Let's up, y'all before we start? What up? Y'all? Before we start this week's episode, I want to give you guys a heads up that we're going to be off for the next few weeks. We have some exciting announcements which we'll be able to tell you all about very soon.
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I'm Manny, I'm Noah, this.
Is Devin, and this is no such thing the show where we settle our dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. On today's episode, who's more influential your parents or your siblings?
There's no no such things touch thing.
Touch than.
To So today's episode was inspired by a new book called The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominis, who I'll be talking to later in this episode. The book profiles six families with multiple successful siblings and tries to analyze what factors have actually made them successful. So she looks into the influence of their parents, their siblings, the environments they grew up in. After reading the book, I think there's an argument to be made that siblings are actually more
influential than our parents. But why don't we start here Since we all have siblings, let's go around and break down when we fall on our ber folder and how many siblings we have. So I'll start. I have one sibling who is fifteen years younger than me, so I'm thirty two and he is seventeen. Noah, I am a middle child.
So I have an older brother who is thirty six, and a younger sister who is six years younger than me twenty six.
I always struggle remembering my siblings agesc too, so but let's see if I can do this. I've got an older brother who's thirty five or thirty six. There's me who's thirty three. My younger sister's only a year younger than me, so she's thirty two.
Irish siblings twins? What do they call that? Iris? Twins? Oh? Right after the other one? Yeah, if that's derogatory, I didn't come up with that, heyth.
A lot of people are saying we need more of that Catholic twins.
And then my youngest brother is twenty nine, I think twenty eight or twenty nine.
He's not thirty yet. I know that. Who can say we're all, let's say, relatively successful year old living in New York. What were your family dynamics like growing up? Like, did your parents have really high expectations when it came to school? You know, some people grow up in households where they have like really strict curfews, like they can't hang out with friends at certain times. Like what was what was the vibe at home growing up? Yeah?
I would say relatively strict in terms of like, yeah, sleepovers and that kind of stuff. I will say my older brother kind of took the brunt of that. Like by the time you get to the second child, it's not as strict.
Mm. So okay, So give me some examples, Like in terms of school, what was the expectation.
For all four of us?
It was straight a's okay. Yeah, So if you came home, would it be it'd be like what's going on here? What's going on? But were your parents like checking your homework every night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
Yeah, I would say mine was sound just less less strict than that. There was definitely expectations of, you know, doing well and getting your stuff done. But I was And it's interesting. I'd be curious what my older brother would say. But for me, it was like pretty hands off. It felt like where it's like they trusted me to get my stuff done.
Yeah, they didn't. I don't remember.
Being like beg to do my homework or do things like that.
How about hobbies, like would they make you like play piano or read? Like in our household, they made sure we were always reading something.
Yeah, did you have to have to like read a book a week or ye?
That stuff was always like usually tied to school, like the summer reading and that sort of thing. But you know, I mean I read, My family read and did this thing, so it was kind of natural to do.
Okay. It wasn't like so you just liked reading.
Yeah, which is parenting, But yeah, I wasn't like what are you reading this month?
For godcha?
You have to read parents an of books? Yeah, I would say it's similar to nouh. It was like the expectation was like, you're going to do well in school. But my parents I don't remember it, Like I'm sure when I was much younger they checked my homework and stuff, but it was like pretty much on me. So it was more so like here, we have expectations, but like it's up to you to like fulfill them. We're not going to give you like a step by step breakdown
on how you are going to achieve this. All right, So we talked a lot about kind of expectations with your parents. Were your siblings like pressuring you to do things or like on you about stuff, especially because both of you had older siblings.
Like, so this is something that I think is key is my brother's four years older than me, so we didn't really overlap in school. I feel like when people have siblings that are a year apart or two years apart, they're so tethered socially and kind of in the school system where it's like every teacher is going to know, okay, those are the those are the manny brothers.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I did my stuff.
So yeah, my brother wasn't caught in to discipline me much, but he was a good student, so definitely set an example in that sense. He definitely took his work seriously and then I saw him, you know, go to school and other things, so it was like, okay, so.
He led by example more so than not like yo, no specific like just knock it off and do this, and we and then just more broadly like we never like fought really or bickered.
Like other than like sure small things or whatever.
