The Sibling Effect

It took me until I was in early middle age to think seriously about the fact that, life and death being what they are, one day there would be fewer than four of us in my original band of brothers. When I was very young, I believed that people died in the order in which they were born and that that rule applied down to the day. A child who came into the world on April 1, 1960, would eventually leave it one day before a child born on April 2, 1960. That was pretty much the last time I gave more than passing thought to how the chronology of mortality applied to my brothers and me. It was more than four decades later that I considered the idea again, one evening when the four of us were sitting at a table at Joe Allen’s restaurant in New York.

We’ve been having dinner at Joe Allen’s for the better part of twenty-five years now. We don’t get to eat there terribly often anymore, since it’s not terribly often that all of us are in town at the same time. Bruce and I still live in New York City, Garry lives in Los Angeles, and Steve lives in Boston. Coordinating four schedules so that we all come together on the same evening at the same table takes some doing, and typically doesn’t happen unless a special occasion like a wedding or a funeral forces the issue. Still, when such an occasion does occur, we know where we’ll eat.

As with most families with a go-to restaurant, we did not choose Joe Allen’s on the strength of either its food or décor—both of which are perfectly nice but also perfectly unremarkable. Human beings are seekers of the warm and the familiar—and families are exponentially more so. There’s a reason the toddler insists on hearing Goodnight Moon night after night—sometimes multiple times on a single night—and it’s not because this time the story might end differently. There’s a reason extended clans return to the same lake house summer after summer. There’s a reason so mundane a thing as meat loaf night becomes an inviolable part of a household’s dinnertime tradition.

All such family habits are marinated in history. Each successive summer at the lake adds to the sum of all the other summers, and makes it likelier still that there will be more to come. Each meat loaf dinner or reading of Goodnight Moon works the same way. And the same is certainly true of every all-brothers dinner at a place like Joe Allen’s.

My dark reflections on the night I contemplated our mortality began as warm thoughts. Looking around the table, I recalled how many similar evenings we’d passed together this way. It occurred to me that since I was too young when Bruce was born to remember his arrival with any clarity, I had no conscious experience of living in a world without all four of us present. Oddly—and a bit morbidly—I then thought of Ringo Starr. Shortly after John Lennon was murdered, a TV reporter asked Ringo a question about his feelings or his plans or the future of the surviving band members. “I don’t know,” he answered. “You’d have to ask the other two.” Then he stopped himself and nodded his head. “That sounded very strange,” he said. And indeed it did. Such a sentence in the past would always have ended with the words “other three.”

I looked around the table again at Steve, Garry, and Bruce, none of whom was as young as he’d once been and none of whom was taking care of his health as well as I’d like—and as well as I took self-satisfied pride in doing. Bruce, after having successfully given up smoking and staying clean for years, had recently taken it up again. Garry—as always, the only athlete among us—was continuing to run in more marathons than I considered safe. Steve, while generally healthy, still has never met a steak he couldn’t vacuum up in less than five minutes.

The long march of years brothers and sisters usually get to share is both a gift and an inevitable source of melancholy. You are together as your family of origin buds and grows. You are together as it matures. And you are together, too, as it decays and declines. You experience the same things, even if not always in the same ways. “Siblings,” says Katherine Conger, “are like our memory banks.”

For the two decades before children are old enough to leave home, they are making constant deposits into that account. The shared experiences of childhood get placed in a family’s short-term vault and then, if the experiences are meaningful enough, they are transferred to long-term archiving. The day I swatted Steve with the balsa wood plank got stored quickly. The recent night I made my nine-year-old daughter laugh so hard at dinner that milk shot out of her nose—causing the seven-year-old to double over, too—has surely been filed away in their accounts already.

It’s only when the sibs begin growing up and breaking away—sequentially leaving home for college and beyond—that things begin to change. No longer are they living in the same environment, exchanging only different perspectives on common experiences. All at once, and for the very first time, they’re living largely separate lives. Brothers and sisters returning from college bring lessons and guidance from the adult world that are new to kids still living with Mom and Dad—and that those kids are not especially accustomed to hearing from a sibling. Conger recalls a telling experience she had during one of her interviews with sibling pairs.

