The Sibling Effect

At the time, it seemed like a good idea to put my baby brother Bruce in the fuse box. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a fuse box—it was more of a fuse cabinet, something larger than a medicine chest and much deeper, made of the same 1950s knotty pine that covered the rest of our playroom. Technically speaking again, my brother wasn’t a baby. He was four years old—but to me, two years older than he was, that seemed pretty close to babyhood.

In any event, Bruce was small enough to fit inside the fuse cabinet, and if he scrunched up tight, there was just enough clearance for the door to be closed and latched behind him. Whether locking a four-year-old in a cabinet next to a panel of high-voltage, old-style, unscrewable fuses really was wise was something I honestly had not thought much about. The way I saw it then, he was probably safer inside than out.

Steve was just over eight years old at the time; I was six and Garry was five. The spacing between children got shorter as my parents went along, until, at the end, there was only a thirteen-month gap between Garry and Bruce. That thirteen months made a difference, though. Garry was an unusually pretty child, with extravagantly long eyelashes and almost absurdly perfect features. But he found a way to compensate for his elegant appearance with a sort of alley-cat toughness that belied his looks—a toughness that I was sure he would not hesitate to call on when he needed it. Bruce was another matter. By the time he was three he was already nearsighted enough to have begun wearing glasses; they had tortoiseshell frames, which went nicely with his fair skin and red hair, giving him an incongruously academic look. He had not lost his baby belly entirely and thus often wore his pants hiked well above his waistline, in the manner of a retiree whose belt can no longer accommodate his shape. Like the rest of us, he wore his hair in a velvety semi–crew cut, but his was offset by a small tuft of red curls at the front. I might have been just a child myself, but I recognized adorable and I recognized vulnerable, and I reckoned he was both. That was the reason that he, more than any of us, needed the protection of the fuse cabinet.

Our mother wasn’t aware of what we were up to when we decided where to stash Bruce. Our father didn’t know, either—and the fact is, our father’s not knowing was precisely the point. My brothers and I were by no means battered children. We never suffered the hard and regular beatings that can wreck minds and scar bodies and lay waste to whole childhoods. But we did get hit—often enough and hard enough that, even during periods of peace, we were always aware of a distant, angry danger. It was a danger posed mostly by our father.

A smart, funny, hotheaded man, our father was just twenty-two years old when he got married and twenty-four when he had his first son. I thought of him as tall, though at five feet seven, he was nothing of the kind. He wore black-framed glasses, had what seemed to be a permanent shadow of whiskers, and smoked L&Ms—a great, great many L&Ms, enough that they would kill him when he was only sixty-seven, though, as a child, I had no way of suspecting that. Long before his cigarettes claimed his health, they claimed the clarity of his voice, and even as a young man he spoke in a rasp. When he found something funny, which he did quite often, the rasp gave his laugh a particularly happy, full-throated sound. When he was angry and shouting—something that happened quite often, too—that rasp became a roar.

I didn’t know the source of my father’s temper, and I still don’t. Some of it, I suspect, was born of frustration. The son of a wealthy Manhattan businessman who’d made his bankroll during World War II, my father had gone to the University of Pennsylvania with the understanding that when he was finished, he would help run his father’s various business interests. Shortly before graduation, however, my grandfather liquidated his assets, parked them in his own portfolios, and announced that he would spend the rest of his life investing and reinvesting them.

My father’s plan B was decidedly less glamorous: he got married; moved to Baltimore, my mother’s hometown; and opened a wholesale toy business. My brothers and I—who were often the happy beneficiaries of the surplus swag he brought home from his stockroom—could imagine no better profession for a man, and we naturally assumed our father delighted in his work. But I suspect he stewed in it, too.

A week’s worth of such slow-cooked anger had to blow at some point, and it generally blew on weekends. Whatever my father might have imagined his Saturday and Sunday mornings would be like after the fourth of his rambunctious sons was born, he could not have realistically assumed they’d be quiet. My brothers and I played boisterously, fought frequently, and broke things constantly. We’d jump on beds until the frames collapsed. We’d split into pairs and climb onto dressers to play a game we called “wrapping up and falling,” which, as its name suggests, involved nothing more than wrapping up in a shared blanket and falling—loudly—to the floor. The appeal is elusive now; it wasn’t then.

