.280
of be on her own and not have the same kind of attention or focus or maybe even affection as the
00:11:01.040
oldest two. So all these things can play out in so many, so many interesting ways.
00:11:06.280
Returning to the idea of gender and its influence on sibling relationship, do sister-sister or brother-brother
00:11:14.180
Yeah. What we found, and we did a lot of interviews and have a lot of data in the book,
00:11:20.380
Adult Sibling Relationships that I wrote with Michael Woolley, we did a lot of focus on the fact
00:11:27.800
that it appears that when we talk to sisters, as opposed to brothers, sisters play a much more
00:11:35.480
fundamental role in communicating with each other and with their brothers, in keeping connections open.
00:11:44.440
I'm very interested, as you said, in men's roles, and I've been studying men's and women's roles,
00:11:50.380
because you can't study one without the other for my whole career. And men still fundamentally leave
00:11:57.920
a lot of the emotional work in the family to the women. It may not be true of any particular
00:12:04.340
person listening to this podcast, but in general and across a wider spectrum, women are more central in
00:12:13.640
many of these families. And sisters are more emotionally focused and are going to spend more
00:12:19.480
time trying to make the relationships work than our brothers. We did find differences between
00:12:26.240
brothers. The older brothers, those 65 and over, tended to be much more the traditional man than the
00:12:35.500
younger brothers, those in their 40s, who tended to be more open and more emotionally expressive.
00:12:43.280
So I'm optimistic that men are moving in a good direction in terms of being able to play a more
00:12:50.460
central emotional role and not just the functional financial roles that they sometimes play in family
00:12:57.500
caregiving as parents age. Returning to the parents' influence on a childhood sibling relationship and
00:13:03.980
maybe how that affects the relationship in adulthood, you mentioned some factors. Parents,
00:13:08.880
maybe their birth order may influence how they treat different kids. So if the parent's a middle
00:13:13.380
child, maybe they'll focus more on the middle child. The parent's job and kind of what's going
00:13:18.120
on in their life can influence the relationship. Any other things that parents do that can cause
00:13:24.040
either the siblings in a relationship to draw closer together or to have conflict? Any other things
00:13:31.420
Yeah, that's a really important question. And this continues throughout life. So we found pretty
00:13:37.560
clear data that if you are raised in a household where someone is favored much more than someone
00:13:46.840
else, that obviously has an important impact both at the time and later. And we found strong connections
00:13:55.300
between people who believe one or the other siblings themselves or the other sibling or siblings were
00:14:02.320
favored and how close they were into adulthood. Now, of course, we're looking at only siblings in
00:14:09.340
adulthood, but we asked them to reflect back. And we didn't define in any great way what being favored
00:14:15.580
meant. It was sort of a feeling. So if there is a favored sibling, there are two sides of that. Being favored
00:14:23.740
can be, of course, really pleasant, but it can also be very unpleasant, depending upon the way that the
00:14:29.980
being favored plays out. Now, there are some families where it was played off. It wasn't a big deal.
00:14:38.060
If there are a bunch of siblings and dad likes to hunt, and I'll say a son, it could be a daughter
00:14:43.960
likes to hunt. Everybody can sort of joke and say, oh, we know they really love each other. They just go off
00:14:49.760
altogether all the time and hunt. And it's not seen as necessarily being dismissed as a child. It's just a
00:14:58.860
public and comfortable acknowledgement that a parent and child really enjoy usually an activity together. So that
00:15:07.540
can work out very well. Obviously, when favoritism comes to the feeling that someone is being neglected or not
00:15:16.120
loved or not supportive, that's also a very, very dangerous and more painful kind of experience
00:15:23.480
for someone to have. So favoritism is a big thing and it can continue on into adulthood. There are,
00:15:32.960
of course, the other thorny issues around child rearing. If I have two children and one of them is born
00:15:39.160
with a disability, I may have to spend more time and do more with that child. And in those families,
00:15:47.180
there should be a great deal of communication about that. But you often get families where someone
00:15:53.340
may have a hidden disability, a hidden challenge, a hidden disability where it's sort of talked about
00:16:00.480
but not talked about and maybe a child needs more support and more time and the less disabled or less
00:16:07.740
challenged child doesn't get quite as much attention. And that's a really difficult thing
00:16:12.740
for any family to balance. So favoring is one issue. The second one is parental interference
00:16:19.920
in the relationship. And again, parents should, if they can, let their children work out issues to the
00:16:28.800
extent that they can without being interfered with. There are, of course, times when parents,
00:16:34.700
and we have a few chapters in the book on this where parents have to step in and have to protect
00:16:40.340
one child from another. There was a chapter where we interviewed a guy in his 60s who talked about
00:16:47.260
having been physically abused by his older brother. Parents naturally had to step in there to protect
00:16:54.620
them. But parents should be trying to stay out of their kids' lives when they need to work things out
00:17:03.220
because if children are left to work things out as children, they'll learn how to work things out
00:17:07.760
as adults. So favoritism and interference that begins in childhood does affect how close children
00:17:17.240
are when they become adults and how close they are with their siblings.
