November 10, 2010 • 20 mins
Multiple studies indicate that people with sisters seem to be happier than people with brothers -- but what does this mean, and could it be true? Join Molly and Cristen as they explore the relationship between your siblings' gender and your happiness.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step Mom Never told you?
From House stepworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. We have discussed
(00:21):
siblings before. We did a very big podcast on birth order.
We've heard from lots of our listeners about whether they
think birth order makes me difference, no difference. It got
a lot of It got a lot of response. Right
because I think we should remind listeners that you are
the oldest sibling in your family, and I am the
(00:41):
youngest sibling in my family, and we're also different in
another way. Kristin, that's going to be the topic of
today's conversation. I am the oldest of three, but I
have but my younger siblings are both brothers. I have
two younger brothers, no sisters. Whereas you've got you've got
like a mixed bag over there, We've got quite a
brat pack. Yes, I am the youngest of five counting folks,
(01:06):
uh in five with two brothers and two sisters. And
this is really gonna provide a lot of insight, I
think because today's topic is does a sister make you happier?
And we didn't pull this topic out of thin air.
There are a ton of new studies and headlines coming
out left and right about how sisters are the bomb
(01:29):
dot com to throw out a golden noldie, that it
is a golden MOLDI that time flood, that h study
after study is showing that people with sisters are happier
than those with brothers, not necessarily than those have only children.
All comes out in the wash somehow. So we're going
to kind of dive into this research and see what
we can find out about the makeup, the gender makeup
(01:52):
of your family. Yes, because when it comes to research
on siblings, it really didn't come around until started to
get much notoriety until the early two thousands. Before then,
there have been realms of research and studies on parents
and how parents affect their children. But when it came
(02:13):
to siblings, it's kind of a newer research focus. And
now that there have been more studies done on siblings,
all of these sort of sister specific benefits are coming out.
Because we should throw out a couple of statistics. Around
eight percent of Americans have at least one sibling, and
I know that. In our Birth Order podcast afterwards, we
(02:34):
got a lot of emails from listeners who are only children,
and we don't want only children to feel left out
in this conversation, so we will. We do have some
some points to make about you folks as well. But um,
by and large, most folks have a sibling, and like
it or not, your siblings have a pretty huge effect
on you, and in some ways larger than your parents,
(02:56):
right because you spend more time with your siblings and
you spend with anytime anyone else. Um, they've done, you know,
says where they follow the kids around and they realized
that by and large, siblings are your main companions, and
they're also the ones who are going to be there
throughout your entire life pretty much. You know, parents at
some point die and you meet a spouse midway through
your life. Let's say that sibling is the one who
(03:18):
saw you maybe from the time you were born to
the very end. Now we should say before we get
into sisters, that sibling research indicates that by and large,
especially having a positive relationship with a sibling, whether it's
a brother or a sister, no surprise here, has a
positive impact on you. For instance, UM, there was a
(03:39):
survey of men that kind of tracked them throughout their
lives and basically the ones who were doing the best
at age sixty five had a close relationship with a
brother or a sister. And then in another survey from
Duke University, they looked at sibling relationships of a group
of people over sixty five, and the majority felt strong
(04:01):
ties towards their siblings and would be expected to either
um provide support and difficult times for their siblings or
vice versa, call their siblings when times were tough for them.
So even later in life, we have these strong sibling relationships.