Most weekend mornings, we’d confine ourselves to the downstairs playroom, a perfectly appropriate choice, except for the fact that it was directly below my parents’ bedroom. My mother was a heavy sleeper—thanks, perhaps, to the early stages of a prescription-drug habit, which we knew nothing about at the time, but would come to know very well later—and did not seem disturbed by the din that always came from below. My father was another matter. He could be awakened easily—and stirred to anger quickly. And when he was, he became a frightening man.

The first indication we’d have that trouble was coming was the sound of pounding footsteps from above. Though the thumping started directly over our heads, the only way our father could reach us was by walking along a hallway outside the bedrooms, then down a short flight of stairs to the living room, turning through the kitchen and descending a half flight to the playroom level. That would take about a minute for an adult walking at a normal pace—less for an angrily striding one. To us, it seemed to take a whole lot longer.

When my father would finally reach the playroom, where we’d all be frozen in more or less the same spots in which we’d been standing when we first heard the footsteps, there was nothing disciplined or systematic about his hitting. He would lash out at whoever was there, landing opportunistic blows rather than planned ones. He did not aim for our faces as far as I knew, but I don’t recall him taking pains to avoid them, either. I do recall him picking me up once by the front of my pajama top, his fisted hand holding a wad of fabric just under my chin, and being vaguely aware that I’d seen that move many times in cartoons, and that it always looked effortless on the screen. In real life, it was awkward and extremely scary. I also remember raising my hand once to protect myself, causing my father’s incoming blow to land squarely on a new wristwatch he had given me not long before. It seemed ironic to me that he would be the one to break a gift he himself had bought, but the watch was a Timex, and it took the punishment.

The hitting never lasted long and we would reliably quiet down afterward. But the memory of the episode and the fear of the next one would leave us shaken, so much so that we—Steve, really—decided we needed a plan. From now on, in the forty-five or so seconds it took our father to reach us in the morning, we would all conceal ourselves in different corners of the playroom. Garry would dive into a window-seat toy chest and close the lid. Steve would slide under the couch. I would duck into the playroom closet and climb to a shelf about midway up the wall. Bruce would get the fuse box. He balked at first when we suggested the plan, but we encouraged him.

We practiced our scatter drill now and then to improve our stealth and timing. When we first put it into practice during a real Sunday emergency, I don’t recall how well it worked, but I suspect any memories I have now are conflated with how we wanted it to work. In my recollections—and certainly in my brothers’ and my retellings—our father would appear at the playroom door, look around confusedly, and begin calling our names, getting angrier and more frustrated at the silence that would greet him. We, of course, would preserve that silence perfectly, and he, mystified, would eventually turn and leave, mumbling and scratching his head. In our tellings, too, this worked weekend after weekend.

I doubt things ever played out this sit-comically. I suspect our father quickly caught on to what we were doing or we quickly gave ourselves away, and the hitting probably followed. We may not have even tried the stunt more than a few times—and, mercifully, we always collected Bruce safely from the fuse box afterward. It was only in later years that I would go a little cold, thinking about the deadly danger we courted on those mornings, squeezing a small child and high voltage so close to each other.

But if my memories of those episodes are murky, my brothers and I did take from them something clear and hard and fine: a deep and primal appreciation of the life-giving—and lifesaving—bond that we shared. The four of us, we came to know at a very deep level, were a unit—a loud, messy, brawling, loyal, loving, lasting unit. We felt much, much stronger that way than we did as individuals. And whenever the need arose, we knew we’d be able to call on that strength. Even now, several decades on, we still can.

The universe of human relationships is an impossibly varied one. Wives have their husbands; children have their parents; lovers have their partners; friends have one another. There are cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, schoolmates and colleagues and rivals and peers. Every one of those relationships plays out under its own set of rules and rituals, each unique, each elaborate. For all that richness and complexity, however, there may be no relationships that can run quite as deep or survive quite as long as those among siblings. You know it if you grew up with one. You know it if you’re raising some. You know it if you’ve merely watched a group of them interact.

From the time we’re born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride. They help us learn how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. Bigger sibs learn to nurture by mentoring little ones; little sibs learn about wisdom by heeding the older ones. Our spouses and children arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents leave us too early. “Our brothers and sisters,” says family sociologist Katherine Conger of the University of California, Davis, “are with us for the whole journey.”

