SMNTY Classics: Do Sisters Make You Happier?

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?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stephman.
Ever told you a production of I Heart Radios? How
stuff Work? You know? Growing up I always wanted a sister,
did you I did. I decided around high school, after

(00:28):
witnessing my friends who had sisters get in some pretty
epic spats with them, that I no longer wanted a sister.
But when I was young, I really did because I
thought it'd be cool. We could play together, we could
share clothes and toys. But around that time I was like,
you know, maybe it's good because I'm the middle child.

(00:50):
I have something that differentiates me. I will say, for me,
I did have a sister, my adopted sister, and instead
of sharing clothes, I got hand me downs, right, So
that's not always wonderful. Yes, a b I also got
compared to her a lot because she was a star
student and very cute blonde and by the way, I'm Asian,
so that is definitely not me um and so but

(01:14):
I will say having her a part of the family,
she is definitely the calm one and the motherly one
of the four of us. I guess I'll be right
because the other two are brothers. The more maternal and
she kind of takes care of us and takes care
of our parents and all. We've talked about this with
a dutiful daughter that has been really nice to also
lean on her as well, and she is a good sister,

(01:37):
my sister. Yeah. So when I decided no more, I
don't want sisters, as part of it was I realized
I would be getting hand me down when I was
the first. Yes, I specifically wanted a twin because of
Mary Kate Ashley. I suspect um. But every now and
then when I see my friends interact with their sisters

(01:57):
now as adults, I do have a pang of all right,
I'll look at that beautiful relationship or look at the
way that they kind of pick on each other, but
they know these things about each other. And the inspiration
for this is specifically Frozen, Yes, which I will have
seen by the time anyone's listening to this, And um,

(02:18):
I just it was really refreshing for me when I
saw that movie to see a relationship between two sisters
and that being the powerful one, that being more important
than the romantic love, having this sister lee connection and
bond and love. Um yeah, I will say I think
because my sister was a lot older than me, our

(02:39):
dynamic is definitely different than the you know, younger so
we didn't fight as much. But she also wasn't in
the home as long. So by the time I think
when I was adopted, she was sixteen, and she got
married and went to school pretty young, and so she
moved out of the house barely quickly. So we didn't
necessarily like we bonded. But isn't the level of as

(03:01):
if I was born taking care of me as a kid,
So it's kind of different. But yeah, definitely still lean
or her for advice and such. Yeah, and I certainly
I have and we've we've talked about this a lot. Um.
I have a great group of female friends, of which
Samantha you are one, and sometimes I do feel like

(03:22):
I get to experience moments of what it might be
like of having that connection. Um. Anyway, it's just been
something that's on my my brain. Yeah, and I wanted
to share this, this classic episode with you about whether
or not sisters make you happier. Welcome to Stuff Mom

(03:48):
Never Told You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen,
we have to guest 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,

(04:09):
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 youngest sibling in my family, and
we're also different in another way, Kristen, 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

(04:31):
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 brup party pack. Yes, I am
the youngest of five counting folks, uh in five with
two brothers and two sisters. And this is really gonna

(04:52):
provide a lot of insight, I think, because today's topic
is does a sister make you happier? And we didn't
pull this top pick out of thin air. There are
a ton of new studies and headlines coming out left
and right about how sisters are the bomb dot com
to throw out a golden moldie that it's a golden

(05:13):
MOLDI that time flies, that study after study is showing
that people with sisters are happier than those with brothers,
not necessarily than those who 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 of your family. Yes,
because when it comes to research on siblings, it really

(05:37):
didn't come around until or started to get much notoriety
until the early two thousands. Before then, there had been
realms of research and studies on parents and how parents
affect their children. But when it came to siblings, it's
kind of a newer research focus. And now that there
have been more studies done on siblings, all of these

(06:01):
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 got a
lot of emails from listeners who are only children, and
we don't want only children to feel left out in

(06:21):
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,
right because you spend more time with your siblings than
you spend with any time anyone else. Um, they've done,

(06:41):
you know, stays where they follow the kids around and
they realize 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 saw you maybe from the time you were born
to the very end. Now we should say before we

(07:03):
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
survey of men that kind of tracked them throughout their
lives and basically the ones who were doing the best

(07:24):
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
ties towards their siblings and would be expected to either
um provide support and difficult times for their siblings or

(07:47):
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
are some variations. That's right. Let's jump to a study
from Brigham Young University. It's the newest one that's come

(08:08):
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
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

(08:31):
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 olds. Regardless of their gender. They
can be boys or girls, but having that sister is
the key factor. And there have been similar studies that
were done before this that found UH positive impacts specifically

(08:51):
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 in reanalyzing a survey
on sibling impact and he felt or he found, I
should say, no effect in how UM siblings sex composition,

(09:11):
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
than people with no or fewer sisters. So basically UM

(09:32):
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 all throughout. One more.
A British study it was presented at the British Psychological
Society last year. It found the growing up with the
sister makes people more optimistic, more ambitious, and better balanced.
And Uh, siblings have either sex had a sister would

