The Sibling Effect

Like all of the other seniors in my high school, I was very much looking forward to graduation day. But, like all of the other seniors, I also maintained a studied nonchalance about it. The natural cynicism of the eighteen-year-old was exceeded only by the fashionable cynicism of the early 1970s, so we all professed not to be terribly excited about an afternoon of ceremonial silliness that was being staged more for our parents than for any of us. But the truth was we were very excited—and the fact that family would be there to watch us graduate was part of the thrill. That’s what made the day particularly hard for me, since, unlike the parents of the other 400 students in my class, mine would be nowhere in sight.

My father had not been a regular part of the family for a decade, though we still occasionally spoke to him on the phone and my brothers and I visited him once a year or so. He had attended Steve’s prep school graduation in Tarrytown, New York, two years earlier, but I had no expectation that he’d make the trip from New York to Baltimore for mine—and I don’t remember if I even bothered to ask. My mother was a different matter. I think she had planned to attend, and I suspect she would have if she’d been able to. But three days before graduation, my brothers and I had her involuntarily committed.

Technically, the commitment wasn’t entirely involuntary. She signed herself into the psychiatric hospital to which we had sent her and she could have signed herself out if she’d wanted to. But the way the arrangement was sprung on her—first thing in the morning, with the family doctor and two ambulance attendants present—made it unlikely she’d resist. Plus, I suspect that at some deeper, lucid level, she knew she had to go.

For nearly all of my mother’s adult life she’d had a taste for prescription pharmaceuticals. She didn’t smoke cigarettes in an era in which it seemed that everyone did, and she rarely drank—something that also set her apart at a time when even pregnant women would indulge without a thought. But the clean, pure, non-caloric high of a drug was something else, and she learned its pleasures early. With four small children in the house, she never had to worry about having access to one substance or another. Somebody always had a cold or a croup, and back then cough medicine wasn’t cough medicine unless it included a healthy slug of codeine. A household with so many kids could plausibly go through a lot of the stuff in the course of a year, and doctors wrote prescriptions practically on demand.

For a while I saw no sign of my mother’s medicinal tippling, though things changed when she switched from cough syrup to pills. One evening during her abbreviated second marriage, I overheard her and her husband talking conspiratorially about how they were beginning to “smell airplane glue.” They were smiling as they said it and seemed quite pleased with themselves. I pressed her on it and she told me they had both taken a pill of some kind, and as it began to dissolve it gave off a smell that rose back up into the throat and nose. It was just medicine and not something I was supposed to worry about.

The pill, I would later learn, was a sedative called Placidyl. It was a burgundy-colored, 500-milligram capsule that was legally prescribed by doctors, but also sold on the street as “jelly bellies.” Placidyl packed a hypnotic wallop and could hit like a hammer to the head if you weren’t used to it. A double dose could knock you flat and keep you that way for a long time. Since the drug was wildly addictive, multiple dosing was common.

My mother’s second marriage lasted only fifteen months, but Placidyl became a commitment of much longer standing. Like all addicts, she did not take long to go from merely enjoying the drug to requiring it, and she became very good at the doctor shopping, pharmacy hopping, lies, and concealment needed to support the habit. My brothers and I couldn’t always tell when she was drugged, and to the degree that we could, we explained it away. She’s tired. She’s emotional. She’s been divorced twice and is raising us all by herself. There’s a lot of power in those self-told fibs. I believed them as her voice got increasingly slurry and her gait became increasingly wobbly. I believed them when I’d get letters at camp written at a sloping angle in a drunkard’s hand. I believed them when I’d come home from camp and her face would be a mass of bruises and cuts and she’d explain that she was simply unloading the dishwasher and bumped herself on an open cabinet door as she stood up. I’d believe her even as she would take to her bed for the evening with a little row of Placidyl neatly arranged on her night table. They’re just there if she needs them, I’d say to myself. She’ll put them away in the morning.

After a while, however, such denial became impossible. By the time I got to high school, our mother’s day-night schedule had flipped all but entirely. She’d be up until three or four in the morning, stay in bed until one in the afternoon, and spend those daylight hours mostly drifting on the couch until the sun went down and the pills came out. Dinnertimes became sad, absurdly early 5:00 p.m. affairs, consisting mostly of deli sandwiches or Italian takeout—the better to get the household duties done and let the evening begin. My brothers and I kept ourselves on a normal school and bedtime schedule, but in the middle of the night we would often be awakened by a loud thud somewhere in the house. We’d get up to see all of the lights on and our mother’s door open, but she was nowhere to be seen. We’d then begin the search for the spot she’d fallen this time, never knowing what we’d find.