00:17:22.220
Something that's also interesting with favoritism is that there's research that there's more tension
00:17:29.040
with adult siblings when there's the perception that the father favors one of the siblings more,
00:17:36.040
but the perception of a mother's favoritism isn't predictive of sibling tension. And something else
00:17:41.620
that's interesting about favoritism is that the child who feels like he or she is the unfavored one,
00:17:48.320
their tendency for depression goes up. And that tendency for depression carries with them into adulthood.
00:17:53.420
Yeah. Yeah. I think if you grow up thinking that you are not favored by your parents, then you are
00:18:01.580
going to maybe be more likely to struggle with connections when you get into adulthood. You're
00:18:09.720
sitting in a classroom and the teacher doesn't call on you, but your hand is up. That's kind of a
00:18:16.380
revisiting of what happens when you're at home. Or you go to a fraternity party, a sorority party,
00:18:23.240
a dance, and people are not sort of willing to dance with you or approach you or talk to you.
00:18:30.040
You may think to yourself, here it goes again. I'm sort of being overlooked. And that's why some
00:18:37.440
of these things that can begin as a kernel can sprout and continue to grow into adulthood.
00:18:44.460
With the favoritism thing, it seems kind of tricky because there is a big subjective element to that,
00:18:48.900
right? One child could feel like, well, mom and dad favored the other kid, but it subjectively feels
00:18:55.320
like everyone else looks like, not really. And that's, I guess, another factor. Like if just
00:18:59.360
one child has a propensity to kind of be like, have a negativity bias about everything that can affect
00:19:05.180
the relationship between siblings. Yeah. It kind of opens up the question and maybe something I should
00:19:10.700
have started with a statement that no two people grow up in the same family. Yes, I've got an older
00:19:17.200
brother and older sister and we grew up together, but I never had the experience of having me as a
00:19:23.660
brother. So, and having the same configuration, we all are going to have different narratives on what our
00:19:32.700
family history is like and what an event is like. No two people can agree a hundred percent on anything
00:19:39.720
that they observe because they're coming at it from a totally different perspective with a different
00:19:44.880
person in the room than themselves. So the notion of a family narrative and I was favored. No, I was not
00:19:54.260
favored. No, I was favored. No, I was not favored from one sibling to the next, or I was favored
00:19:59.560
here. But I remember six months later, you were favored there. Those are all narratives that
00:20:05.680
families are going to have to work through. You also talk about in your research that a
00:20:10.260
parent's relationship with their own siblings can also influence the relationship their own
00:20:16.800
children have with each other. What does the research say there? Yeah, very interesting. What we found,
00:20:21.540
and we had to think about it for a while, we asked both sisters and brothers, in this case,
00:20:27.680
mothers and fathers also, siblings that were parents, if they were close, if they perceived their parents
00:20:35.380
as being close, I should say, with their own siblings when they were growing up. So if I grew
00:20:41.960
up in a household where I saw my father being close with his siblings, I was more apt to be close with my
00:20:49.080
siblings. So to be more succinct, father closeness or the perception of father closeness with
00:20:56.740
his siblings would often tend to make somebody more close with their own siblings. And about a third
00:21:05.880
of the people we interviewed said that they believed their father was close with his siblings. When it
00:21:13.560
came to mothers, 80% of the people we interviewed said their mothers were close with their siblings,
00:21:20.580
siblings. And that did not have the same effect. So mothers were seen as being much more close in general,
00:21:27.360
as we've said, with siblings, where it was in the minority that fathers said they were close with their
00:21:33.920
siblings. So in those cases, having a father and growing up in a home where a father put a lot of value and was
00:21:40.980
close with his siblings would tend to improve one's own relationship with one's own siblings.