In a sense, the sibling bond should not run as deep as it does, if only because brothers and sisters are among the more commonplace of kin. You have just one mother; you have just one father; if you do marriage right, you have just one spouse for life. But siblings can claim none of that uniqueness. They are fungible, replaceable—a kind of genetic commodity. Parents set up shop and then begin laying in inventory, producing as many children as they choose until they decide their shelves are full. The exact size of the brood is limited only by sperm, eggs, and economics. As long as Mom and Dad are able to breed and support more young, they may as well keep having them. Even when families are exceedingly—sometimes regally—special, there’s a product-line quality to the children they produce. It’s not for nothing that Britain’s princes William and Harry are referred as “an heir and a spare.” It’s not for nothing that each time a Kennedy boy died, his parents—and later the nation as a whole—began turning to the next one to fill the breach, as if he were a mere familial replacement part that could simply be snapped into place.

For scientists studying childhood and human development, this mass-produced quality always relegated siblings to a vaguely secondary station. A noisy group of comparative peers who wield little or no authority over you could not possibly have the same power to shape what you become as your parents or your teachers or—even more fundamentally—your genes. And even if there were useful data to be uncovered by studying siblings, trying to unearth it would be a bloody nuisance.

“There are so many variables to juggle,” says Laurie Kramer, professor of applied family study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There’s age difference, gender difference, the number of kids; there’s income, geography, culture, education. The complexity just turned people off.”

But if scientists never showed much interest in studying sibling relationships, the rest of human society seems always to have understood that those bonds involved something special—at least judging by the high place sibling imagery holds in our language and our art. There’s a reason Dostoyevsky did not write a novel about the comrades Karamazov. There’s a reason the signature song of the Great Depression was not called “Mister, Can You Spare a Dime?” Twentieth-century women found strength not through solidarity or unity but through sisterhood. Soldiers march into battle not just as squad members or platoon mates but as bands of brothers. America’s good are crowned with brotherhood; its Civil War is cursed as an act of national fratricide.

Even now, with the much-lamented fragmentation of so many families, brothers and sisters transfix us. There can be dignity in the sibling bond: Think of Cooper Manning, his own football dreams smothered in the cradle by a congenital narrowing of the spine, standing on the sidelines and cheering with seemingly genuine joy as little brothers Peyton and Eli go on to win Super Bowls. There can be petulance, too: Think of Neil Bush, sibling of a president and a governor, and veteran of both a savings-and-loan scandal and a messy public divorce, famously griping, “I’ve lost patience for being compared to my brothers.” There can also be greatness: The whole of the Wright brothers was more inventive than the sum of its parts. The whole of the Marx Brothers was funnier than the sum. Would the Gershwins, with the perfect key-in-lock fit of their music and lyrics, have been what they were if one of them had been named Jones? Would the Williams sisters have become the athletes they are if there had been no Venus to push Serena, nor Serena to push Venus?

Most of us will experience our relationships with our siblings much more privately and much less spectacularly, but we’ll feel them no less acutely. A household with multiple siblings is a parliament of personalities that are forever in motion—and often in conflict. There are alliances and feuds, loyalties and betrayals. Slights are remembered and favors are banked. Daily wars erupt in the playroom, requiring compromises to be negotiated and peace deals to be struck—deals that last only until the next outbreak of hostilities, which can easily happen within the hour. “Getting along with a brother or sister,” says Kramer understatedly, “can be a complicated experience.”

But it can be an educational one, too: Adulthood, after all, is practically defined by peer relationships—the workplace, the marriage, the community group. As siblings, we may fight and sulk and fume, but by nighttime we still return to the same twin beds in the same shared room. Peace is made when one sib offers a toy or ventures a thought or throws a pillow in mock provocation that releases the lingering tension in a burst of roughhousing or laughter. Somewhere in there is the early training for the e-mail joke that breaks an office silence or the husband who signals that a fight is over by asking his wife where she thinks they should go on that fast-approaching vacation anyway.

And all of that complexity comes just from the civil wars among the sibs themselves. There’s also the constant jostling for the precious resource of parental love and attention, with each child struggling practically from birth to establish an identity that will best catch Mom and Dad’s eye: I’m the smart one! I’m the funny one! I’m the athlete! I’m the pretty one! If one niche is filled, a child switches to another. Parents inevitably wind up playing favorites, and kids, cleverly, learn to game their parents—sending the adored oldest son to ask Mom a favor, sending the adorable youngest daughter to wheedle a treat from Dad. Mom and Dad themselves are entangled in all of this but also somehow above it, too busy with bills and meals and playdates to remember fully from their own childhoods what these kinds of quotidian dramas mean to the kids. The kids, on the other hand, are defined by it.