“One older sibling who had gone off to school came back home, and I did a videotape with him and his little sister,” she recalls. “As part of the interview he said to her, ‘College is a lot tougher than I thought it would be. You’ll have to knuckle down and start studying. I kind of fooled around in high school and I’m really having to work hard.’ I thought it was so great for the older brother to fill his sister in on what’s awaiting her out there. It’s a great image.”

Important as such mentoring from an emancipated sibling can be, the threshold from high school to college also marks a period in which brothers and sisters begin to disinvest from one another. Geography drives sibs apart, as do diverging academic interests, differing career pursuits, and, of course, romantic relationships. There’s a centrifugal physics to all these forces, one that scatters a previously cohesive sibling band in all manner of unpredictable directions.

Conger calls this period, which can run a decade or more, the sibling moratorium, and while it can come as a jolt to the sibs themselves—especially the little brothers and sisters, who may feel abandoned—it is an essential developmental step. Once the younger sibs themselves are out in the world, they see the benefits of the separation, too.

“The moratorium tends to happen mostly when siblings are in their twenties,” Conger says. “They’re all trying to establish where they’re going in terms of work, education, finding romance, starting a family. The sibling relationship must recede for a while, because they are working on these issues. Brothers and sisters will all become influential again in one another’s lives, but not until later, when they move past that age.”

Victoria Bedford of the University of Indianapolis describes this phenomenon as the “hourglass effect,” a stage at which sibling closeness and interaction contracts to a narrow choke point, and only expands again when the brothers and sisters are all set and settled. At that stage, they are likelier to be living similar lives once again—even if they’re living them separately—wrestling with the common challenges of raising kids, earning a living, and keeping a household solvent and afloat. Matching lives—not to mention often-matching schedules—will typically draw them closer again.

My brothers and I took longer than most to scatter—and at first we managed it only halfway. By the time we were in our twenties, we had all moved away from Baltimore. Steve and Garry migrated to Los Angeles, living in separate apartments not far from each other; Bruce and I moved to New York—or Hoboken, New Jersey, actually, for the cheaper rent, where we shared an apartment. Even as we pursued our early careers, we all remained intimately involved in one another’s lives—Bruce and I especially, and unavoidably, since we lived under the same roof. Whether or not that was good for our emotional growth we did not much consider, but other people in our lives had doubts.

Not long after Bruce and I left Hoboken and moved to separate apartments in New York City, I began a several-year romance with a woman who got to know my brothers well and could not help but observe how much time we still spent on the phone together or in one another’s company. She began to ask me—tactfully but tellingly—if maybe it wouldn’t be good for me to be investing more of my emotional energy elsewhere. Truth be told, I’d been thinking that, too. I suspect Bruce felt the same way—and I’m certain the serial women he was dating at the time did as well. Yet the first time I shared my girlfriend’s thoughts with him, he frowned and muttered, “Yoko.”

He was joking—sort of—or at least he delivered the dismissal with enough of a playful tone that he seemed to be. But there was indeed a busting-up-the-Beatles quality to my girlfriend’s urgings, though Bruce and I knew she was right. Ultimately, the four of us did establish more autonomous lives. No coincidence, perhaps, that only then did any of our romantic relationships begin to move toward marriage.

The very act of marrying, of course, can have its own kind of impact on sibling bonds. By definition, spouses should be each other’s best friends and go-to confidants, and while plenty of people in chilly or unhappy marriages have either lost or never achieved that intimacy, few would deny that it was one of the things they hoped for at the outset. No matter how well spouses do or don’t get along, however, the day-to-day collaboration that goes into making a home and raising children does crowd out a lot of the time and emotional energy they had for relationships outside the marriage. That includes siblings—and that can lead to problems. Bedford cites studies showing that romantically unattached sibs will often continue to name another sib as their primary attachment figure—scientist-speak for the most important person in their lives—but married sibs will be much less likely to return the favor. Often as not, this results in feelings of resentment, directed both at the attached brother or sister and at the romantic partner who caused the problems in the first place.

