Why Having Siblings Matters More Than You Think - Newsweek

We laugh about it now, but one of the core memories I share with my two sisters involves me, at our family’s apartment in Italy in the late 1990s, becoming so angry that I picked up a child-sized chair and possibly a matching table and threatened to throw them.

I say “possibly” because I’m being nice to myself, but I’m pretty sure that exact scenario played out a few times throughout our childhoods.

I tell you this nearly 30 years later mostly to establish that my siblings and I (we've got a younger brother as well) had a perfectly loving childhood relationship, which is to say we also occasionally wanted to kill one another. The four of us are extremely different people, and our most obvious commonality is that we have the same exact parents.

And yet, sometime between the chair-throwing years and now, I started realizing that our relationships feel delicately precious the older we get. The three of them bother me in ways almost nobody else can, but they are also the people I never have to explain the backstory of whatever I am feeling to.

They, mostly, don't agree with my feelings, but they understand how those sentiments can come about because they were formed inside the same house, ruled by the same parents. We grew up under the same little weather system, if you will.

At the risk of reducing my grand theory of siblings to an onion, one of my sisters explained this to me years ago while I was cooking. I was peeling an onion and, as I always do, removing not only the papery skin but the perfectly edible first layer underneath it. I wondered aloud why I always wasted that piece.

My sister barely looked up. “Because that’s how mom peels onions,” she said. Duh.

That, really, is the thesis. Siblings are the only people who have access to the same source material you do. They may reach completely different conclusions from it, but they understand where the conclusions came from.

The principle works in reverse, too. One of us picked up one habit from my parents (me waking up at the crack of dawn every day and assuming the rest of the house should as well...on the weekend), and another reacted against that exact habit and became its opposite (a sibling, I shall not name names, who could sleep 18 hours on a Sunday).

Same input, wildly different output.

I think about this much more now because I have four children of my own, which means I spend an impressive portion of every day screaming at them to stop screaming. Motherhood has also made me constantly reconsider my own mother: not simply how she raised me, which I remember reasonably well, but how she managed four completely different children inside one family.

Only three other people on Earth can really audit that experience with me.

My husband knows me well (hopefully), and my closest friends know a pretty true version of me, but when I am trying to understand why I do something, like peel an onion extra hard, my siblings are probably the only ones who can dissect the actions.

Perhaps that explains why, when I was pregnant with my fourth and last child and learned I was having a boy, I briefly panicked. He is the love of my life, but it suddenly occurred to me that my two daughters would never have a third sister. Our family arithmetic would be fundamentally different from the one I knew: two girls, two boys instead of three girls and one boy.

A friend once told me we tend to want for our children what we ourselves had because it is the only childhood we know how to navigate from the inside. I thought that was why the news unsettled me.

But I don't think I was trying to reproduce my childhood numerically. I was worried about recreating something more useful: a group of people who, decades from now, can call one another and skip the first 20 minutes of explanation.

That may be the most practical case for siblings: they are not guaranteed best friends, built-in soulmates or even people you would necessarily select from a lineup. They're simply the only other people with the same original documents.

Although I’ve tried to resist the urge to sermonize from the tiny pedestal of a published essay, today I’m giving in: give your kids siblings. They may be even more useful than the piano lessons you’re saving up for.