My dynamic my older brother in terms of school is a little different because well, we we're classic like immigrant family, where like we're here in this country, you guys better fucking do perfect or they'll kick us out.
And uh.
But he so he was just like an insanely good student, and I think just because of the dynamic of like that immigrant family who like wants you to become pharmacists, that kind of stuff. It went down a chain of like my parents were really strict on him, and then he was definitely checking up on my schooling and being like, well, you know, how come you didn't do we better in this class? Blah blah blah. It wasn't like he would be a that upset, but more like checking in.
Yeah, So he led more by like actually instruction.
By example and also by like it was pretty like kind of hands on in the early Like I won the spelling bee at my school in fourth grade and so then they sent me to like the city spelling bee.
I was practicing for the city championship with my older brother and that was like, you know, he was really drilling me on the words and stuff, and like then I went up there and failed to spell like sorcerer or something like that, and then he was like disappointed like that kind of yeah, sorcerer, I hope so s O R C E.
R E R nice, well done?
Can I get the country of Orgony?
Yeah?
It was like he was like involved but not but kind of in a chill way, like it wasn't ever like, damn my brother's home.
I needed a cool uncle.
But he kind of had to do that as well because our parents were working all the time. And it's crazy to think, like he was actually like twelve when this was happening. Yeah, took on a lot of responsibility early.
And then you know, obviously with me, it's very different having a brother. You know, I was in high school when my brother was born, so people always like, well, you had such a big age difference, like were you guys close and we were because I would drag him around and like it was in all my like student films at the time, Like I would put him in stuff, So I would hang out with him a lot. But
obviously it is a very different dynamic. So one of the things that really drew me to Susan's reporting is her focusing in on families with multiple successful siblings and influence that they have on one another. I feel like most of the time we were talking about like successful people, we're usually talking about their parents and how their raise. So neither one of you have actually read this book
yet that's or definitely done any research. So I'm curious, just based on what we were talking about in terms of influences and that sort of thing, who do you think has been more influential to where you are today? Your parents or your siblings.
It's got to be I think it's got to be my siblings, And I think the reason. One of the reasons could be that my parents are like immigrants to this country and they just come from like kind of a completely different culture, whereas my siblings we all grew up here and I don't know, we like culturally socially, we were much more similar to each other than we were to our parents.
No, it's definitely a mix.
I'd probably say my parents overall, just as far as my kind of I don't know how to structure my life and those sorts of things. But then there's obvious things like I went to the same college as my brother, and you know, he did well in school, so I wanted to do well in school. So things like that. We kind of diverged at a certain point in terms of interests and kind of you know, career type and things like that. But there's definitely things where it's like, Okay, he set an example for me.
But you still think that your parents at the end of the day still more influential, even if he was a positive influence.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's hard to kind of quantify, I guess, or like delineate what came from who, But that's just kind of my gut feeling, I guess.
Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll hear from Susan and her reporting on family dynamics. All right, we're back. This is no such thing. I'm manny Noah, Devin, Can I have you start by introducing yourself sure.
My name is Susan Dominus, and I am the author of The Family Dynamic, A Journey inside the Mystery of Sibling Success. I'm also a staff writer at the Sunday New York Times magazine.
So as a reminder, Susan's book profile six different families. So I was curious why she chose these specific families.
When we look at a family that has, you know, one kid who's wildly successful, I think you can think that maybe that kid was an outlier, a bunch of lucky things happened to that child, and or that person was extremely talented.
And was an outlier in that way.
But I was interested in families where multiple siblings were very successful, because when you see it across the board, then you kind of think, well, maybe there was something consistent that the parents were doing in the family home that inspired those kids. And I was curious to find out what those things were.
So we already talked a bit about our own family dynamics, but I was curious to hear what Susan's family dynamic was. Like.
I have an older brother and an older sister, and I grew up in the seventies and eighties, which most of us recalls an era of benign neglect.
My parents definitely expected us.
To get good grades, and if they were good grades were not forthcoming, that was a problem. But beyond that, they didn't have particularly life big dreams for us other than that we have stable careers and you know, happy lives.
But when Susan was younger, she also spent time with other families where she noticed a very different family dynamic.