As bad as these tensions can be, they become worse if they stir up older, long-dormant ones as well. When the sib who has paired up was also the pretty one or the popular one or the one with all the dates when the kids were growing up, the feelings of inadequacy or envy that occurred back then will likely be recycled. Similarly, if the married sib was generally known to be Mom’s or Dad’s favorite, the renewed familial attention that comes with planning a wedding or the arrival of the first grandchild will spark problems of its own.

“The unattached sibling will feel hostile and distant and may or may not say anything about it,” says Catherine Salmon. “But unless the married sibling is totally clueless, it will be obvious that something is going on.” Paradoxically, it’s that partnered sib who may have the tougher go. Yes, it’s nice to be the one who’s loved by both a sibling and a mate, but the torn loyalties that come from having to mind the feelings of both can create tensions and guilt of their own.

All of these issues can occur even when the single sibling is actually fond of the attached sibling’s partner. But what happens when that’s not the case—when you think your sister’s new husband is a boor or a bum, or your brother’s new wife is humorless or controlling? Dare the unpaired sib say anything at all? In most fraught familial situations, psychologists counsel candor and openness. But unless the undesirable partner actually seems dangerous or otherwise unstable, this is one time the honesty-in-all-things rule may not apply. “Often, it’s just not going to be taken well,” says Laurie Kramer. “Maybe the complaints are on target and the couple winds up getting divorced ten years later. But if you say something much earlier than that, the message just might not be heard.” This is especially so if the siblings do not have a long, shared history of mutual trust and supportiveness. “That’s when you hear things like, ‘You’ve never approved of my choices. Nothing I do is ever good enough for you,’” says Kramer.

No matter the quality of the partners the siblings choose, the passage of time does tend to smooth over a lot of conflicts. This is particularly so when an unattached sibling finds a mate as well—and most particularly when any sib becomes a parent. The primal sense of family bonding that gets stirred up when the first baby of a new generation is born can be an extraordinarily powerful thing. That’s partly pure sentiment—who doesn’t love babies?—and partly genetic. A family’s biological legacy is a precious thing, and when the entire responsibility for passing it on is heaped on one small child, the clan draws together around that new member.

Bruce was the first of the brothers in our family to get married and the first to become a father as well, and while part of me moped enviously through his wedding and had to force a smile when he and his new wife bought an apartment and set up housekeeping, all that was swept away when his daughter Bridgette was born. For me, the new sense of family connectedness was expressed through gifts—a great, great many gifts—as well as constant visits and regular offers to babysit. For my other brothers it meant flying in from Los Angeles and spending as much time with the new baby as their schedules would allow. Not surprisingly, as Garry and I went on to have children of our own, our investment in any niece or nephew had to be dialed back, but the time we logged as Bridgette’s exceedingly devoted uncles was good for us, good for the family, and, I’d like to think, good for her, too.

Not every uncle or aunt responds to a nephew or niece in quite the same way. Badly estranged siblings may extend their antipathy for one another to the next generation—though the birth of a baby may sometimes warm things up at least a little. And despite the consuming attentiveness my brothers and I displayed toward Bridgette, studies do suggest that sisters—particularly unmarried sisters—do a better job of alloparenting nieces and nephews than brothers. “Unmarried men tend to be involved in reproductive things of their own—such as meeting women and dating,” says Salmon. When uncles do get heavily involved in helping to care for a sibling’s kids, some surprising studies suggest that they’re likelier to do so if the sibling is a sister. “There’s anthropological stuff going on here,” says Salmon. “You invest in your sister’s children because you know they’re hers. When a brother has children there can always be paternity questions.”

Gay and lesbian aunts and uncles, most research continues to show, are more attentive to their nieces and nephews because they’re less likely to have kids of their own—though this, again, is changing as liberalized adoption laws, new reproductive technologies, and surrogate parenting democratize parenthood more than ever. The gender of a sibling’s children can draw an uncle or aunt closer as well. If you’re raising daughters and have always longed for a son, you may be more motivated to spend time with a nephew than a niece—and the same holds true for a parent of boys who’s always wanted a girl. In all of these cases, one overarching rule does apply: The more involved siblings are with one another’s kids, the closer the sibs themselves will remain—and the closer the extended family as a whole will be as well.