But then when you start to break down between brothers
and sisters and how we affect each other differently, there
(04:21):
are some variations. That's right. Let's jump to a study
from Brigham Young University. It's the newest one that's come
out and one that's with one that's getting a lot
of press coverage right now, and it's all about how
UM adolescents who have a sister. So this is a
much different time period than the people who are over
sixty five. Those other studies you were citing. These are
(04:42):
specifically ten year olds to fourteen year olds they were
looking up. They are less likely to report such feelings
as I am unhappy, sad or depressed, and I feel
like no one loves me. So they're really showing that
these sisters do something to the self esteem of these
ten to fourteen year old regardless of their gender. They
can meet boys or girls, but having that sister is
(05:03):
the key factor. And there have been similar studies that
were done before this that found UH positive impacts specifically
from sisters. For instance, there was a study I think
from the late nineties by a guy named Robert Kraisner
who he was actually going back and re analyzing a
survey on sibling impact and he felt or he found,
(05:26):
I should say, no effect in how UM siblings, sex composition,
whether or not you have brothers and sisters or just
sisters and sisters, brothers and brothers. He found no impact
on educational attainment except among black adults. And he found
that UM brothers who grew up with a sister or
had relatively more sisters had greater levels of educational attainment
(05:48):
than people with no or fewer sisters. So basically UM
for these black families, the more the more sisters that
the guys had the better off they were in the school,
which is kind of interesting and throughout one more a
British study it was presented at the British Psychological Society
last year. It found that growing up with the sister
makes people more optimistic, more ambitious, and better balanced. And uh,
(06:11):
siblings of either sex that a sister would score higher
on tests that evaluated mental health. So there's something about
having a sister that makes you more flexible, more able
to deal with things. And so if you see these
trends start to emerge, you've got to ask why, Yeah,
why is it specifically sisters that are so so wonderful?
(06:32):
And uh, it's kind of it's kind of frustrating because
at this point the researchers kind of fall back on
some old gender stereotypes about how girls are a little
more touchy feeling, more likely to talk for hours and
hours and make you feel connected to a family. And Uh,
at first I was a little frustrated by that because
I feel like I can talk for hours and hours
with my brothers and it's not me being touchy feeling,
(06:53):
it's not them being you know, touchy feel It just
there's something about this level of conversation that I don't
think church have quite figured out why it's why it's
so important or why it's so different than having brothers. Well,
the main reason we wanted to talk about this sister
research today was because of an essay in the New
York Times that was published a couple of days ago
(07:16):
where the researcher was talking about the findings from that
two thousand ten study that said that, you know that
the ten of fourteen year olds with sisters seemed to
be more optimistic and more ambitious and all of that,
and she was kind of calling out in the same
way this sort of knee jerk response said, oh, naturally,
sisters have a positive influence because you know, we're more
emotional and more well, we'll communicate more and have these
(07:39):
all these heart to hearts that make you feel so great.
And she kind of took issue with that because she
has actually gone in and talked to sisters and sibling pairs,
and her theory is that it's not so much the
content of what women are talking about, but rather how
often they are. It's it's not so much quality but quantity, right,
(08:00):
Because she's saying that, even uh, these brothers who are
touching base with each other, just don't don't talk with
the same frequency that the women talk. And it's not
that their conversations are any better worse in terms of
the content, like you were saying, Christen, it's just that
frequency of content. It seems that the sisters are better
at picking up the phone or going into the brother's
(08:20):
room or whatever they have to do to talk to
the other people in their family. And also, I mean,
I should notice someone who grew up with two sisters.
Granted I'm coming at this from from the younger, and
it's not all touchy feely conversations that you have with
your sisters. I mean, there was my sister who was
(08:41):
closest in age to me. We are extremely close now,
but there were certainly times when we wanted to ring
each other's throats. Well, a researcher would say that's pretty
important at the time article that we got a lot
of our statistics from UH in terms of how many
people in the United States have siblings, and that UH
it played out that a lot of researchers now think
(09:03):
we're learning our conflict resolution skills and our you know,
interpersonal relationship skills from our siblings. That it's not uncommon
for young kids to have as many as you know,
ten conflicts in an hour. We're having one like every
six minutes, and those aren't necessarily bad if the parents
can use it as a teaching moment to help the
(09:24):
help the child deal with the other child. So these
researchers would say, you were supposed to feel that conflict
with your sister so that you could learn how to
you know, deal with me, or something like that. Well,
it's interesting coming at this from an adult perspective as
well and thinking about the interactions that I've had with
with my brothers and with my sisters, because one thing
(09:46):
that comes up a lot in all the sibling research
is how much we tend to mirror our siblings and
also how much we tend to sort of disassociate ourselves
with our siblings in a process that is termed de identification.