My parents used to go on vacation just the two of them, or sometimes they traveled for work, and they would leave us with family friends for up to ten days, maybe even a little bit longer, each of us in
a different household. And the particular family friends that I stayed with them most had like these really elaborate dinner time cultural kind of enrichment opportunities where the father would do very elaborate math word games with the kids, like, you know, playing is leaving Albuquerque flying x number of miles per hour, another one is leaving another city, what time is it when they cross paths, you know, where they would talk about current events and this very deliberate way,
and I loved it until the moment when the father turned to me and asked me one of those math questions, and I burst into tears.
Because like, there was no way in hell that I could do that.
I was amazed, and I loved watching the kids work it out, but like I couldn't.
It sounds like my worst nightmare. Like we're trying to have dinner and you're asking me math questions that I need to work out in my head.
Well it's funny because I always admit that I was a very ambitious kid, and I think they did want to.
Do something exciting with my life.
And I was sort of intrigued by the fact that the parents were giving their kids this boost beyond our pretty mediocre public high school education that we were getting. So I both envied it a little bit and also was relieved when I got back to my house and all we had to do.
My father was very strict about chewing with your mouth clothes. That was like the big imperative for our dinner table.
So I'm curious, but what were your dinner time routines. Did you have any specific like every night we have to do ex for dinner? Were you getting math prolems at the dinner table?
Not every night, but like definitely there were times when my dad would be like at dinner, like tell me what nine times four is or whatever, just so like just to kind of quiz us on the thing that we were. Yeah, but no, mostly I think our dinners were pretty chill.
You know. My ritual was at the dinner table. We always had a TV in the kitchen. Oh oh we do.
Yeah, that's great TV dinners.
So kind of in the start of a book, Susan really comes at the idea that parents have this like huge impact on the outcome of their kids' lives. She says, you know, obviously there's some basic things that parents can do they set their kids up for success. But she makes the argument that these little, like small minute things that parents think so hard about about like should we have a chore wheel, and like these small decisions what rules should we have, they don't really matter all that much.
Yeah, it's basically we know this from twins studies, and from twins you've been separated at birth. And there are critiques of this research, but most behavioral genet at least will tell you that you know, you come into the earth and you have certain genetic variations that lead you in certain directions, and that accounts for like fifty percent of the differences among people in a population, let's say.
But then there's also just this.
Huge environmental effect, and people often think of that as like parenting. But the environmental effect is like everything that happens to you. It's the school that you go to, it's what teacher you had, it's your siblings, it's like whether it was sunny where you grew up. It's what opportunities were presented to you, and a huge amount of
like chance and luck and happenstance. So parenting, when you think about it, by the time kids are five years old, you know, there's only so many hours a day you're spending with your parents, and there's so much that happens over the course of the day that your parents have nothing to do with. So the idea that you know, whether you enforce rules strictly or not, or make your kid practice for half an hour of piano or an hour a day, and that's going to have some like
huge effect on their diligence or their conscientiousness. I don't I think the search suggests that's probably not true. You know, parenting matters for kids. I would say it matters in the moment for kids and you know, like, how do they feel, how is that relationship? Are they happy to come home at the end of the day, and all of that obviously matters. Are there things you can do to make your kids, you know, excel? The answer is probably less than you think.
Wow, So, like the circumstances in your life probably have a lot more sway than the way you're raised.
Well, I think the point that she makes is like it makes so much sense on you, hear right. It's like, especially when you're younger, you spend so much time at school, after school activity, hanging out with your friends. You don't spend outside of weekends that much like one on one time with your parents. There's a lot of time most of the time you're not spending with your parents. You know, most of the time you're spending when your parents you're sleeping.
So I think what she's saying is that, like not parents don't matter at all. It's just like there's so many things outside of the parents control that happen day to day, and often when parents are thinking about how successful their kids are going to be, they're only thinking about the influence that they have and the things that
they are bestowing onto their kids. They're not thinking about all the random things that can happen to them throughout the day that can really put them on a certain trajectory that they will have no say on.
Yeah, it's interesting. As someone who's dating a British person, we always joke about like whether our kids would have in a British accent or an American accent, And we did a little bit of reading. It turns out they're going to have the accent of the kids at school, but they're not. It doesn't matter.