While adult siblings who remain involved in one another’s lives generally see their continued relationship as a desirable and very rewarding thing, even those who want nothing to do with one another continue to be deeply connected all the same—whether they realize it or not. That’s because the person with whom you first learned how—or how not—to manage relationships and resolve conflicts can’t help but inform how you practice those same skills with all of the other people who eventually populate your world.

Parents of small children tear their hair out when their kids are fighting, and not just because of all the noise and upheaval. They also worry that siblings who can’t settle their conflicts at home will be equally poor at interpersonal skills when they grow up and the stakes for getting along will be much higher. Laurie Kramer’s findings that the preschoolers who have the most fights in the playroom tend to be more combative on the playground as well seems to confirm that fear, as does Lew Bank’s finding that older brothers who bully their little sibs are at higher risk of carrying on that behavior outside the home.

But there are upsides to the fights, too. Bedford has conducted studies of groups of adult siblings over a twenty-year period, looking into the lingering effects of childhood battles, and has come up with some encouraging findings. In most cases, she says, as long as early-life conflicts do not cross the line from merely fractious to dangerous or abusive, most adult sibs will see the experiences as essentially positive, both in terms of what they teach them about human relationships in general and how they strengthen the sibling bond in particular. “Conflicts with siblings give you growth experience you wouldn’t have outside the family,” Bedford says. “You get to push limits further than you usually would with other relationships.” And that can be very instructional.

Among her subjects, 75 percent said that during childhood they argued with their siblings “somewhat frequently” to “extremely frequently.” But of the people who answered that way, fully 87 percent said that once they grew up, arguments with the same sibs occurred “hardly ever or not at all.” About 80 percent of siblings who fought as kids also said they were consciously aware of using those experiences to their advantage when they were older, usually in one or more of four ways: personal development, social competence, parenting skills, and better managing the sibling relationship itself.

“I’m very sensitized to the fact that it’s important to listen to others,” said one study participant about the lessons that came from childhood conflicts. “People get over their anger and people who disagree are not terrible,” said another. One subject who has always had to struggle with shyness even in adulthood said that fighting with his sibs taught him to be “more vocal” and “to argue better.” Others said that they learned to have “more open and honest exchanges.”

This is by no means true of all brothers and sisters. The sibling bond may be powerful and resilient, but like all human relationships, it is not indestructible—and the damage done to it by conflict can be lasting. Psychologist Deborah Gold of Duke University has closely studied adult sibling relationships and sees most of them falling into one of five categories: intimate, congenial, loyal, apathetic, and hostile.

In her 1990 study that first defined and explored these groupings, she described intimate relationships as “characterized by ardent devotion and psychological closeness. [The siblings] share a relationship based upon mutual love, concern, empathy, protection, durability, and stability.” Said one adult brother in Gold’s study, describing his relationship with his sister: “We’re kindred souls. I can tell her anything. She’s my favorite character in the whole world right now. She’s part of me; she’s my best friend.”

Congenial sibs, Gold says, are close as well, but their relationship lacks the depth and reliability of the one the intimates share. They consider one another good friends, but not best friends, and while they remain in touch, it’s not with the same frequency as intimate sibs. “We call each other every week and we take turns,” said one sister. “Sometimes he does things I don’t like, but I get over that quickly. He can afford to help me if I need it and I would help him if he asked me and if I could.”

Loyal sibs fall a notch lower, basing their relationship more on a sense of family history and obligation than on deep warmth. They show up at events such as weddings but have little contact beyond that, even if they live nearby. “We don’t bother each other . . . and we don’t need each other every second,” said one such sib. “But we have each other for life because we’re brother and sister.”

Siblings in the apathetic category are ones in a slow drift toward becoming strangers; they have no emotional involvement and make no effort to change that. “Our interests are different. It’s just something I haven’t given too much thought to,” said one subject. “I would never in the world ask him for help and can’t envision that he would come to me.”