Steve was away at prep school by then and Garry, Bruce, and I would handle those nighttime crises in ways entirely keeping with our developing personalities. Bruce, still our mother’s most adored princeling, would hover and hand-wring and sometimes scream, doing the true—often literal—heavy lifting of getting her back to bed. I would toss about a lot of ineffectual instructions, ordering Bruce to calm down, Garry to help out, and our mother to “get in bed this very second.” Garry wanted no part of the entire drama and his crossed arms and disgusted silence showed it. One night in the middle of an episode, he stalked back to our mother’s bedroom, grabbed one of her pillows, and returned with it, then lifted her head and shoved the pillow beneath it. “Let her sleep there!” he barked, before striding back to his room and slamming the door.

Our mother, of course, was almost certain to die if she kept this up, and at one level or other we all knew that. There would be a car accident or a fall down the steps or simply a thud in the night from which she wouldn’t awaken. And even if such a terrible end never came to pass, my brothers and I could no longer take the situation as it was.

Not long before my graduation, Garry, Bruce, and I called Steve and explained how serious things had become. He then called our family doctor. I don’t know what I imagined the doctor would say, but I suppose I thought he’d promise to talk to our mother, take the pills away, and fix the problem. That was not what he said. What he said was that she was indeed in grave danger, that she’d have to go somewhere she could be taken care of, and that it would have to happen immediately—the next day, if possible. Steve agreed, called us back, and explained what was happening. He said he was on his way to Baltimore as fast as possible and, no matter what, would be there by morning. There was a bat-signal quality to the call we had made to him—and a Batman quality to the way he responded to it.

Steve arrived early the next morning as promised and we all gathered in the doctor’s office along with our grandparents, who would have to sign any papers and pay any bills, since the four of us were minors. Shortly afterward, my brothers and I returned to our house, followed by the doctor and then by an ambulance. The attendants waited in the driveway while the doctor went into our mother’s room, woke her up, and spoke to her. Again, we all assumed the jobs that seemed most in keeping with our temperaments. Bruce was dispatched to our grandparents’ home—ostensibly to help keep them calm but more to keep him safe from the storm that was sure to break. Our mother, as we feared, went wild, screaming at the doctor, lashing out at us, threatening to grab her car keys, dash out of the house, and kill herself behind the wheel. Garry played tough, going outside and blocking her car with ours. Steve and I watched out for Garry, talked with the doctor, and fetched the ambulance attendants when it was time for them. Steve alone helped get our mother packed.

By early afternoon, it was over. Our mother was installed in a local facility under medical supervision as she began the process of detoxing from a ten-year drug addiction. No one could say how long she’d be there. We followed the ambulance over to the hospital to help sign her in. At some point after we were finished, our grandparents gave us some money for basic needs; we’d have all we needed, we were assured. They then went back to their home and we went back to ours. That night, the four of us bought some food and had some dinner and went out to a movie that none of us really watched. The next morning, Steve had to go back to New York. Garry and Bruce and I were left alone in the house. For the previous few years, the three of us had more and more been raising one another. Soon, I’d be going to college, but Bruce and Garry, just fifteen and sixteen, needed some rearing still. We had absolutely no idea what we were expected to do next.

Brothers and sisters have played a role in parenting one another for as long as multiple-sibling families have existed. The behavior starts early and happens universally: A kindergartner helps a toddler hold a spoon, a second-grader explains a game to a first-grader, an older sister minds a little brother while Mom takes a quick shower, or scolds him when he gets into a cabinet or drawer that is supposed to be off-limits.

The lines of power are typically vertical—with the bigger sibs wielding authority over the littler ones—but often they can be multidirectional, too. A middle sister fed up with a shouting match beween an older and younger brother may take them both in hand and settle them down. A fearless younger brother who thinks nothing of climbing a tree or diving off a high board may encourage a more timid older brother—and applaud him if he gives it a try. All that is part of the natural arc of siblings growing up together, and it continues into their teen years, when the same sister may crack down on her brother about getting his homework done, or the same brother may challenge his sister about what she’s doing dating that slacker from her homeroom, anyway. Some of this is just pose or play, much of it isn’t, but it’s all a very real form of impromptu parenting.