Because on one hand, um, you have all of these
findings talking about all these positive benefits. Um, there was
one finding saying that that brothers have a positive impact
(10:09):
on the number of good deeds that kids will have
that's actually stronger than a parent's influence on kids. But
at the same time, there have been surveys finding, for
instance that uh, younger sisters who have an older sister
who's pregnant or four to six times more likely to
also become pregnant at some point. But then you also
have surveys to saying that um, in a d identification
(10:31):
kind of way, the younger siblings who have say, older
siblings who are who have a drug problem or drinking
problem tend to follow the straight and narrow a little
bit more. Well, I think it's it's a nice way
for researchers to kind of cover their behind because you know,
either yes, the sibling is modeling after the older one
or they're de identifying from the other. But they're basically
(10:51):
two paths that uh, they're saying, these siblings can choose,
but the extent to which we do that can have
really interesting, uh impacts on our friendships, on the spouses
we choose things like that. So they are still trying
to sess out how the gender of your sibling either
causes you to de identify from that sibling or causes
(11:12):
you to model yourself more like there's this one interesting
study about friendship and they're like, they took these two,
you know, two siblings once a boy and once a girl,
And they asked each of them to pick a friend.
And they asked the brother and sister to kind of
identify how often they had the touchy feeling conversations with
their pals, how often they had more just you know,
(11:34):
shared interests than you know, they're just playing a football
game together, and how often they took the lead and
planning activities. And then they asked the friend, uh, you know,
sort of why they're friends with the sibling. What they
found was that, um, when the when there was a
brother who had an older sister, that brother was more
likely to seek out the most masculine friends you could
(11:55):
find the shared interests ones, no touchy feely conversations at all.
And what girl also had brothers tended to do in
their friendships was to emulate those elements of control and
masculine aggression that they've seen their brothers do. But the
brothers never seemed to learn that touchy feely aspect of
uh have been a personal relationships. Well, I guess that
(12:15):
I could relate as a as a younger sibling. I
guess that I could relate to picking up those sort
of tactics from uh my, my older brother brothers, but
as the older sister to two younger brothers, I mean,
how how do you think that those findings about the
brothers looking for the more masculine friends might might come about?
(12:36):
You know, I can't. I can't think of a specific example.
I was more struck by places where the research made
it look bad for me because I guess I'm looking
out for number one. So let's jump to another study
really quick that found that if parents break up, the
families that have sisters do better. But um, only children
(12:58):
do better than uh than a than a sister who
only has brothers. So if my parents had gotten divorced,
which they didn't, then I would have been, you know,
in turmoil because I wouldn't have had the touchy feel
a sister to talk to you, whereas my brothers would
have had me to do all the work. It would
have been really hard for me. And that's where that's
why we wanted to make that point earlier about only children,
(13:20):
because yes, they they are left out of a lot
of this kind of research, but when they're included, they
do sort of fall into a middle ground because studies
show that while no, they don't have siblings to build
all of these kind of conflict ritten and yet healthy
relationships with with brothers and sisters. But they go, they
make a stronger effort to build up the friendships, to
(13:43):
build up the social support. So in a way they
are in an at an advantage if say, like you said,
if parents get divorced, or if say you lose a
sibling as you age, I mean, only children a little
bit more prepared maybe for for adulthood in that way,
which I think you know is kind of the less
one we can start to take from some of the
sibling research is it's just the places you have to
(14:04):
work a little bit harder to get the same benefits
as others. Like the way I read some of these studies,
um not having a sister, of all the benefits of
a sister, it seems like what I have to do
is just work harder to reach out to female friends
who can take on that that role, or work harder
to be the one who reaches out to my brothers,
whereas brothers could could read these um studies and maybe
(14:26):
think I need I need to be the one who
reaches out more to my family members. Remember it's quantity,
not quality, Like you don't have to have anything to
say is what's kind of the weird thing and the
challenging thing to to take away with with all of
these varied research findings, because they are kind of all
over the place when you start to list them all out,
is the fact that, yes, birth order makes a big difference.
(14:49):
I think that I I learned from my siblings in
a different as the youngest, in a different way that
you maybe learned from your siblings as the oldest. And
also every family is different. Also, every child's experience within
a family is its own sort of micro environment, depending
on the type of favoritism that parents might display, the
type of conflict that parents might also display in front
(15:11):
of kids, how they work on conflict resolution between children.