Our accents don't matter exactly. Parents don't matter, kidding, But for parents or people who are thinking about being parents, there are a few things that Choosing points to in their book that they can do to help kids help themselves. So there's one study that showed that when researchers modeled persistence while playing with toys in front of babies, that may the babies more likely to be persistent.
So basically, the study had researchers working with like fifteen month old babies, and the researcher would be holding a toy and you know, trying to make it make this sound and saying things like.
Huh, how do I do this?
And there would be a big button that you'd think would make the music play, but they would hide the buttons, so the researcher would eventually press this module that would make the song come out. And then they would see how long a baby, having watched a researcher persist, would then persist in getting a different toy to do something else.
So it was basically seeing if modeling persistence had an effect on how long babies tried to do something, and the answer was they did see a real result, like watching a researcher persist did lead babies to try harder.
The same researcher then went on. Her name is Julia Leonard. She runs the.
Leonard Learning Lab at Yale. She got very interested in autonomy and because we know that when parents do intervene when like kids are doing a puzzle or something like that, it's very deep motivating and kids tend to try less hard the next time around when they're presented with a puzzle,
like even a few hours later. So she set up this experiment at a children's museum in which four or five year olds were in the dressing room of the children's museum trying to put on hockey gear, which is kind of elaborate, and in some of the dressing rooms there was a sign that said, did you know that putting on clothing can be learning? And in the other rooms it just said dress up is fun, you know
that kind of thing. In the room where there was no reminder that getting dressed could be learning, the parents jumped in and intervened all the time. And in the room where the parents were reminded that there was learning to be done and even simple everyday tasks like putting
on shin guards, they waited a little bit longer. So it was both a reinforcement of the idea that parents jump in way too quickly and also got at the idea that maybe if parents appreciated that there is learning to be done in letting kids struggle with their tying
their shoelace or buckling their backpack. Parents do see value in having their kids do puzzles and things like that, but there's also a lot of value to be had from learning the autonomy of just some small tasks that you do daily and getting it right and getting it right on your own.
So the researchers say you should try to find opportunities, like when you're going to a grocery store, give your kids a list and say, hey, go find these things and don't be so hands on.
That makes sense. I mean, think about how many people kind of seem to not be able to do anything, oh or like have you know it's like no, it's right, Like but like I'm think of simple thing like.
You're scared to talk on the phone.
Or yeah yeah, And like I can think of like code I can just think of as a kid being told like okay you can call this.
Yeah, yeah, you wanted a food. Yeah.
It's like you're just doing a small thing like that that like you as a kid might be scared of.
Yep.
That then helps like have that little bit of confidence that like, Okay, I'm I'm an actual person and I can like do this thing that's scary or whatever.
So enough about our god bamn parents. Like I said earlier, one of the things that sets this book apart is
Susan's focused on siblings. And one thing that you called out in the book that is just it was so obvious once you said it, but like I hadn't thought about it until reading it was just like your siblings see you in a different way than your parents do, Right, your parents see you usually when you're performing for adults to some degree, and your siblings see you out in the world where you're with your friends, like they see you in so many different environments. They see that code switching.
They know you at a deeper level than your parents do. So you just talked through, you know, how you saw that bit and your reporting with these families.
Yeah, I mean I can even tell you in my own experience, if that's okay. I mean, I talk about how my brother, when I was fourteen years old, came to my bedroom and said he was home for visiting from college, and he said to me, you know, you should really join the high school newspaper, because he knew I liked to write. Our high school newspaper had been disbanded, and as so far as I was concerned, that was
that there wasn't no high school newspaper. And he really just lectured me and was like, you should start a high school newspaper.
It's terrible.
Democracy ties in darkness and your fellow students are apathetic.
And I was like, Jesus, all right, excuse my language.
But I was like fine, fine, And so I started the high school newspaper up again. And I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And somehow my brother put it all together. And there's two reasons for it.
You know.
One is that he was a peer, so he knew what a high school was supposed to look like. High school was supposed to have a high school newspaper, and there had been one when he was there.
That's not something that would have been top of mind for my parents, you know. And he knew me.
He knew that I liked to write that I was very curious, and I don't think my parents ever thought of journalism as like something they would have necessarily wanted me to pursue, because it wasn't really a secure path. But my brother thought it would be cool, and so I did it, and he thought it'd be cool for me.