Sibs step in to act as allomothers and allofathers to one another in all human cultures. But as indicated in the studies conducted by UCLA’s Tom Weisner in Kenya, Polynesia, and elsewhere, in some places that tradition has remained a much deeper part of the culture than in others. It’s the agrarian history of those lands that has usually made the difference. Farming and the related trades require big families, with all adult hands laboring in the fields, barns, or pastures while those who are too young for work look after one another—perhaps in the company of an adult who is now too old to plant or weed.

“Among the kids in families in these parts of the world, sibling care is seen as an important part of childhood,” says Weisner. “It allows them to learn about child care as part of a system, a household, and a community, rather than just as an exchange between two siblings or a parent and child. The goal is that by the time you have children of your own, you know most of what you have to do. The American middle-class model is a very different one. It just does not put many responsibilities on siblings.”

That’s the case in most parts of America, anyway, but there are places in which the agricultural tradition and the benefits of sibling co-parenting are still being felt—and Hawaii is one of the most revealing. The native family practices of all of the Pacific islands emerged over the course of many, many generations, but those in Hawaii came under particular siege throughout much of the twentieth century as mainlanders from the United States flooded west to colonize the archipelago—a cultural swamping that only accelerated after statehood became official in 1959. Schools, businesses, and other forms of civic infrastructure were set up with the American and European systems in mind. Classroom schedules in particular were designed to accommodate those traditions, giving little consideration to students who might also be working at home as caregivers and quasi-parents.

One of Weisner’s studies tried to look at how this arrangement has affected the academic performance of native Hawaiian children compared to those descended from settlers from the mainland, and it produced some surprising results. Not only did the native kids not suffer from being pressed into service at home while also maintaining a full school schedule, they actually seemed to thrive as a result of it. Part of the benefit came from the way the brothers and sisters would play together. Nearly all play children engage in is good play, because it’s all built around the idea of learning and rehearsing for adulthood. In one Hawaiian household after another, however, one of the most popular games the kids would invent was make-believe school—with the big children pretending to be teachers and the little ones students.

The game may have been merely fun, but the particular form of rehearsal it involved was especially valuable, because it kept the older brothers’ and sisters’ minds limber and also acclimated the younger ones to what learning in a structured, Westernized environment was all about. What’s more, older and younger kids alike used the opportunity to practice a skill that too often separates native communities from an increasingly dominant settler community: language. Big brothers and sisters attending schools in which lessons were taught in standard English often came from homes in which native languages or a native-English mishmash were spoken. What they learned in class they carried home, and what they carried home they shared with their little brothers and sisters—particularly during their pretend classroom sessions.

“The native Hawaiian moms who encouraged sibling care often spoke pidgin English themselves, while the older kids were learning standard English in school,” Weisner says. “In these families, the language stimulation among the siblings increased, and soon was better than the language stimulation between the mother and child. The way all the kids spoke became more similar to school language.”

The learning that goes on among co-parenting siblings may yield deeper benefits than merely improving their academic performance or helping kids become better parents one day. It can also teach them primal lessons about some of the most highly valued human attributes: empathy, generosity, and even selflessness. Small children in all cultures are narcissists by nature, and why not? They know what their needs are and they know they want them to be met—and for the first year or so of their lives, that’s pretty much how things go. It comes as a cruel shock when adults start saying “no,” or “maybe later,” or “only if you behave.”

Children do slowly come to understand patience and limits and delayed gratification, but the Western model of heaping all of the caretaking work on parents, teachers, and babysitters—freeing the kids from any meaningful responsibilities for the other people in the home—does little to hasten the maturation. When bigger sibs are instead given occasional child-care responsibilities themselves, they learn what it’s like to be the one who sometimes has to say no—and then to deal with the tears or tantrums that follow from a younger sib. That, Weisner says, kick-starts the kids’ understanding of such higher-order attributes as empathy, patience, and communication, valuable skills for forming later relationships outside the home.

“Shared responsibility for child rearing does tend to get generalized to other situations,” he says. “If you are expected to be nurturing and understanding of the needs of others—which is the definition of empathy—you’re more likely to apply that ability to other relationships with other people that don’t call for caretaking or direct care.”