I mean, there are so many factors that can influence
your relationship with your siblings. Yeah, and that's we talked
about that in the Birth Order podcast because you know,
people will hear this and everyone will think they're the exception.
You know. I was reading about how sisters make people happier.
I was like, ah, I got brothers. They make me
(15:31):
plenty happy. This is bunk. And I think that realizing
that all of these studies have to have an asters
by them, right, I mean you can't. I just don't
think you boil down family dynamics to all these studies.
But again, I think trying to just sess out what
sisters can do in a family, what they might do naturally,
um can be kind of kind of cool to to
(15:52):
take as a lesson, sure, because that is one theme.
There have now been enough studies finding these positive benefits
of sisters, whether it's you know, emotional support or just
someone to talk to or whatever, even someone to fight
with and practice all of that conflict resolution. Sisters do
play a very special role in families. Not to say,
(16:13):
I would hate for my brothers to listen to this
and think that I am in any way to seeing
their influence on me, because you know, I think that
I you know, they provided plenty of unique benefits for
me as well in terms of socialization, conflict resolution and
all of that. But I'm pretty proud to learn that
sisters kind of where it's at. Well, I guess, you know,
(16:35):
maybe I'm providing a valuable service for my brother. And
I never wanted a sister growing up to be perfectly
honest because some of the stereotypes about them or that
they're so Cattie and Jealous stealing your clothes? How many
sitcoms did I watch where the sister stole the other
sister's clothes that I can tell you that absolutely happened,
and so I wanted no part of that. Yeah. Well,
(16:56):
I think we've said all that we can say about sisters.
I think it's time to turn it over to our
wonderful listeners and see what they think sisters positive, negative.
I mean, I'm sure that the responses are going to
be all over the place, so I can't wait to
see what folks out there think from their own experience.
And also, only children chime in. I mean, are you
(17:16):
glad that you kind of missed out on the whole
sibling dynamic? Was it nice to have just all that
attention paid to number one? There are times when I
kind of wish that I had been the only child.
So let us know what you think. You can send
us an email at mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, and also you can share it on our
Facebook page. But in the meantime, let's read a couple
(17:37):
of emails. I have one here from Brittany and it's
about the adult Acne podcast. She writes as someone who
has always suffered from severe acne that got worse in
my early twenties. It was refreshing to hear you, guys
to spell rumors about acnees, such as chocolate and bad
hygiene being causes forsits. As a side note, I tried
everything to get rid of my acne and nothing worked
(17:58):
until I tried accutane. It's been a year since I
finished the medicine and my skin is still act me free.
It's important for anyone with this prompt to consult a
dermatologist because I can tell you from experience that over
the counter solutions don't help, but it's nothing to be
ashamed of and can be easily controlled with the doctor's help.
It would be great if you could share this information
with your listeners. So thank you, Brittany. And you are
not the only one who had success with accutament. Heard
(18:20):
from a few listeners who had good luck with that one,
So there you go. Well, I've got an email here
from Sam and she was writing in response to our
podcast on motorcycles and she just got her motorcycle license
in March of this year. And she actually got her
motorcycle license before she got a driver's license. And she
(18:41):
writes as a new writer, I strongly encourage anyone male
or female to go take a rider's safety course before
going out on your brand new bike. In Canada, where
I'm from, these courses are usually offered through your province's
Ministry of Transportation. I would also recommend that new riders
start on smaller bikes. The upside is a small except
two or three years old have a high resale value
(19:02):
because they're always new writers sleeping for that first bike.
As it stands now, my bike is bigger and faster
than my boyfriends because he only has a small scooter
until he can save up for a bigger bike. And
I try not to rub it in too often. So
thanks for writing in, Sam and again, our email address
is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Also,
we'd love to see you over on Facebook and follow
(19:25):
us on Twitter where we are mom Stuff Podcast. And
then at last you can check out what we're doing
during the week. It's on our blogs stuff Mom Never
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(19:45):
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m HM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
(20:05):
twelve Camray. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step Mom Never told you?