Documentary filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns are famously part of this group—though in some cases their relationship seems to be even chillier than mere indifference. In a 1999 interview with the New York Times, Ric compared his relationship with his brother to the “benign indifference” New Yorkers often seem to exhibit for one another. “That’s the way Ken and I are now,” he said. “It’s kind of good to be left alone to do what you each do. Like New Yorkers say: ‘Don’t be my friend. Leave me alone. Do whatever it is you want to do. Other than that, get out of my face.’”

When you’re famous, however—particularly when you’re famous in the same field—the public keeps trying to push you back together, if only to watch the sparks fly. New York magazine’s story on power siblings was published just three years after the New York Times piece on the Burns boys, and by then the brothers seemed to have grown even more hostile. “Ken likes to say I’m more intellectual than he is, which is a subtle put-down on his part,” Ric told the magazine, exhibiting a family member’s characteristic ability to see passive-aggression—rightly or wrongly—in what outsiders might see as a compliment. “Just when I think he’s irretrievably a horrifying son of a bitch, he’ll do some act of amazing generosity. He said to me a year ago, ‘Why don’t we just not bug each other anymore. There’s room enough in the world—there’s room enough in this family—for two documentary filmmakers.’”

When saying “Why don’t we just not bug each other anymore” qualifies as an act of amazing generosity, you know a relationship is in trouble. Ken, for his part, gave as good as he got—but far more subtly. Commenting on Ric’s filmmaking career—which includes 1999’s spectacular New York: A Documentary Film—he said, “Of all the imitators of my style, no one has done it better than Ric.” That had to hurt, and while Ken also took care to insist that, next to his two children, nothing means more to him than the love of his brother, he has an awfully ambiguous way of expressing that love in print.

The Burnses may never descend to the lowest of Gold’s five categories of sibling attachment—the hostile category—but they don’t seem to be all that far away. In some ways, hostile sibs are, paradoxically, more emotionally invested in each other than apathetic sibs are. The passion of the intimate sibs has been turned completely on its head and become a passionate enmity; contact is virtually nonexistent, and that void is filled by a powerful loathing. “I feel this contempt and this dislike and this anger very strongly,” said a study subject. “I wouldn’t go to his funeral and I’d rather starve than ask him for help.”

Like so many other things in the field of psychology, the distribution of relationships along this spectrum follows a bell curve. In Gold’s sample, 17 percent of siblings fell into the intimate category, 28 percent were congenial, 35 percent were loyal, 10 percent were apathetic, and 10 percent were hostile. Gold herself concedes that her findings need to be interpreted cautiously, in part because her sample group was relatively small, and in part because human subjects are notoriously poor at accurately describing their feelings about such intimate matters. A recent fight may have darkened a sib’s mood temporarily, causing the relationship to be downgraded when the survey was taken. A surprise birthday card may have fleetingly boosted the rating. Even the most hostile siblings may sometimes merely be passing through a stage—a moratorium driven not by lives that have taken different developmental directions but by a fight or a slight that, for a time at least, seems irreconcilable.

Steve did not speak to Bruce or me for the better part of a year once after a trip we all made to Baltimore as adults for our grandfather’s ninetieth birthday. Like all of our family gatherings in the hometown of origin, this one could not help but stir up childhood memories—memories that in Steve’s case included leaving a Baltimore home for a boarding school banishment that left him feeling tossed aside and often unloved. He came to town that weekend, bringing with him a favorite movie that he’d hoped would be the occasion for a family night around the TV. When Bruce and I said that it was not a movie that interested us and that we’d just as soon not watch it, Steve stalked out, left town, and declared that he was through with us.

It was the tiniest of sparks, perhaps, and his reaction was surely far larger than what was warranted for the offense we’d committed, but that offense ignited an explosive drum of emotion for him all the same. He did write us off for a period of months, and while I’ve never asked him how he spent that time, I imagine he used a bit of it to tease apart the hurts he experienced as a child from the ones he would unavoidably feel as an adult, and in doing that was able to forgive us. I, similarly, began to appreciate better how different his upbringing had been from mine and to remember that he bore a different set of scars as a result—ones that I would do well to keep in mind.