If the majority of Americans—or at least those outside of Hawaii—have not yet caught on to the distributed-care, it-takes-a-village model of child rearing, it’s not to say we’re a wholly lost cause. Studies of blended families do show how some older children of one parent will enthusiastically pitch in to help care for the younger children of that parent’s new spouse—as celebrity Pia Lindstrom did when her filmicon mom remarried—a form of alloparenting that’s good for the kids and the family as a whole, as it helps knit the two halves of the brood together more firmly. And in all families, blended and otherwise, girls do show at least a greater willingness than boys—by roughly a three-to-one margin—to step forward and help out with child care when needed. But boys generally score so low that three times close to nothing is still not very much.

If there is hope for the United States—and there is—it begins in the more recent immigrant communities. Chinese American families have generally outperformed those of European descent in embracing the distributed-care model, and the brothers and sisters in those broods typically reap all of the developmental dividends that turn up in Weisner’s studies. Indeed, they have benefited in other, previously unobserved ways. A 2009 University of San Francisco study of 218 Chinese American adolescents found that fourteen-year-olds who help care for siblings or elderly relatives not only become more empathic and less selfish but also develop lower levels of depression later in their teen years than kids who are given no such responsibilities.

It’s impossible to tease out all of the variables that could be at play here—not the least being that fourteen-year-olds who were willing to get with the family-care program might simply have been happier, better-balanced kids to begin with and would have remained that way later no matter what. But while that may account for part of the finding, the researchers believe that the rest comes the deeper sense of kinship that results from caring for other family members. That fosters a greater feeling of safety and belonging—and that, in turn, can be a powerful inoculum against depression.

African American communities similarly show greater sibling fealty than European American ones, and, according to many studies, are likelier to exhibit an orientation sociologists call “going for kin,” placing family first and cleaving tightly together, particularly in times of hardship. Frederick Gibbons’s study of the proactive role African American brothers and sisters often play in keeping their little sibs away from drugs was a good example of this phenomenon in action and an illustration of how both parties—the one offering the guidance and the one receiving it—can benefit from the dynamic.

Still, among all of America’s multiple ethnicities, it is Latinos—particularly Mexicans—who blow the doors off nearly all other groups. And it is the mothers who are mostly responsible. American parents think they know a thing or two about raising kids with a healthy dose of tough love, but nothing touches a Mexican mom—something I see in my home every day. My wife did not move from Mexico City to the United States until she went to college, and the sensibility of our household is often more south of the border than north. Our grade-school daughters can be stubborn, strong-willed, and maddeningly rebellious, and while I often approach their acting out with a talk-about-yourfeelings tolerance, my wife takes a far harder, far less flexible line. There are behaviors that are acceptable and those that are not, and there is a bright line between them. The feelings that led to a crossing of that line don’t matter much in the discipline that follows. Table manners and a tidy appearance are things all parents try to teach their kids, but for many Mexican moms they’re more than just goals, they’re preconditions for participation in civil society. Mind your manners or leave the table; comb your hair again—properly this time—or you don’t leave the house.

Such a fundamental difference in parenting philosophy predictably leads to disagreements between us, and I do have a fair body of sociological science on my side. But so does my wife. In 2010, a collaborative team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University released a study of twenty-four first- or secondgeneration Mexican American mothers as they interacted—and often struggled—with their four-year-old children. Repeatedly, the authors found, the mothers relied on two key principles to keep the kids in line: familismo (a sense of responsibility to family) and respeto (respect for parental authority). Compared to American mothers, who often practice what the researchers call lateral reasoning—equal parts persuasion, explanation, and discipline—Mexican moms are more inclined to go straight for the rule book and tell the kids what’s expected of them. In the 1,477 “compliance attempts” the researchers observed the mothers making with their kids over the course of the study, the hard-line approach worked, rarely requiring a maternal scolding or a raised voice. The title of the paper, published in the journal Developmental Authority , was “Commands, Competence, and Cariño: Maternal Socialization Practices in Mexican American Families.” Cariño, which means warmth and affection, is the love part of the tough-love pairing.

Such a take-no-prisoners parenting style may not always be fun for the kids but, done right, it can lead to twin benefits: better behavior in the short run, and a deep sense of family responsibility and loyalty in the long run. This builds very strong ties among all of the members of a household—particularly the siblings. In the same way Mexican American girls surpass other girls in lavishing attention on the baby of an older sister, so, too, are all siblings in that community more inclined to devote themselves to one another, spending an average of 17.2 hours per week engaged in shared activities, according to one 2005 study. That easily beats the average of 12 hours they spend with parents, teachers, and any other adult. More important, it dramatically exceeds the amount of time sibs spend in shared activities in European American families—just 10 hours in a similar seven-day stretch. Mexican American and other Latina sisters tend to be closer with all their siblings than brothers are, but both genders beat those of other ethnicities.