He knew me well enough to know that I would really love it, and I mean I really found my calling. I mean almost right away. I was like, wow, he really knows me well, yeah, and encouraged it.
And do you think you would have taken that same advice if your parents would have given you, like said, hey, why don't you know go say maybe the exact same thing.
I don't I think I would have rolled my eyes and said, you don't understand. It's not easy to get a high school newspaper started. Julia Leonard, also the same woman at the Learning Lab, has done research on from whom do teenagers basically want to get advice and what they The answer to that is people who know me well, and people who understand the task at hand. And by the time you're seventeen years old, they don't say their
parents know them well. It's their friends, their peers, and their siblings, and siblings also understand the task at hand. You know, there's a reason why kids say to their parents all the time, what do they say, you don't understand? But they don't. We don't We're not there, we don't know what the dynamics are. So siblings really get it in a way that parents don't. And I think they can see the future in a way that parents can't.
So do y'all have any stories of your siblings influencing you to do something that you feel like maybe you wouldn't have been as receptive to if your parents had suggested it.
I mean the big one is right after college, I wanted to go to LA and like kind of do that whole film struggle, Like I already planned to sleep on my good friend's couch at the time for a couple of weeks until I found the job in the industry.
But my older brother, I think, was maybe concerned about like the practicality of that and sent me quickly sent me a link for an application to be an intern at Business Insider, and I kind of just applied to it on a whim, but they got back to me, and then I ended up working there and moving to New York. And obviously my entire life today can be traced back to that decision. Butterfly, Yeah, I think this really.
I mean, like I wouldn't have met you, guys, I wouldn't have met Mia, Like my entire life would have been completely different La beautiful.
In a way.
Well, maybe you would have had a great life over there.
True, Yeah, maybe this is the timeline that fucking.
It could have been Timothy shall.
No, I would have been Timothy Shallame is like casting directly.
To whether or not we like to admit it, our siblings do have an influence on us, and it does have a name. It's called the siblings spillover effect.
We've always known that siblings tend to perform relatively similarly in school, and that effect is known as the siblings spillover effect. But what the cause of it is.
Was sort of unknown, but parenting was a genetics was something else.
So this researcher did a really interesting study in which she looked at kids who were old for their grade, meaning because of when their birthday fell, they happened to be on the older side of their grade. And we know that kids who are old for their grade do better because they're developmentally farther along. Teachers like them better, they can sit still more, they just have a better experience of school, and they're cognitively more developed.
So if you're one of the oldest kids in.
Your grade, you have this you know, by chance, by the chance of when your birthday falls, you have this academic advantage.
And what the researcher found was that the younger siblings of.
Those kids, regardless of whether they were old young for their grade, middle, they also did better. So they were somehow benefiting from the fact that their older sibling was doing better in school. And we don't know if it's that the older sibling then felt good about school and made school.
Seem positive or tutored them.
But we just know that there's this siblings spillover effect in which kids whose older siblings are doing better also do better.
And to Titus our conversation earlier, there are some examples in a book where she profiles a family where the older sibling goes to a college and then the other siblings follow in their footsteps. So she profiles this one family called the Mergias, whose parents were from Mexico and the kids grew up to be really successful federal judges, civil rights activists.
With the Mrgias, what you see is this network effect where the oldest sibling is the first one in his family to go to college.
His parents would have been perfectly happy if.
He'd gone to work at the plant, I think, but as they as the father and that family did. But he wanted to go to college because his friends were going to college and because he was already there. First of all, he set the expectation for the younger siblings, but he also made life so much easier for them because he understood how financial aid worked. He helped them navigate which classes to take and how he got.
Them into the fraternity.
So it was something that was hugely influential for them, and he didn't have the benefit of that, and you know, he was the trailblazer.
And she points to as another example, Michelle Obama and her older brother Craig Robinson.
Craig Robinson got recruited to play basketball. You know, they did his parent They were working class people.
They weren't like you know what, Craig.
Princeton's the place where you don't know, Princeton came to him because he was such a superb student.
And athlete, and we know obviously that helps with recruitment.
So Michelle thought, well, if he's going to Princeton, I can go to Princeton. I know, I know my ability, I know his ability, and if he can do it, I can do it. But the guidance counselor said to her, Michelle, I don't think you're Princeton material. So I mean, really awful, because we certainly know she was Princeton material, and she
ignored the guidance counselor and obviously thrived there. So if her brother hadn't gone and the guidance counselor said to her, you're not Princeton material, she.