00:21:47.400
So just to recap here, kids who have a father who's close with his siblings tend to be close
00:21:53.600
themselves. But a mother being close to her siblings doesn't seem to influence the closeness
00:21:58.940
of her own children. Though what's interesting is that there's some research out there that shows
00:22:04.840
that if a mother had a negative relationship with her siblings, her children are more likely to have
00:22:13.300
positive relationships with each other. And the thinking is it's because those moms try to correct
00:22:21.420
for things that went wrong in their birth families. And so they're intentionally trying to cultivate
00:22:27.820
with their own kids, you know, a sibling experience and bond that they didn't get to experience
00:22:34.320
themselves. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:22:43.300
And now back to the show. So as you said earlier, at the beginning, our sibling relationship is the
00:22:49.340
longest relationship we have. And this is a person that's in our lives that we, I don't know, we kind
00:22:54.760
of compare ourselves to them, like how we're doing. In your research, do you find that children and then
00:23:00.820
even maybe adults like shape their own identity in order to differentiate themselves from their siblings?
00:23:07.320
Yeah, not so much my own research because I didn't do a lot on children. But yeah, from what I've read,
00:23:15.160
it seems to be that siblings have to sort of find their own place in a family. And if your brother or
00:23:22.440
sister is a great cellist, you may then decide to pick up the violin instead. So you're not directly
00:23:29.720
competing with the older and at least the beginning, the more competent player. Now, if you
00:23:37.260
pick up the cello as did your older sibling and you're much better immediately, you may continue
00:23:43.140
along with it. And these kinds of hidden or not maybe always overt forms of competition or choosing
00:23:53.840
a different path can, of course, continue throughout life. And those can lead to all kinds of feelings.
00:24:01.360
And one of the themes of the book about siblings and from our research is that these relationships
00:24:08.440
are defined in our book as being a combination of great affection, but also often affected by
00:24:17.840
ambivalence and ambiguity. That when we talk to people about their relationships, and you talked
00:24:26.260
about it initially about how your sibling may be your best friend and the person to whom you're
00:24:33.380
closest in the world or your siblings. And a lot of people said, I trust my siblings. I'm very close to
00:24:41.880
them. They're my best friend. I love being with them. There were also the minority of people that
00:24:48.640
said that I'm mixed about my sibling. I haven't been close to him my whole life. We grew up,
00:24:55.340
we moved apart. Maybe we've come back together now to take care of mom and dad. And that's been
00:25:00.980
a struggle. So there might be a lot of ambivalent feelings. And just as we can all remember maybe the
00:25:08.580
million complimentary things we heard from our father or mother, maybe we can also remember the
00:25:13.720
one or two at least less complimentary things. And those loom large. We have so many communications
00:25:20.380
with our siblings that of course, some of them are likely to be negative and maybe those stick with
00:25:27.020
us longer or perceived as being negative. And those can affect how we feel. Yes, I want my brother to do
00:25:35.380
well in life, but do I want him to do as well as me? Or do I want to sort of say, aha, I won because
00:25:41.780
that's the way we used to compete as brothers when we were young. So I think that's a normal thing that
00:25:49.680
we're trying to help people to understand that it's okay to have ambivalent feelings and still love
00:25:55.580
your sibling. And that affection is a very strong feeling and it tends to grow over time. The other
00:26:03.080
word to get in here is of course, the ambiguity. A lot of siblings we interviewed did not understand
00:26:10.260
why their brother or sister did certain things as an adult. Why did she marry that idiot? Or why did
00:26:18.500
he marry that jerk? I can't understand it. I can't understand their behavior. I don't know why they
00:26:25.040
continue to treat me like I'm 12 when I'm a competent adult who is navigating the world. So all these
00:26:33.620
sorts of things. And I can't understand why they're close to dad or mom after all the horrible things he or
00:26:39.600
she has done to them. So there's this, the three A's, the affection, the ambivalence, and the ambiguity
00:26:47.240
that really, if you think about it and step back, I think characterize a lot of adult relationships.