“The Latino kids generally rated their relationships with their siblings as very close,” says Arizona State University’s Kimberly Updegraff, who gathered the 2005 data in a survey of families in the Southwest. “They have cultural values that highlight the importance of family support and loyalty.” And, as in the African American community, it’s during times of hardship that that support and loyalty are especially tested—as Davianka Lopez, a twenty-year-old resident of Southern California, learned.

Lopez is the youngest in her family—the baby sister of four older brothers ranging in age from twenty-four to thirty-three. Her parents divorced when she was small and she grew up largely without the influence of a father. From the moment the split occurred, her mother made it clear to the entire brood that many of the absent dad’s responsibilities would now fall to the bigger brothers, especially the oldest, Merlyn. “My mom made sure my older brother knew that anything he did would have an impact on the younger ones,” Davianka says. “She raised us to be close and expected them to be role models to the younger kids, especially me.”

Merlyn embraced that role more enthusiastically than anyone might have expected. When the three older boys had grown up and left home, their mother moved what remained of the family—just Davianka, then twelve, and her brother Angel, sixteen—to Miami. The move made financial sense, but both kids were miserable there, and Davianka suspected there might be a way she and Angel wouldn’t have to stay.

“I told Merlyn how unhappy we were,” she says, “and he told my mother that he would take care of Angel and me because he was married and he already had kids of his own anyway. He knew I was so unhappy and not doing well in school. My mom said it was the hardest thing she ever had to do but she let us move back to California to live with him.” Davianka spent the remainder of her childhood under the care of her brother, not just as a little sister, but as a de facto daughter, being fed and clothed and, for practical purposes, raised by a loving older sibling.

Such a complete assumption of a parenting role is rare for even the most devoted siblings, but the all-for-one impulse that emerges when a Latino family is in distress can nonetheless be remarkable. Patricia East’s studies, for example, have looked at a range of Latino broods and come up with another unexpected finding: The sibling groups with the closest ties are often the ones being raised by a single parent. As a stand-alone data point, that’s a real stunner. The absence of one parent from the household does not have to cause a family to fall apart, but it usually doesn’t do it any favors, either. Among the Latinos in East’s surveys, however, it sometimes did, actually improving the bonds among the members of the household who were left—probably because the very hardship the kids were all facing gave rise to an in-this-together intimacy that otherwise might not have occurred.

Divorce is not the only emergency that draws families closer this way, and Latinos are hardly the only people who can show grace in rising to such a challenge. Wayne Duvall, fifty-three, a film and television actor, experienced such a coming together when he was only thirteen and his father died suddenly of a heart attack. In some ways, death, though more traumatic than divorce, can also be a cleaner and less complicated way to lose a parent. With a permanent void where a caregiver once was—as opposed to an intermittent one that is sometimes filled by visits, phone calls, and shared custody—the need for a surrogate to step in is more acute and the willingness of younger brothers and sisters to accept the authority of an older sibling is greater.

“I was spoiled by my parents—mostly by my father,” Duvall says. “When it came to chores, I could manipulate my father by saying I was tired. He would respond, ‘That’s okay, boy. Your brothers can handle it.’ After my father died and some time had passed, a day came that I was faced with some chores. I vividly remember one of my brothers leaning down to me and saying, ‘The party’s over.’ ” That was a cold slap for a pampered child, and Duvall resisted the new order for a time. Eventually, however—fatherless but certainly not brotherless—he tumbled comfortably into it. “My brothers became my parental figures and always looked out for me after that,” he says. “In some ways they still do. Even now, so many years later, they remain my best friends.”

In Duvall’s household, as well as in Davianka Lopez’s, the lines of authority followed the siblings’ ages, and that’s the way things usually go after a parent is lost—but not always. In some homes, the substitute parent and chief sibling caregiver may be the so-called functional firstborn, a second- or even later-born child who takes over if the eldest is unable to assume command or for some other reason resigns the post. Gender often determines which sibling occupies this pro tem position. In patriarchal cultures—which in too many ways continues to describe our own—a firstborn daughter may still have to give way to a second-born son in matters such as education, inheritance, or assuming control of the family business. But in matters of sibling co-parenting, the role switching is just as likely to run the other way, with a second-born sister taking the firmest hand and the rest of the brood—even a firstborn son—falling into line and accepting her domestic authority.