From House stepworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. We have discussed
(00:21):
siblings before. We did a very big podcast on birth order.
We've heard from lots of our listeners about whether they
think birth order makes me difference, no difference. It got
a lot of It got a lot of response. Right
because I think we should remind listeners that you are
the oldest sibling in your family, and I am the
(00:41):
youngest sibling in my family, and we're also different in
another way. Kristin, that's going to be the topic of
today's conversation. I am the oldest of three, but I
have but my younger siblings are both brothers. I have
two younger brothers, no sisters. Whereas you've got you've got
like a mixed bag over there, We've got quite a
brat pack. Yes, I am the youngest of five counting folks,
(01:06):
uh in five with two brothers and two sisters. And
this is really gonna provide a lot of insight, I
think because today's topic is does a sister make you happier?
And we didn't pull this topic out of thin air.
There are a ton of new studies and headlines coming
out left and right about how sisters are the bomb
(01:29):
dot com to throw out a golden noldie, that it
is a golden MOLDI that time flood, that h study
after study is showing that people with sisters are happier
than those with brothers, not necessarily than those have only children.
All comes out in the wash somehow. So we're going
to kind of dive into this research and see what
we can find out about the makeup, the gender makeup
(01:52):
of your family. Yes, because when it comes to research
on siblings, it really didn't come around until started to
get much notoriety until the early two thousands. Before then,
there have been realms of research and studies on parents
and how parents affect their children. But when it came
(02:13):
to siblings, it's kind of a newer research focus. And
now that there have been more studies done on siblings,
all of these sort of sister specific benefits are coming out.
Because we should throw out a couple of statistics. Around
eight percent of Americans have at least one sibling, and
I know that. In our Birth Order podcast afterwards, we
(02:34):
got a lot of emails from listeners who are only children,
and we don't want only children to feel left out
in this conversation, so we will. We do have some
some points to make about you folks as well. But um,
by and large, most folks have a sibling, and like
it or not, your siblings have a pretty huge effect
on you, and in some ways larger than your parents,
(02:56):
right because you spend more time with your siblings and
you spend with anytime anyone else. Um, they've done, you know,
says where they follow the kids around and they realized
that by and large, siblings are your main companions, and
they're also the ones who are going to be there
throughout your entire life pretty much. You know, parents at
some point die and you meet a spouse midway through
your life. Let's say that sibling is the one who
(03:18):
saw you maybe from the time you were born to
the very end. Now we should say before we get
into sisters, that sibling research indicates that by and large,
especially having a positive relationship with a sibling, whether it's
a brother or a sister, no surprise here, has a
positive impact on you. For instance, UM, there was a
(03:39):
survey of men that kind of tracked them throughout their
lives and basically the ones who were doing the best
at age sixty five had a close relationship with a
brother or a sister. And then in another survey from
Duke University, they looked at sibling relationships of a group
of people over sixty five, and the majority felt strong
(04:01):
ties towards their siblings and would be expected to either
um provide support and difficult times for their siblings or
vice versa, call their siblings when times were tough for them.
So even later in life, we have these strong sibling relationships.
But then when you start to break down between brothers
and sisters and how we affect each other differently, there
(04:21):
are some variations. That's right. Let's jump to a study
from Brigham Young University. It's the newest one that's come
out and one that's with one that's getting a lot
of press coverage right now, and it's all about how
UM adolescents who have a sister. So this is a
much different time period than the people who are over
sixty five. Those other studies you were citing. These are
(04:42):
specifically ten year olds to fourteen year olds they were
looking up. They are less likely to report such feelings
as I am unhappy, sad or depressed, and I feel
like no one loves me. So they're really showing that
these sisters do something to the self esteem of these
ten to fourteen year old regardless of their gender. They
can meet boys or girls, but having that sister is
(05:03):
the key factor. And there have been similar studies that
were done before this that found UH positive impacts specifically
from sisters. For instance, there was a study I think
from the late nineties by a guy named Robert Kraisner
who he was actually going back and re analyzing a
survey on sibling impact and he felt or he found,
(05:26):
I should say, no effect in how UM siblings, sex composition,
whether or not you have brothers and sisters or just
sisters and sisters, brothers and brothers. He found no impact
on educational attainment except among black adults. And he found
that UM brothers who grew up with a sister or
had relatively more sisters had greater levels of educational attainment
(05:48):
than people with no or fewer sisters. So basically UM
for these black families, the more the more sisters that
the guys had the better off they were in the school,
which is kind of interesting and throughout one more a
British study it was presented at the British Psychological Society
last year. It found that growing up with the sister
makes people more optimistic, more ambitious, and better balanced. And uh,
(06:11):
siblings of either sex that a sister would score higher
on tests that evaluated mental health. So there's something about
having a sister that makes you more flexible, more able
to deal with things. And so if you see these
trends start to emerge, you've got to ask why, Yeah,
why is it specifically sisters that are so so wonderful?