00:26:55.360
And again, we're trying to say in the book, these are normal. Don't think it has to be a Norman
00:26:59.780
Rockwell kind of loving family. They're going to be ups and downs in families across 40, 50 years of
00:27:08.260
family life together, or 60 or 70 years of family life together, or even longer now. So expect ups and
00:27:15.760
downs, but try and focus on things that are working on the love that should be shown in many families.
00:27:24.500
Staying in childhood, and we'll move on to young adulthood. I think a lot of research talks about
00:27:28.680
how the parents influence children and shape children and sort of teaching them and whatever.
00:27:33.880
But there's other research that says, you know, actually, kids probably spend more time with each
00:27:40.000
other, with their sibling, than mom and dad. So what sorts of things are we learning from our siblings
00:27:45.300
in childhood that carry with us into adulthood?
00:27:49.100
Well, we learn, of course, how to share the bathroom, how to share the kitchen, maybe how to share
00:27:55.320
a bedroom, or in some families, even have to share a bed with a sibling. So there's a lot of very,
00:28:01.800
I could almost say, forced physical closeness that comes along, depending upon the size of the house
00:28:09.760
and the number of children. And those can form a blueprint for how one forms intimate relationships
00:28:17.660
as an adult. In some cases, it doesn't mean you can't change the way you were raised, but it will
00:28:24.300
certainly influence what you are thinking about, how you feel about women and men and closeness.
00:28:32.480
So I think all those early experiences do set the stage for, but do not have to be the final act on what
00:28:44.580
Okay, so when you're a kid, you probably spend a lot of time with your siblings, especially if they're close
00:28:47.980
in age to you. That's like, you know, it could be like the first 18 years of your life. You got this person
00:28:52.100
that you're just constantly in contact with. How does the relationship change as siblings shift
00:29:00.460
Yeah, I think one of the greatest tasks in life is to figure out how to grow up, move away from home,
00:29:06.800
perhaps with a partner, perhaps not, yet still stay connected to the family. So that's where the
00:29:13.360
struggle comes in. How do we all grow up, perhaps get married, perhaps have kids, yet still stay loyal
00:29:21.240
or connected to our family. And so many people do grow up, they do leave home, they move out of town,
00:29:30.900
they move away, and they're balancing their lives, they're balancing maybe their partner or their
00:29:37.160
spouse's lives and families, and they're trying to figure out how to stay close to both sides of a
00:29:44.560
family in adulthood. And then as they age and their parents age and become ill, they then as siblings
00:29:53.760
have to come back together as a group to figure out how to do the caretaking of parents and how to
00:30:01.000
negotiate if the parents die, when the parents die, how to negotiate the estate. And there may be
00:30:09.140
well-meaning parents that will call me into the room and say, you know, Jeff, I want you to have that
00:30:16.800
painting on the wall after I die. And I say, that's great, I've always loved that painting, thanks, dad.
00:30:22.460
And then my brother comes in, or my sister comes in, and my dad tells my brother's sister the exact same
00:30:29.200
thing because he forgot that he told me. Well, my father dies, and then we struggle over who's supposed
00:30:34.720
to get that, and how parents divide up their estate. And of course, some siblings need more
00:30:40.880
than others. Siblings may marry people that are schoolteachers and not earning much money, or
00:30:47.740
marrying people in business that are earning a huge amount of money. So there are always those things
00:30:53.280
that maybe start to reverberate down to, well, here's the favoritism again that happened when I was
00:31:00.460
six. Or here I thought I had grown up and separated from the family and established myself as a competent
00:31:07.420
adult, but I'm back again dealing with the same issues I've always had to deal with the family.