Power will similarly devolve to the second-born when the oldest doesn’t live in the home or is simply disinclined or temperamentally unable to discharge the powers of office. All of those factors were at work in my household during our mother’s growing disability. Steve had always had something of a broad, theatrical temperament, given to sweeps of mood that took him from high energy to low gloom, sometimes without any calm and grounded stops in between. The back-andforthing he went through as a child, feeling simultaneously claimed and banished by both parents, did nothing to help stabilize his gyros. There may have been no one better at parachuting in and helping out in a period of crisis. Indeed, that played nicely to Steve’s self-confessed love of an entrance—which served us well on the day we institutionalized our mother. But when the ambulance had pulled away and a sort of exhausted quiet was restored, he had all he could do seeing to himself. Returning to his life as a near adult in New York was the best thing for him.

After he was gone, I was left with my little brothers and a conditional authority over them—and not a whole lot more. I did have control of my mother’s checkbook—in a quaint era in which I could simply sign my name on the signature line, put the word son in parentheses, and explain myself when I went to the bank to cash the check for groceries or other necessities—and that helped. We maintained something of a self-enforced curfew and we did try to keep the house as picked up and neat as we could manage. Our father did not, as I recall, offer to come to Baltimore or have us up to New York, but he did offer support and sympathy of a kind. He also provided perhaps the only laugh in the whole dismal chapter. When we called to tell him what had happened—that our mother’s behavior had gotten out of hand and we had made arrangements to have her taken away—he let a moment pass in surprised silence. Then he muttered, “I guess I’d better watch my step.” Sometimes, in his dark way, he was not hard to like.

Sibling co-parenting is by no means always natural, nurturing, and without complications. Indeed, in some cases, families can make a complete hash of it, a problem most commonly seen after the parents divorce or one of them is widowed. A newly single mother or father is understandably bereft of company. Even in a failing marriage, it’s still nice to have someone with whom to share the responsibility of child rearing. While unhappy partners often spend more time stewing in silence or openly warring than they do actually talking to each other, the lines of communication usually remain open for any conversation concerning the kids. All that vanishes when the partner does—and that makes it very tempting for the remaining parent to turn to the oldest child instead. If the firstborn is going to be pitching in with the child-care duties, shouldn’t that work sometimes include participating in the parental powwows that the adult heads of the household used to practice? No—and for a lot of reasons.

When a parent is missing, younger brothers and sisters may accept the new authority of older ones, but they still want to see them as siblings—a relationship that will continue long after childhood is over. A parent who elevates a firstborn too far out of the sibling ranks disrupts the balance of the sib-sib bonds in a way that may never be fully rebalanced. What’s more, it can also have an impact on the security and self-esteem of the kids who don’t become the parent’s confidant. Competition for Mom’s or Dad’s attention will become all the more intense when Mom or Dad is the only parent left in the house. The last thing that that parent wants to do now is get sloppy about how evenly care and love are distributed. “Those children who are not the confidant start to question why they’re being left out,” says Katherine Conger, of the University of California, Davis. “They ask, ‘Why is Mom spending so much time with my sister or brother and not me?’ ” The answer—because you’re not the oldest—is obvious, but it does nothing to ease the anxiety or reduce the tension that is mounting among the kids.

In some families, the problem starts to develop even while the parents are still together. Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are celebrated for their movies but also recognized as Hollywood’s most venerable brother-sister pair. They have had their unavoidable rivalries and differences, but across the arc of their multidecade careers, they’ve remained close. Wrote Suzanne Finstad in her 2005 Beatty biography Warren Beatty: A Private Man: “Shirley was Warren’s best and most imaginative friend. ‘I know it seems unbelievable,’ MacLaine said later, ‘but we played together all the time.’ ” Beatty, in turn, made no secret of his admiration for his big sister, once referring to her as his “first crush.”

Their upbringing did not make that closeness easy. The two were raised in Arlington, Virginia, with a hard-drinking father and a too-compliant mother who often simply cleaned up after her husband. Shirley was the older of the two children by three years, and by the time she was thirteen, her mother, Kathlyn, had already begun taking her clumsily into her confidence.