(06:32):
And uh, it's kind of it's kind of frustrating because
at this point the researchers kind of fall back on
some old gender stereotypes about how girls are a little
more touchy feeling, more likely to talk for hours and
hours and make you feel connected to a family. And Uh,
at first I was a little frustrated by that because
I feel like I can talk for hours and hours
with my brothers and it's not me being touchy feeling,
(06:53):
it's not them being you know, touchy feel It just
there's something about this level of conversation that I don't
think church have quite figured out why it's why it's
so important or why it's so different than having brothers. Well,
the main reason we wanted to talk about this sister
research today was because of an essay in the New
York Times that was published a couple of days ago
(07:16):
where the researcher was talking about the findings from that
two thousand ten study that said that, you know that
the ten of fourteen year olds with sisters seemed to
be more optimistic and more ambitious and all of that,
and she was kind of calling out in the same
way this sort of knee jerk response said, oh, naturally,
sisters have a positive influence because you know, we're more
emotional and more well, we'll communicate more and have these
(07:39):
all these heart to hearts that make you feel so great.
And she kind of took issue with that because she
has actually gone in and talked to sisters and sibling pairs,
and her theory is that it's not so much the
content of what women are talking about, but rather how
often they are. It's it's not so much quality but quantity, right,
(08:00):
Because she's saying that, even uh, these brothers who are
touching base with each other, just don't don't talk with
the same frequency that the women talk. And it's not
that their conversations are any better worse in terms of
the content, like you were saying, Christen, it's just that
frequency of content. It seems that the sisters are better
at picking up the phone or going into the brother's
(08:20):
room or whatever they have to do to talk to
the other people in their family. And also, I mean,
I should notice someone who grew up with two sisters.
Granted I'm coming at this from from the younger, and
it's not all touchy feely conversations that you have with
your sisters. I mean, there was my sister who was
(08:41):
closest in age to me. We are extremely close now,
but there were certainly times when we wanted to ring
each other's throats. Well, a researcher would say that's pretty
important at the time article that we got a lot
of our statistics from UH in terms of how many
people in the United States have siblings, and that UH
it played out that a lot of researchers now think
(09:03):
we're learning our conflict resolution skills and our you know,
interpersonal relationship skills from our siblings. That it's not uncommon
for young kids to have as many as you know,
ten conflicts in an hour. We're having one like every
six minutes, and those aren't necessarily bad if the parents
can use it as a teaching moment to help the
(09:24):
help the child deal with the other child. So these
researchers would say, you were supposed to feel that conflict
with your sister so that you could learn how to
you know, deal with me, or something like that. Well,
it's interesting coming at this from an adult perspective as
well and thinking about the interactions that I've had with
with my brothers and with my sisters, because one thing
(09:46):
that comes up a lot in all the sibling research
is how much we tend to mirror our siblings and
also how much we tend to sort of disassociate ourselves
with our siblings in a process that is termed de identification.