00:31:14.280
There they go again, repeating these patterns of favoritism, or my being dismissed, or my being
00:31:21.580
favored, and I don't want the burden of taking care of my other siblings. So there's so many factors
00:31:27.740
that can affect that. Okay, so it sounds like when you shift into young adulthood, that relationship
00:31:32.200
with your sibling could drift apart, especially if you move out of state and you move far away from
00:31:36.260
them. And then also you're just getting busy with life, raising your own family, work, etc. And then
00:31:41.520
as you shift into middle age and your parents get older and you have to be concerned about their health
00:31:47.640
and helping them out, that's when siblings are likely to come back together again.
00:31:52.140
Right. And of course, if they've stayed in touch and stayed close, then that's not a struggle for
00:31:59.560
them. But if they've moved away and have felt the need to establish an identity strongly different
00:32:05.440
from their family identity, that may make other siblings somewhat resentful of them all of a sudden
00:32:12.280
coming back into the fold if that person has drifted too far from the family.
00:32:17.720
So speaking about that sort of young adulthood period, I guess the factors that influence whether
00:32:21.820
siblings stay connected through that sort of young adulthood period, like 20s, 30s, maybe early
00:32:27.900
40s, is if they had a good relationship when they were kids or maybe they saw their parents had a good
00:32:33.660
relationship with their siblings, that pattern is likely to follow through with them, correct?
00:32:38.320
Yes, it is. And of course, who they marry is important too. If they marry someone that values
00:32:44.560
family life and staying connected to everybody on both sides of the family,
00:32:48.820
they're more likely to stay in touch and to be a force for pulling the family together.
00:32:56.820
Some people grow up and are attracted to people that will help them separate from their families.
00:33:03.340
Others are attracted to people that will help them to stay connected to their family.
00:33:07.700
So there are all these different factors that come in play as you grow up and begin to
00:33:12.780
establish a work life, establish a partner life, and then have children that maybe
00:33:19.340
pull the family further apart or help the family to stay together.
00:33:24.920
Yeah, I think it's always interesting to kind of survey your friends about their relationship with
00:33:28.020
their siblings. And like it's some friends are like, yeah, I talk to my sister every day.
00:33:33.160
We FaceTime each other. And then there's some other people that's like, yeah, you know,
00:33:37.400
we call each other on Christmas and say, Merry Christmas. And that's about it. And it's not
00:33:42.200
like they'd hate their siblings. It's just like, well, we just got, we're just busy. And it's just
00:33:48.760
Right. Probably, probably the seeds for that could have been sown in childhood, or maybe they were
00:33:54.000
sown in adulthood. Maybe they met somebody or have married somebody who is pulling them in a
00:34:00.320
certain direction, or maybe doesn't even like, like the family all that, all that much too.
00:34:05.640
There are so many different factors that can come into play when people move away and have to go
00:34:12.880
away to school for a special program or have to take a job on a different coast. So many of these
00:34:19.800
factors can affect what happens with these relationships across the lifespan.
00:34:25.600
And you mentioned another one early on, gender can play a factor. Sisters typically do more work to
00:34:30.660
stay connected with siblings. Brothers, not so much.
00:34:33.920
Right. And of course, traditionally, when taking care of older parents, the women would be the ones
00:34:41.260
doing the physical care and sort of checking in while the brothers might be handling the money.
00:34:49.220
And that's at least historically because men were more likely to be in the workforce than women.
00:34:55.060
That, of course, has changed with women taking much greater role in helping with the finances and men
00:35:02.780
feeling more comfortable and helping with the physical care, the driving, the cleaning up around
00:35:07.620
the house. So all these things are becoming more, I guess, intermixed and less specific to any one
00:35:15.840
So returning to this idea of classifying sibling relationships as affectionate, ambivalent,
00:35:20.960
and ambiguous. So you said the research shows in your surveys that most people,
00:35:25.020
they have like an affectionate relationship with their sibling.
00:35:27.440
But then also even those affectionate things can be, you know, sort of pocketed with ambiguity or
00:35:32.760
ambivalence. And then some of them might just be completely ambivalent. I'm curious, like, how do
00:35:37.720
two people who spend so much time together for perhaps, you know, two decades end up feeling
00:35:43.960
completely ambivalent towards each other? Right? They just like, like, how does that happen? And what,
00:35:49.180
what does an ambivalent sibling relationship look like?