“As a daughter,” wrote Finstad, “[MacLaine was] privy to secrets of her mother’s that were best left untold. Kathlyn took Shirley aside and told her that she would leave their father if it weren’t for her and Warren.” Worse, it fell to Shirley to try to stiffen her mother’s spine and get her to face down their father when he acted out. “I used to say to my mother, ‘Why are you being so diplomatic about this?’” Finstad quotes MacLaine as recalling. “And she said, ‘Diplomacy is what keeps the world from going to war.’”

My father experienced similar things as he was growing up. His parents divorced—just as he later would—and he became both a caretaker of his little brother and a communications link between his parents. Certainly, it’s not always a bad thing for a single parent to lean on a child, and when all of the kids are still at home and divorce—or the death of a spouse—does occur, there’s nothing wrong with the remaining parent clearly deputizing one of them to help look after the others. Indeed, in a household in which the age breakdown among the kids is, say, thirteen, nine, and six, it would be a waste of resources not to, since the firstborn is old enough to exercise real—if circumscribed—authority. But the parent should also be careful about how the authority is granted. There should be no official crowning—no explicit statement that the big sister or brother is now running the show. As the case of the Duvall brothers illustrates, sibs often fall into those new power arrangements on their own anyway. And if Mom or Dad wants to know how the little sibs behaved while the big sib was babysitting, there’s no reason to huddle with that child alone. Simply asking all the kids, “So how did it go last night?” can usually yield more than enough information.

A related problem occurs when lonely parents don’t lift one child up to an adult station, but demote themselves to the kids’ level. The phenomenon happens more often than parents think—and sometimes quite subtly—even in two-parent homes. It’s especially common when kids are entering adolescence, and the parents, seeing an empty nest in their futures, are starting to feel their years. The desire to straddle the parentpal fence—to chase the I’m-my-daughter’s-best-friend ideal—is a powerful one. But for parents who think they can pull it off, the answer from family experts is clear: You can’t.

The same need for clear structure and firm family roles that is denied when an oldest sibling is too openly promoted to co-parent is equally ill served when a parent spends too much time as just one of the troops. Paradoxically, Conger says, this can lead to sibling co-parenting, too, but not the healthy kind that occurs when the kids pull together in a time of crisis. Rather, the sibs start turning to one another for guidance because a parent is, in some ways, abdicating the position. When Mom comes home wearing a new outfit she bought at the same store at which her teenagers shop for clothes and one daughter mutters to the other “What’s with her?” it’s a good sign that a boundary has been crossed.

Of course, there is one thing worse than growing up in a home in which the lines of parental authority are blurred or disrupted, and that’s when they’re blown up entirely—when a group of children find themselves entirely without a mother, father, or any other parental figure. This most commonly occurs when the parents die and there are no suitable relatives to take the kids in. But it happens in other situations—when parents become disabled by addiction or illness or even incarceration. When that happens, an entire litter of sibs is suddenly spinning free, and at that point, the state must often step in.

Foster care in the United States is governed by a hodgepodge of often irrational practices that vary from state to state, city to city, and even courtroom to courtroom. And the systems are no more consistent overseas. As a very broad rule, the more money any jurisdiction has, the likelier it is that programs are in place that will minimize the trauma to abandoned or orphaned children and give them a chance to grow up in a comparatively stable situation that won’t leave too many psychic scars. But money hardly guarantees anything. Even in wealthy areas of the developed world, placement in foster homes and the transition to adoption can be an opaque or arbitrary process that takes years to play out. Supervision of new parents can be spotty or nonexistent, which too often leads to neglect or abuse. Improving the situation may take a wholesale overhaul of the way governments do things, but there is one reform that is both inexpensive and powerful and emerges again and again as a way to provide kids comfort, structure, and a natural form of ad hoc parenting even in the worst situations: Whenever possible, sibling groups should be kept together.

Much has been made—and rightly so—of the life of Annie Sullivan, the poor and nearly blind immigrant girl who grew up to be Helen Keller’s teacher and companion. It was Sullivan’s preternatural patience and tenacity that allowed her to open up the world to the deaf and blind Keller. But it was Sullivan’s loyalty and tenderness to her little brother much earlier in life that set her apart well before she was even grown. Abused by their alcoholic father—and abandoned by him when their mother died—Sullivan, who was ten, and Jimmie, who was eight, were sent to live in the almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts.