The fact that we did back away from that abyss was by no means a guaranteed thing. In childhood, your siblings may be an obligatory part of your life—“relationships you can’t get a divorce from,” as Conger puts it. But in adulthood, this dynamic is reversed. Indeed, in some ways, siblings become the most optional of your close kin. Grown children who have poor relationships with their parents still tend to feel an obligation to them, especially as the parents age. Unhappy spouses may eventually divorce, but they will often spend years trying to resolve their differences first, if only to spare their children the trauma of a broken home. And it’s the rarest of parents who ever cuts off all ties with a child, no matter how fraught the relationship may be. Siblings, however, are done with the most intimately entwined phase of their relationship when childhood ends, and have more freedom to stand back and reevaluate things when they’re grown. If they don’t like what they see, they can act on that antipathy. “Adult siblings are less likely to put up with a bad relationship over time,” says Bedford simply. “They realize life is short.” The sibs in Gold’s apathetic and hostile categories clearly made their choices with that idea in mind.

Just which sib relationships will wind up on the ash heap and which will be saved and even improved depends on a lot of variables. One of them is simply the curative presence of sisters. In most mixed-sex sibling broods, the default position is for sisters to be the kin keepers—the ones who maintain the family photo albums, remember all the birthdays, and see to it that scattered clans get called back together at holiday time. Females are also likelier to be the family biographers, knowing whose second cousin is related to whose great aunt—and, for that matter, what a second cousin and a great aunt are in the first place. This is especially so when a sister is either the oldest or the youngest, and thus more invested in the family unit than middle-borns, who may grow up feeling less central to the overall dynamic of the clan.

Sisters, similarly, may serve as sibling peacemakers. The image of males as closemouthed and averse to sharing their feelings has much more than a grain of truth to it—at least in comparison to females. This makes estranged brothers more likely to remain that way than estranged sisters, with each passing year of silence or indifference further hardening the hostility.

Sisters, by contrast, are likelier to try to work things out with a sib when they themselves are part of the estranged pair, and likelier as well to try a little shuttle diplomacy between two brothers who aren’t communicating. That idea has seeped into the popular culture. It’s not for nothing that one of the most poignant scenes in the epic Godfather films occurs when the Corleone sister, Connie, begs younger brother Michael to forgive older brother Fredo for betraying the family. “He’s so helpless without you,” she pleads. Michael seems to relent, taking Fredo in a fierce and fraternal embrace at their mother’s funeral. The fact that Michael nonetheless has Fredo killed at the end of the movie admittedly diminishes the authenticity of the reconciliation, but it makes Connie’s efforts no less worthy—and no less typical of the power of a peacemaking sister.

The common phenomenon of sibling rivalry may also play a role in shaping the relationships of adult siblings, particularly adult brothers, and here the problem can sometimes be intractable. Deborah Gold has studied the way the primal competition that defines childhood—which brother makes the soccer team or gets the better grades or merely winds up taller—can continue into adulthood, with the metrics now changing to who has the better job or the bigger income or even the sexier wife.

“Almost from day one, the fundamental developmental markers—who gets a tooth first, who crawls, walks, and speaks first—are held up on a larger-than-life scale,” said Gold in an article in Psychology Today. The rivalry may have its earliest roots in the struggle for Mom’s and Dad’s approval, but it goes on well past the point that Mom and Dad are paying attention—or in some cases are even alive anymore.

What makes things especially difficult in cases of adult brother-brother competition is that while the world at large does not give a hoot about the kinds of things that were the source of competition when the sibs were children, it renders judgments in very real ways about adult achievements. Famous brothers must often tread very carefully around their unfamous ones; rich brothers may be deeply resented by their middle-class ones. “In our society, men are supposed to be achievement oriented, aggressive,” Gold explained. “They’re supposed to succeed.” That race for that success may be one reason that, in a 1990s study of 7,700 adult sibs, the brother-brother pairs had less regular contact than brother-sister or, especially, sister-sister.