00:35:52.180
Well, well, we grow up and we witness somebody else doing things that aren't, aren't very nice to
00:35:59.700
other people or to themselves. You may be in high school with your older or younger sibling and you
00:36:07.480
don't like their behavior. And that sort of begins a narrative in your head or continues a narrative in
00:36:15.520
your head that my sibling wasn't very nice to me when we were young. And I see he's not very nice to
00:36:21.880
other people too. And yeah, he's my sibling and mom and dad said we should always be close, but I don't
00:36:28.380
feel all that close to him because he's just not the kind of person that I enjoy being around. So there
00:36:35.580
are paths that people can take and there are ways that people can sort of not connect that may help to
00:36:44.040
build a narrative that maybe has existed in the family for a variety of generations ahead. And it's
00:36:51.220
getting, getting played out. You hear your parents talk about not liking their own siblings or you
00:36:57.440
don't trust, you know, don't trust uncle Joe or don't trust aunt, aunt Millie. And so you begin to
00:37:03.880
be cautious around family and that can sort of feed into this narrative of, I don't really like
00:37:14.720
And then also, yeah, you see your siblings, how they treat your parents. Maybe they just cause a lot
00:37:18.380
of stress and problems for your parents. And you kind of resent that and you're like, ah, geez,
00:37:21.740
I just don't want anything to do with you because you're causing mom and dad just so much, just so
00:37:25.900
much grief. Right. I think that's a really good point. I think this notion that, and again, this,
00:37:31.980
this gentleman who was in his sixties, who was abused by his brother said in the interview that
00:37:37.600
the brother was such a difficult person that the family never took vacations. They were just
00:37:43.800
so focused on trying to control his behavior that there was sort of no fun in the family. He,
00:37:52.000
for whatever reason, you know, sucked all the fun out of the, out of the family. So I think that
00:37:57.580
things can get going that make, uh, being together as a family, just not as much fun as it might be if
00:38:05.140
everybody enjoyed playing the same, same games together on, on Saturday night. If there's somebody who
00:38:11.220
was hanging out in his room and not wanting to join the crowd, it's going to draw down the fun
00:38:18.460
from the family. And I think another factor that could play into the, the ambivalence between
00:38:23.440
siblings is there's research out there that shows that personality wise, two siblings are nearly as
00:38:30.940
dissimilar as two people randomly drawn from the population. So siblings, you know, they might look
00:38:37.740
alike. They've got this shared history, but they often just don't have a lot in common and their
00:38:42.900
personalities just don't jive. So I think that could be another factor that could contribute to
00:38:48.720
ambivalence. So we talked about ambivalence and then with ambiguity, this is something where,
00:38:54.740
you know, your sibling does something where you're not sure what that meant. So, you know, for example,
00:39:01.740
they didn't invite you to this thing and you're thinking, well, what does that mean? And that
00:39:07.860
ambiguity can actually lead to greater feelings of ambivalence. Yes. I think the two definitely do
00:39:14.640
feed each other. If you don't understand why someone has acted towards you or towards somebody else,
00:39:21.380
you tend to be a little bit more cautious around them and that's going to engender more mixed feelings
00:39:28.280
towards that person. Let's talk about siblings who just decide to just completely cut off or sever
00:39:35.640
the relationship with their sibling. What does the research say about that? Like what causes those
00:39:39.760
cutoffs? People sometimes, again, don't know why their siblings drift off. And the more siblings
00:39:47.900
there are, if you're one of five or six siblings, there's more likely to be somebody who has decided to
00:39:54.980
grow his own way through the waters of life. So it can be because of something perceived or something
00:40:03.800
that happened at the hands of a parent that people want nothing to do with the family. It can be the
00:40:10.100
feeling that I just don't fit in here. It can be having a relationship with somebody, a partner or
00:40:18.000
spouse that pulls you away from the family. It can be that you're spinning in one direction and the
00:40:25.500
other family members are spinning in another direction. There's nothing really to do with
00:40:30.900
anybody, just that you never really connected on any deep level. And you may stay in touch every so
00:40:38.620
often, but you really enjoy not being with the family. You don't want to be put back into a role
00:40:44.160
that's uncomfortable. You have people that don't go to their high school reunion 50 years later
00:40:51.540
because they never had a good time in high school. They didn't like themselves in high school or they
00:40:55.640
were bullied or not liked in high school. So why go back to your reunion if it was never a happy time
00:41:02.000
of your life? I think that's the same sort of pattern that can happen in families. If you've just
00:41:07.700
struggled the whole life, your whole life with connecting to your family members, it's going to
00:41:14.800
make it less fun to stay in touch. And you may need out of your own protection for your mental health
00:41:22.160
or physical health to stay away from your family. Can those rifts ever be mended? Have you seen people
00:41:28.100
where there was a big cutoff, but then they kind of worked together to bring the relationship to back?