Because on one hand, um, you have all of these
findings talking about all these positive benefits. Um, there was
one finding saying that that brothers have a positive impact
(10:09):
on the number of good deeds that kids will have
that's actually stronger than a parent's influence on kids. But
at the same time, there have been surveys finding, for
instance that uh, younger sisters who have an older sister
who's pregnant or four to six times more likely to
also become pregnant at some point. But then you also
have surveys to saying that um, in a d identification
(10:31):
kind of way, the younger siblings who have say, older
siblings who are who have a drug problem or drinking
problem tend to follow the straight and narrow a little
bit more. Well, I think it's it's a nice way
for researchers to kind of cover their behind because you know,
either yes, the sibling is modeling after the older one
or they're de identifying from the other. But they're basically
(10:51):
two paths that uh, they're saying, these siblings can choose,
but the extent to which we do that can have
really interesting, uh impacts on our friendships, on the spouses
we choose things like that. So they are still trying
to sess out how the gender of your sibling either
causes you to de identify from that sibling or causes
(11:12):
you to model yourself more like there's this one interesting
study about friendship and they're like, they took these two,
you know, two siblings once a boy and once a girl,
And they asked each of them to pick a friend.
And they asked the brother and sister to kind of
identify how often they had the touchy feeling conversations with
their pals, how often they had more just you know,
(11:34):
shared interests than you know, they're just playing a football
game together, and how often they took the lead and
planning activities. And then they asked the friend, uh, you know,
sort of why they're friends with the sibling. What they
found was that, um, when the when there was a
brother who had an older sister, that brother was more
likely to seek out the most masculine friends you could
(11:55):
find the shared interests ones, no touchy feely conversations at all.
And what girl also had brothers tended to do in
their friendships was to emulate those elements of control and
masculine aggression that they've seen their brothers do. But the
brothers never seemed to learn that touchy feely aspect of
uh have been a personal relationships. Well, I guess that
(12:15):
I could relate as a as a younger sibling. I
guess that I could relate to picking up those sort
of tactics from uh my, my older brother brothers, but
as the older sister to two younger brothers, I mean,
how how do you think that those findings about the
brothers looking for the more masculine friends might might come about?
(12:36):
You know, I can't. I can't think of a specific example.
I was more struck by places where the research made
it look bad for me because I guess I'm looking
out for number one. So let's jump to another study
really quick that found that if parents break up, the
families that have sisters do better. But um, only children
(12:58):
do better than uh than a than a sister who
only has brothers. So if my parents had gotten divorced,
which they didn't, then I would have been, you know,
in turmoil because I wouldn't have had the touchy feel
a sister to talk to you, whereas my brothers would
have had me to do all the work. It would
have been really hard for me. And that's where that's
why we wanted to make that point earlier about only children,
(13:20):
because yes, they they are left out of a lot
of this kind of research, but when they're included, they
do sort of fall into a middle ground because studies
show that while no, they don't have siblings to build
all of these kind of conflict ritten and yet healthy
relationships with with brothers and sisters. But they go, they
make a stronger effort to build up the friendships, to
(13:43):
build up the social support. So in a way they
are in an at an advantage if say, like you said,
if parents get divorced, or if say you lose a
sibling as you age, I mean, only children a little
bit more prepared maybe for for adulthood in that way,
which I think you know is kind of the less
one we can start to take from some of the
sibling research is it's just the places you have to
(14:04):
work a little bit harder to get the same benefits
as others. Like the way I read some of these studies,
um not having a sister, of all the benefits of
a sister, it seems like what I have to do
is just work harder to reach out to female friends
who can take on that that role, or work harder
to be the one who reaches out to my brothers,
whereas brothers could could read these um studies and maybe
(14:26):
think I need I need to be the one who
reaches out more to my family members. Remember it's quantity,
not quality, Like you don't have to have anything to
say is what's kind of the weird thing and the
challenging thing to to take away with with all of
these varied research findings, because they are kind of all
over the place when you start to list them all out,
is the fact that, yes, birth order makes a big difference.
(14:49):
I think that I I learned from my siblings in
a different as the youngest, in a different way that
you maybe learned from your siblings as the oldest. And
also every family is different. Also, every child's experience within
a family is its own sort of micro environment, depending
on the type of favoritism that parents might display, the
type of conflict that parents might also display in front
(15:11):
of kids, how they work on conflict resolution between children.
I mean, there are so many factors that can influence
your relationship with your siblings. Yeah, and that's we talked
about that in the Birth Order podcast because you know,
people will hear this and everyone will think they're the exception.