Brothers are hardly hopeless, of course, and most do have the ability to mend the cracks in their relationship and even avoid them in the first place. In the 2006 book Men in Relationships, Victoria Bedford and psychologist Paula Avioli of Kean University wrote about a twenty-year, longitudinal study of brothers from three wartime eras: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the sibling styles varied widely across those very different periods, even if just thirty-five years spanned all three. Not surprisingly, either, it was the Vietnam cohort—the baby boomers, who came of age in an era of feminism and increased emotional openness—who tended to have the most complex and candid relationships with their brothers. As a result, those relationships were also likelier to be more durable and to recover better when there’d been a breach. The brothers of that era were “more likely to be understanding of differences,” wrote Bedford and Avioli, “and at ease in the realm of emotional support, whether as receiver or provider.”

That did not mean that the brothers from the World War II and Korean War eras were not, in their own more circumscribed ways, deeply committed to their bonds with their brothers. Indeed, the nature of the survey proved that they were. “The fact that these men remained in the study for twenty years to document the meaning of brothers to them is testimony of the importance of the relationship,” said the authors.

No matter the gender, era, or temperaments of any adult sibling group, nothing will test their relationships quite as much as the challenge of tending to aging parents. Just as no two siblings got the same level of attention, validation, and love from Mom and Dad when they were children, so do no two give back to them in precisely the same way when the caretaking roles switch.

Who should take the lead in looking after elderly parents can be a source of constant conflict, but certain patterns do emerge. Simple proximity can often be where the discussions begin and end. An adult child who lives five minutes away from the parents’ home in Philadelphia is a lot likelier to be checking on them regularly than one who lives in San Diego—or even in New Jersey, for that matter. Gender, again, is critical, too. All other things being equal, the kin-keeping tendencies of a sister will emerge at this stage of a family’s life as well, and when that happens, brothers are typically content to let the women take the lead. Birth order is another big player, with firstborns the likeliest to do the heavy lifting in caring for parents, last-borns the next likeliest, and middle children doing the least work. For the middling who always felt overlooked in childhood, there can be something of a flip-off quality to this, a conscious or unconscious way of punishing parents for perceived inattentiveness. For other middle kids, it may simply be a matter of habit. When your family of origin was always less central to your emotional life than it was to that of your older and younger siblings, you’re accustomed to letting those brothers and sisters take charge. In general, says Catherine Salmon, “first- and last-born children are more likely to report being very close to parents and having more contact with them.”

The fact that brothers and sisters often enter their parents’ declining years knowing in advance—if only in an unspoken way—which one of them will be doing most of the elder care can help keep arguments to a minimum, since there are less likely to be any surprises. It’s a lot harder to avoid problems when it comes to the much more complicated matter of dividing the shared inheritance.

Parents with an even modest estate to divide among their children may well think that the best approach is the one they used when the kids were small and the bounty being apportioned was cake or Halloween candy or a bucket of crayons: Everyone gets the same amount, and that means no one complains. Those same parents, however, might also consider this: How well did that strategy actually work back then? It’s not just the number of crayons you get, after all—it’s who got the blue one or who got the red one. It’s not just the size of the piece of cake—it’s whose has the little frosting flower. If moms and dads were struck by the ability of their children to find injustice in even the most equitable arrangements, should they really be surprised when those same kids are adults and the stakes being divided are real estate, cash, or a family business? And in fairness to the sibs, there can be merit in the grievances.

Should the oldest daughter who’s done the overwhelming share of the caretaking work really get no more of a bequest than the middle son who moved away twenty-five years ago and has come home just once a year for the holidays? Shouldn’t the loyal son who followed the family tradition and became the third in a generational line of lawyers or doctors or carpenters be rewarded more generously than the one who defied Dad’s wishes and became an artist or a real estate speculator? And what happens when one child has gotten independently wealthy and another barely scrapes by? Surely no one would argue with giving more money to the child who needs it most, right? Wrong. That child, Bedford warns, may be seen as being “rewarded for failure,” while the success of the other sib is essentially being penalized. The unfortunate solution to these problems is that there often is no solution at all. Equal division of the estate will anger some sibs; unequal division will anger others.