00:41:33.280
Yes, absolutely. And it happened with, again, this guy that I talked about that was physically
00:41:39.620
abused by his older brother. They are now back in touch. And this guy just flew out to spend a few
00:41:46.360
days with his older brother, who is now in his late 70s and pretty frail. So aside from that extreme
00:41:55.600
example, people can always change. I can pick up a book and read something and change how I feel about
00:42:02.400
someone. I can watch a movie and say, oh, those siblings got closer. Why can't I get closer with
00:42:09.180
mine? Maybe I'll reach out. And I would encourage people to write a narrative for themselves that
00:42:16.900
makes them feel good about their sibling relations. Even if you've got a sibling who is out of touch
00:42:23.940
and seemingly doesn't want anything to do with you, you may feel better about yourself if you
00:42:30.260
continue to reach out once a year or once a month with a card or an email. Even if that sibling does
00:42:38.040
not respond, you might like yourself more if you have written a narrative where you're the one that's
00:42:45.360
reaching out. So returning to the sibling relationship in middle age, so they start coming
00:42:51.100
together, usually coming back together because mom and dad has an issue. How does the relationship
00:42:56.300
change? When you were kids, there might have been favoritism and resentment about that.
00:43:01.620
Does that stuff stay there or do you tend to grow out of that as you get into your 40s, 50s, and 60s?
00:43:07.760
We found a very clear change across time. People tend to trust each other more. They tend to be less
00:43:16.080
competitive. They tend to like their siblings more across time. I think they tend to value their
00:43:23.980
siblings more with time. That's the great part about growing old. You become less focused on the
00:43:30.940
small stuff and maybe more focused on the existential stuff. Siblings sometimes, even if they're married,
00:43:41.000
will turn to each other for care. There was one case that is an interview I did with a group of
00:43:48.500
sisters. One of the sisters had died about a year before the interview I did, and the other sisters
00:43:55.560
didn't think that she had been well taken care of by her husband as she was dying. So they sort of got
00:44:02.820
on their horses and were trying to help out a lot and disagreed with the way she was being taken care of
00:44:09.760
by her husband. So those kinds of things can cause people that are close to get closer.
00:44:17.380
And the example of the brother can cause somebody who was very distant and cut off to decide over
00:44:24.320
time, let's try and make something meaningful out of this last stage of our lives.
00:44:29.700
But as you said, there could be some conflict in middle age too, but it's usually around mom and dad.
00:44:33.740
Like what are we going to do with mom and dad or how are we going to do the estate? I thought it was
00:44:37.580
interesting. There was some research in the book where you highlighted that in some sibling
00:44:41.760
relationships, they actually start drawing further apart after mom and dad died. Did I read that right?
00:44:48.620
Yes, absolutely. So, you know, it's not surprising, but at the death of the first or second parent,
00:44:54.980
three things can happen in the sibling relationship. You draw closer because maybe mom was keeping people
00:45:01.820
apart or you just never enjoyed the interaction with mom. You become more distant because mom's house
00:45:09.840
was where you went for Thanksgiving and she was the magnet that drew everyone together for the holidays
00:45:15.920
or the death has no impact. My mother died at the age of 98 a few years ago after having dementia
00:45:25.300
for a few years. So, we had already adjusted. We had accepted she was going to die,
00:45:31.060
that she was no longer a force, that we were going to work out how to take care of her,
00:45:36.300
which the three of us did. And her death didn't change our relationship at all because we had
00:45:42.060
already absorbed her loss into the ongoing relationship that we had prior to her death.