The exact nature of life on those wards can be determined by countless other X factors, and affect siblings in countless other ways. There is birth order, with its common notions of the smart and studious older sib, the lost-in-the-thickets middle sib, and the wild-child younger sib. Are who you are and what you become really governed by something as capricious as the order in which you pop from the womb? There is divorce—when the home is suddenly blown to pieces and the family becomes a bipolar thing, with Mom in one house and Dad in the other, and the kids pulled like iron filings between two emotional magnets. There is the blended home, in which elements of two broken families and two sets of sibs try to combine themselves into a coherent whole under a single roof. Does the biology of your birth brood trump the proximity of the new, unrelated brood, or can children raised together become de facto brothers and sisters without a scrap of shared DNA?

Even if you can figure out all those variables, there are always others waiting. What about risk-taking behavior—the way smoking, drug use, drinking, teen pregnancy, and even criminality can be passed from older siblings to younger ones as easily as last year’s sweater? What about the unique bond shared by twins and triplets and other multiple wombmates, or the powerful influence of culture—the way Asian sibs differ from American ones, and Americans in turn differ from Africans and Europeans? Most enigmatically, there’s the puzzle of the singleton—the only child who feasts on the concentrated love of two parents but is forever starved of the company of a sib. Is the one-child playroom really the lonely place it can seem, or are there quiet rewards that no one but the singletons themselves truly know?

Still, family studies sidestepped many of these questions for decades, focusing heavily on the husband-wife and parent-child bonds. But once the scientists had strip-mined all the findings from that work, they still came away with as many questions as answers. Somewhere, there was a sort of temperamental dark matter exerting an invisible gravitational pull all its own. And that force, the investigators finally began to accept, could only be our brothers and sisters.

With that realization, the dam finally broke. Over the past fifteen years or so, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, even biologists and zoologists, have begun studying brothers and sisters as never before—teasing apart the genetic, sociological, and psychological threads of the sibling relationship. They are videotaping brothers and sisters as they interact and breaking down the tapes like football coaches studying plays. They are tracking sibling genes and seeing how the shared biological software that makes them what they are either pulls them together or drives them apart. They are venturing into the field to study sibs in their natural family habitats—intact families, single-parent families, families with young parents, families with old parents, families with grandparents or other relatives doing the parents’ job. In 2005, the Journal of Family Psychology, one of the psychology field’s most prestigious publications, devoted an issue exclusively to siblings, and the clamor to publish in its pages was overwhelming.

“[Sibling research] has been one of the more neglected areas until recently,” says Kimberly Updegraff, a professor of family and human development at Arizona State University. “But over time it snowballed and more people have become involved and reached consistent findings about the important ways siblings influence one another.”

This book grew out of a pair of cover stories I wrote for Time magazine in 2006 and 2007, exploring the burgeoning field. The first of the stories covered sibling relationships in general, the second focused on the power of birth order. But my interest grew from something far more primal. My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half sibs, and for a time I had stepsibs. My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home—and then watched that home explode, too. My brothers and I have fought the birth-order wars and struggled with ongoing rivalries for parental attention that define so many sibs. We lived in the total-immersion testosterone environment of an all-boy household, and then watched how things effervesced when sisters were suddenly dropped into the mix. We came together when drug addiction ravaged the family; we learned to accept—and then celebrate—what decades ago could be a traumatic announcement: that one of the members of our all-boy band had a hankering for other boys, outside the home. Most important, I, like my sibs, am now raising children of my own—two grade-school daughters, in my case—and find myself observing and refereeing the same sibling chess matches I spent my whole life playing.

If self-interest is partly behind my fascination with the sibling bond, I am hardly alone. The near universality of the sibling experience makes it something that powerfully affects all families. What’s more, that effect continues later and later in life. With Americans living longer than ever, increasing numbers of us will be launched into an old age in which we’ve outlived our friends, our parents, and even our spouses, while our children and grandchildren have scattered to distant cities. For plenty of us, the only ones left at the end of the dance will be the ones what brung us—the brothers and sisters who have been with us the longest, loved us the hardest, and, by a wide margin, know us the best.