When it opened in 1854, Tewksbury was home to 2,193 indigent residents, who were looked after by fourteen employees on a weekly budget of less than ninety-five cents per inmate. By the time Sullivan and her brother arrived, in 1876, Tewksbury had, if anything, declined further. It had diversified and become part poorhouse, part hospital, and part psychiatric asylum, with little talent on staff capable of dealing with any of the residents’ very particular needs.

Jimmie had always been sickly, suffering from a chronic hip infection that left him barely able to walk and always one bad flare-up away from death. Upon their arrival, he was assigned to a hospital bed and Annie to a children’s ward. She, however, insisted upon staying by his side, enduring the grueling conditions in the hospital, where death was routine, odors were foul, and patients who had quietly died might not be discovered and removed until they had begun to decompose. Nonetheless, Sullivan bedded down with Jimmie every night until, six months later, he at last died. In The Miracle Worker, the Oscar-winning 1962 movie that told the tale of Keller’s life, Helen’s father asks Sullivan about her lost—and still deeply loved—sibling.

Psychologist Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis of England’s University of Birmingham has put together what’s known as a best-practices manual for the European Union, providing a framework for how those countries should structure institutional care for abandoned or orphaned children, and strongly argues for keeping sibs together at nearly any cost. She recently investigated the practices in seven very different EU nations—Greece, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, and France—as well as EU aspirant Turkey. The initial yardstick she used in determining quality of care was the simple question of how commonly orphaned siblings in state institutions were allowed to share a room. The results were as varied as the countries themselves: Greece came out on top with an 87 percent sibling-roommate rate; Turkey finished last at 10 percent, while Denmark and France—among the richest and most Westernized members of the EU—clocked in at a dismal 25 percent and 23 percent, respectively. The other scores included Slovakia’s 48 percent, Romania’s 46 percent, Poland’s 45 percent, and Hungary’s 25 percent.

Hamilton-Giachritsis used this data and a wealth of other findings to create her foster-care guidelines, and while the handbook is long and complex, designed to accommodate a range of possible situations and complications, she does return to some simple rules. “The message is, you shouldn’t be putting children of a young age—or any age—in institutions,” she says, “but if you have to, there are specific things you should do. Easily, one of the most important ones is housing sibs together and maintaining sib bonds. That’s the way you can limit the damage as much as possible.”

Not all psychologists agree entirely. Some, such as Lew Bank of the Oregon Social Learning Center, urge a more case-by-case approach, cautioning that if the children’s original family was dysfunctional or violent and an older sibling tends to bully or exploit a younger one, keeping sibs together may be precisely what the courts shouldn’t do. Hamilton-Giachritsis agrees, but only to a point. “Obviously, you have to look at cases on an individual level,” she says. “Some siblings in a family are so close it would be damaging to separate them. Others might benefit from separation. But that’s rare.”

My brothers and I, teenagers left parentless by circumstance in a comfortable suburb in a wealthy country, in no way found ourselves in the terrible state experienced by small children in poor countries who are well and truly orphaned. We would surely have landed somewhere with other adults in our extended family, and I was bound for college anyway. Garry and Bruce and I kept a close watch on one another while we were alone, and they were present for my graduation, where they did their best to show the family’s by now faded colors. As it was, our period in self-care was brief. The science of addiction recovery was still comparatively crude even a few decades ago, and our mother—like so many substance abusers of the era—was released from the hospital after just a few weeks of detox with a stern admonition to stay off the drugs and little follow-up beyond that. She promised she’d behave.

She did not, of course. That’s not the way of addiction. Instead, after a relatively brief period of abstinence, she resumed her drug habit, sneaking and secreting her pills more artfully than she had before. And since she took care never to get to the same depths of sloppy, lifethreatening intoxication, we were often not aware of what she was up to. She kept that subterfuge up for decades, until advancing age made it impossible for her to tolerate so much chemistry anymore. In recent years, my brothers and I have wound up as parents to our parent—not at all uncommon for sons and daughters of aging mothers and fathers, even healthy ones with a sober past. I like to think we’re good at the work, though sometimes I worry we’re not. That, too, is typical of most people in our position. I do know that the turbulent upbringing we had and the sibling co-parenting that was made necessary as a result is not the childhood I would have chosen for us. But I also believe that that co-parenting made us better, closer brothers—and made us better parents, too, when our time for that role came.