My brothers’ and my emerging relationship with our half brother and half sister nearly came to grief just a few years after we reconnected, as a result of our own inheritance issues. One summer, our father and paternal grandmother died within a month of each other. She was ninety and had lived long, if not always well. He was just sixty-seven and died frail and gaunt, his body and mind laid waste by emphysema, the result of a lifetime of heavy smoking. Both of them died with considerable wealth inherited from my paternal grandfather, and while my father did leave my brothers and me a small, almost token bequest, nearly all of his wealth flowed to his widow. Upon his death, nearly all of our grandmother’s did as well.

This, of course, meant that that entire inheritance would eventually flow from my father’s widow to her children. And that, in turn, meant that Steve, Garry, Bruce, and I, who were effectively divorced by our father when his marriage to our mother broke up, would be effectively disinherited by him, too. Our father’s justification, which we were told he had expressed to his lawyer and his wife (though he did not state it explicitly in his will), was that our mother had inherited a comfortable trust fund of her own from her father and that that would eventually come to us. It was a fair enough argument, and the small amount of money he did leave us was better than nothing at all. But reason was not at work here—and nor was simple greed. Deeper feelings of resentment and betrayal were, and we expressed our pique by refusing to sign a stack of required estate papers, which froze any transfer of assets until we complied.

Adam and Allison, concerned about ensuring an income for their mother, were as unhappy with us as we were with the will. The stalemate stood for a few weeks, until our uncle Richard brokered a peace, carving out an additional bequest—also a comparatively modest one—from his own inheritance for the four of us. It was a generous act and it worked as he’d hoped. We relented and signed the estate documents, and all six sibs pressed on together—and actually got past the nastiness quickly. It helped, I think, that Adam and Allison were empathic enough to understand our feelings—and that Steve, Garry, Bruce, and I were self-aware enough to be a little embarrassed at having behaved so churlishly.

For us, it was the passage of even a short stretch of time, and the easing of bruised feelings that came with it, that was the most powerful palliative. For all sibs—no matter the quality of the relationship or the cause of a rift—the inexorable advance of the calendar can work a similar curative magic. This is especially so among aging and elderly brothers and sisters. If young adulthood is defined by a scattering of the siblings, late adulthood is defined by an opposite phenomenon—a gravitational gathering as dispersed broods are drawn back together. For many aging brothers and sisters, reconnecting with siblings in this way can literally be a lifesaving choice.

There are few things that enhance longevity more as we age than sharing our lives—and even our homes—with somebody else, particularly when that somebody knows us deeply and well. This is more important than ever in an era in which life expectancy continues to rise and growing numbers of seniors are living into their eighties and beyond. The United States is already home to up to 95,000 people who are at least 100 years old—and that population cohort is expected to explode to 800,000 by 2050. The older people get, the likelier they are to outlive a spouse—leaving them alone at just the point in their lives when they’re least equipped to get by without companionship. That’s when aged siblings can step in to help—and that’s what more and more are now doing, the scientists and demographers say.

Many siblings at this stage of life choose to live together, or at least within arm’s reach—either sharing a home or living as neighbors, or sometimes moving into the same retirement community or assistedliving facility. But even siblings who aren’t widowed and may not live near their brothers and sisters get a similar benefit from simply reconnecting with one another or, if they’re already connected, integrating more fully into one another’s lives.

It’s also a very natural source. There’s a reason older people reminisce together so much, and it’s not just because fading short-term memory makes recollections from long ago the only reliable ones. Rather, it’s because there’s a familiarity and intimacy to shared experiences. They’re the comfort food of memories, but unlike real comfort food, they’re nutritious in a very real way. It’s precisely that sense of having an emotional home that helps work the life-extending magic demographers so often observe, and it’s precisely the lack of that groundedness that can make years shorter—or at least poorer.

Staying close to stay alive seems like a coolly pragmatic transaction, but it’s one in which the benefits manifestly flow to all the parties involved. What’s more, there’s nothing cool or detached about it. Latelife sibling bonds have roots that may reach back a century, spanning a stretch of shared time that’s longer than the lives of some nations. Every moment lived in that joint history is in some way active in the aged sibs’ current lives—in a way that is very real and very deeply felt. “When asked what contributes to the importance of the sibling relationship most,” says Dunn, “elderly brothers and sisters will say it’s the shared early experiences, which cast a long shadow for all of us.”