You know. I was reading about how sisters make people happier.
I was like, ah, I got brothers. They make me
(15:31):
plenty happy. This is bunk. And I think that realizing
that all of these studies have to have an asters
by them, right, I mean you can't. I just don't
think you boil down family dynamics to all these studies.
But again, I think trying to just sess out what
sisters can do in a family, what they might do naturally,
um can be kind of kind of cool to to
(15:52):
take as a lesson, sure, because that is one theme.
There have now been enough studies finding these positive benefits
of sisters, whether it's you know, emotional support or just
someone to talk to or whatever, even someone to fight
with and practice all of that conflict resolution. Sisters do
play a very special role in families. Not to say,
(16:13):
I would hate for my brothers to listen to this
and think that I am in any way to seeing
their influence on me, because you know, I think that
I you know, they provided plenty of unique benefits for
me as well in terms of socialization, conflict resolution and
all of that. But I'm pretty proud to learn that
sisters kind of where it's at. Well, I guess, you know,
(16:35):
maybe I'm providing a valuable service for my brother. And
I never wanted a sister growing up to be perfectly
honest because some of the stereotypes about them or that
they're so Cattie and Jealous stealing your clothes? How many
sitcoms did I watch where the sister stole the other
sister's clothes that I can tell you that absolutely happened,
and so I wanted no part of that. Yeah. Well,
(16:56):
I think we've said all that we can say about sisters.
I think it's time to turn it over to our
wonderful listeners and see what they think sisters positive, negative.
I mean, I'm sure that the responses are going to
be all over the place, so I can't wait to
see what folks out there think from their own experience.
And also, only children chime in. I mean, are you
(17:16):
glad that you kind of missed out on the whole
sibling dynamic? Was it nice to have just all that
attention paid to number one? There are times when I
kind of wish that I had been the only child.
So let us know what you think. You can send
us an email at mom Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, and also you can share it on our
Facebook page. But in the meantime, let's read a couple
(17:37):
of emails. I have one here from Brittany and it's
about the adult Acne podcast. She writes as someone who
has always suffered from severe acne that got worse in
my early twenties. It was refreshing to hear you, guys
to spell rumors about acnees, such as chocolate and bad
hygiene being causes forsits. As a side note, I tried
everything to get rid of my acne and nothing worked
(17:58):
until I tried accutane. It's been a year since I
finished the medicine and my skin is still act me free.
It's important for anyone with this prompt to consult a
dermatologist because I can tell you from experience that over
the counter solutions don't help, but it's nothing to be
ashamed of and can be easily controlled with the doctor's help.
It would be great if you could share this information
with your listeners. So thank you, Brittany. And you are
not the only one who had success with accutament. Heard
(18:20):
from a few listeners who had good luck with that one,
So there you go. Well, I've got an email here
from Sam and she was writing in response to our
podcast on motorcycles and she just got her motorcycle license
in March of this year. And she actually got her
motorcycle license before she got a driver's license. And she
(18:41):
writes as a new writer, I strongly encourage anyone male
or female to go take a rider's safety course before
going out on your brand new bike. In Canada, where
I'm from, these courses are usually offered through your province's
Ministry of Transportation. I would also recommend that new riders
start on smaller bikes. The upside is a small except
two or three years old have a high resale value
(19:02):
because they're always new writers sleeping for that first bike.
As it stands now, my bike is bigger and faster
than my boyfriends because he only has a small scooter
until he can save up for a bigger bike. And
I try not to rub it in too often. So
thanks for writing in, Sam and again, our email address
is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Also,
we'd love to see you over on Facebook and follow
(19:25):
us on Twitter where we are mom Stuff Podcast. And
then at last you can check out what we're doing
during the week. It's on our blogs stuff Mom Never
told You at how stuff works dot com for moralness
and thousands of other topics. Because at how stuff works
dot com, the house stuff works dot com. My phone
(19:45):
app is coming soon. Get access to our content in
a new way, articles, videos and more all on the go.
Check out the latest podcasts and blog posts, and see
what we're saying on Facebook and Twitter. Coming soon to iTunes,
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(20:05):
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