(09:52):
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,
why is it specifically sisters that are so so wonderful,
And uh, it's kind of it's kind of frustrating because

(10:14):
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,
it's not them being you know, touchy feel It just

(10:35):
there's something about this level of conversation that I don't
think researchers 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 the sister
research today was because of an essay in The New
York Times that was published a couple of days ago
where the researcher was talking about the findings from that

(10:58):
two thousand tens study that said that, you know, the
tended 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, will communicate more and have these all these

(11:19):
heart to hearts to make you feel so great. And
she kind of took issue with that because she has
actually gone in and talk 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,

(11:39):
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 brothers

(12:00):
room or whatever they have to do to talk to
the other people in their family. And also, I mean
I should note as someone who grew up with two sisters,

(12:22):
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
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.

(12:44):
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, etcetera. It pointed out
that a lot of researchers now think we're learning our
conflict resolution skills and are you know, inner person all
relationship skills from our siblings. That it's not uncommon for
young kids to have as many as you know, ten

(13:07):
conflicts in an hour, right, 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 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

(13:29):
at this from an adult perspective as well, and and
thinking about the interactions that I've had with with my
brothers and with my sisters, because one thing 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

(13:51):
on the one hand, um, you have all of these
findings talking about all these positive benefits. Um, there was
one finding saying that that brother have a positive impact
on the number of good deeds that kids will have
that's actually stronger than a parent's influence on kids. But
the same time, there have been surveys finding, for instance,
that uh, younger sisters who have an older sister who's

(14:14):
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 de identification 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

(14:35):
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 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

(14:56):
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 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, once a girl, and they
asked each of them to pick a friend, and they

(15:17):
asked the brother and sister to kind of identify how
often they had the touchy feely conversations with their pals,
how often they had more just you know, shared interests
that 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

(15:38):
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 find
the shared interest ones, no touchy feely conversations at all.
And what girls who had brothers tended to do in
their friendships was to emulate those elements of control and

(15:58):
masculine aggression and 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 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 brothers brothers.
But as the older sister to two younger brothers, I mean,

(16:21):
how how do you think that those findings about the
brothers looking for the more masculine friends might might come about?
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

(16:41):
really quick. They found that if parents break up, the
families that have sisters do better, but um, only children
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 rm weill because I wouldn't have had the touchy
feely sister to talk to you, whereas my brothers would

(17:04):
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,
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 ridden and yet healthy

(17:27):
relationships with with brothers and sisters, but they go they
make a stronger effort to build up the friendships, to
build up the social support. So in a way they
are 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

(17:50):
I think you know is kind of the lesson we
can start to take from some of the sibling research
is it is just the places you have to work
a little bit harder to get the same benefits as others.
Like 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

(18:12):
the one who reaches out to my brother's whereas brothers
could could read these um studies and maybe 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.

(18:34):
When you start to list them all out. Is the
fact that, yes, birth order makes a big difference. 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. And also every child's experience within
a family is its own sort of micro environment, depending

(18:57):
on the type of favoritism that parents might just play,
the type of conflict that parents might also display in
front 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.

(19:19):
You know. I was reading about how sisters make people happier.
I was like, ah, I got brothers. They make me
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 can boil down family dynamics to all these studies.
But again, I think trying to to sus out what
sisters can do in a family and what they might

(19:40):
do naturally, um can be kind of kind of cool
to to 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 practic us all of that conflict resolution.

(20:01):
Sisters do play a very special role in families. Not
to say, I would hate for my brothers to listen
to this and think that I am in any way
just 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

(20:23):
learn that sisters kind of where it's at. Well, I guess,
you know, 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 are
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,

(20:45):
and so I wanted no part of that. Yeah, well,
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 response is are going
to be all over the place, So I can't wait
to see what folks out there think from their own experience.

(21:06):
And also, only children chime in. I mean, are you
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, yeah,
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

(21:27):
Facebook page. I have one here from Brittany, and it's
about the Adult Acne podcast. She writes, as someone who

(21:49):
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 for zits. As a side note. I
tried everything to get rid of my acne and nothing
worked until I tried accutane. It's been a year since
I finished the medicine and my skin is still acne free.
It's important for anyone with this prompt to consult a
dermatologist because I can tell you from experience that over

(22:11):
the counter solutions don't help, but it's nothing to be
ashamed of and can be easily controlled with a 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 Accutanement've heard
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

(22:33):
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
writes as a new writer. I strongly encourage anyone male
or female to go take a writer's safety course before
going out on your brand new bike. In Canada, where

(22:54):
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 bikes
that are two or three years old have a high
resale value because they're always new riders sleeping for that
first bike. As it stands now, my bike is bigger
and faster than my boyfriends because he only has a

(23:14):
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
addresses mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Also,
we'd love to see you over on Facebook and follow
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then at last you can check out what we're doing
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(23:36):
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