00:45:50.840
I'm curious, is there any insight from your work and then maybe the research of others on what parents
00:45:55.480
can do who have, you know, kids at home right now to ensure their kids have strong sibling relationships
00:46:03.220
I think when parents show that they are trying to maintain a healthy relationship with their own sibling,
00:46:11.160
first of all, that can be a role model. Secondly, I think discussions around how difficult emotional
00:46:18.540
relationships are handled with others, which happens all the time when people talk over
00:46:25.000
the dinner table about what happened at work or what happened at school or what happened with friends
00:46:29.520
or family. I think all those are a template for children as to how parents might expect the
00:46:36.740
children to handle their own relationships. So, I'd be very aware of how intimate relationships,
00:46:45.340
friendships are, and work relationships and sibling relationships are all talked about because
00:46:52.320
those are going to be important life lessons that children are going to hear and will affect
00:46:58.620
how they see their own sibling. And of course, parents need to be attuned to when siblings need
00:47:04.380
to be given their own identity, their own time with a parent. All those things are important in terms of
00:47:12.040
not forcing siblings together if you can give them some space from each other. And of course,
00:47:18.400
on the other hand, allowing closeness if that's what they want.
00:47:23.020
Oh, what about people who've got adult siblings and they want to strengthen those relationships?
00:47:27.280
Anything from the research or your work there that can help?
00:47:30.640
Reach out to them. Most of the requests I get for help, I get people who read the book and say,
00:47:36.180
can you help me with the relationship? I wish I was closer is usually what we get. The other side
00:47:43.000
of that is that I don't want to be as close as this sibling wants to be with me. So, it's usually
00:47:48.720
around someone has drifted away and I want to reestablish a relationship. One approach I got from somebody
00:47:56.580
a few years ago was that something happened between my sister and me many years ago and she will
00:48:03.180
never forgive me for that, yet I'm trying to get this relationship to work. And she thinks the sister
00:48:10.160
sort of made more of it than she wanted to make of it. So, there can be a lot of things around how
00:48:17.780
close to get to a sibling that bring people into treatment. And again, I think to work that out,
00:48:25.420
you're going to have to have both people willing to change or open up a little bit about what they
00:48:32.280
want the relationship to be and drop what the relationship was. That requires maybe some level
00:48:39.280
of forgiveness, depending upon who feels they need to forgive. And it's going to be a willingness
00:48:46.040
to move forward. The important thing to remember is that how those relationships get worked out in
00:48:53.160
adulthood, send a powerful message to your own family. So, if I'm not close to my siblings, am I sending
00:49:00.300
a difficult message to my own children about how important I think their relationship is? And
00:49:07.020
that's where you can attempt to change the narrative and say, I'm going to try and reach out even if she
00:49:13.340
doesn't respond to me, even if he doesn't respond, I'm going to feel better about myself if I want to
00:49:18.960
continue to try and build a positive, healthy relationship. And that's how you should handle
00:49:25.220
other relationships in your life is the message to give your kids.
00:49:29.540
Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people
00:49:31.940
can go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:49:34.780
I guess aside from going to Amazon and looking at the book, and that's where sort of most of
00:49:41.080
the information will be, it will be in the book.
00:49:43.720
Fantastic. Well, Jeffrey Greif, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:49:48.880
My guest there is Jeffrey Greif. He's the co-author of the book, Adult Siblings. It's available
00:49:52.120
on Amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash siblings, where we find links
00:50:05.200
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:50:08.740
at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written
00:50:12.480
over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:50:15.520
episodes of the AOM podcast, you could do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:50:19.580
sign up, use code MANLY as a checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,
00:50:23.240
download the Stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the
00:50:26.400
AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us
00:50:29.760
your view on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you.
00:50:33.580
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think we get something out
00:50:36.680
of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time's Brett McKay.
00:50:40.540
Remind you on this AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:50:49.580
AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.