Quite likely would have been like okay.
But she knew otherwise because she had this close family member who made it there, and she knew herself and she knew him well enough to know if he could do it, she could do it.
So siblings really matter.
Yeah, that's really interesting, my I mean, my older brother went to Ohio State on a bunch of scholarships, and then I went to Ohio State, and then my younger sister went to Ohio State.
Yeah, and for me, my brother deaf, Like, I probably wouldn't have even thought about going to AU if it wasn't for my brother. He was like big politics junkie, so DC made sense for him. And then it was just like my experience seeing the campus and all that that drew me to applying there when it was time for me to look at school.
All right, So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit about birth order. We're back. So when it comes to siblings, one thing that people love love to talk about is birth order. Are you the oldest sibling, a middlesembing you and a youngest sibling? People say that they could just tell based on people's personalities. All right, And Susan looks into some of the research around this.
So there's this known fact which is that the oldest child in families tends to have the academic edge, and that holds up in all kinds of studies.
It's really consistent.
And the thinking of that is that the oldest child and a family is the only one who is ever an only child, so they have the most enrichment from the parents and they have that single minded focus. And then as they get older, they also do a little bit of instruction of the younger siblings, you know, and that reinforces their knowledge and that's also kind of a sharpening of cognition, and you see it more and more as they get older and older, like when the kids
are all in school. So that means, okay, on average, the oldest child is the most academic. What you then see with younger children is that they're overrepresented in participation in sports and in elite sports. And the thinking is that this must be because the younger kids see that the older child has their lane, which is school, and they as a younger child, are now going to try to excel in some other way, and certainly in America, that is often sports. So in the Groff family, Sarah
True was the youngest of three. Her brother Adam went on to become like a serial healthcare entrepreneur MDPHD.
Her sister, Lauren Groff.
Is now this very esteemed and admired novelist, and they were terrific students, and even though I'm sure Sarah was a great student, she decided that she could not keep up, and she made a concerted decision that she was going to own something that her sister did not care about that much, which was swimming and sports, and she just knew that she could excel there because even though her sister was a tremendous athlete and even participated in the Junior Olympics, Lauren didn't care.
That wasn't her main drive. She had other dreams.
And so Sarah went on to become an Olympic triathlete and world class ironman competitor.
And she remembers making a really concerted decision when she was young.
Would you say that your older siblings were like the best academically?
Yes, uh, yep, better than me for sure. I mean he was like validict I think he was a valedictorian in high school. But he was also one of those freaks that were also good at like athletics and like all around just in all the clubs and all that kind of stuff. So there I really had no.
Yeah, are taken. It's funny, you know, with my age gap with my brother, I definitely am the more academic and he's definitely more athletic.
But did you guys both start sports at the same age?
So interesting now you asked that, So come back to that. There's this study that Susan sits in the book of youth soccer players training for the US women's national team. Three fourths of the people surveyed in this you know, really competitive program were younger siblings. And there's a couple different theories as to why that is. One of them is what you just brought up, which is that the younger sibling is going to start sports earlier because the
older siblings are playing those sports already. Right, So you may not think to give a two year old a soccer ball, but if the older sibling is playing soccer and a younger sibling is going to see that and be like, oh, I got to play that. So if you have an older sibling that does play sports, they're teaching you stuff at at a younger age of here's the right way to do it, so you haven't advantage here. So one thing she points out to where we have,
you know, the spillover effect. We're kind of following directly in the footsteps, and then you have this thing that's happening where it's like, Okay, you're doing that thing, I'm
gonna do a different thing. Obviously, family with more resources is more able to have their siblings do completely different things, right, Like if you have a family of very little resources, you're not gonna be like, let's go to soccer and play baseball, and like this kid is going to play to cello, right, It's like everybody's going and doing the same thing.
Well, we've realized also is that siblings function differently in
advantaged families versus disadvantaged families. You see more differentiation in very well resourced families because the parents can afford to drive one to flute lessons and take the other one to tennis across town, and in less advantaged families, the kids spend more time together because maybe the parents are working long hours or because the parents aren't investing in all of these extracurriculars that are that take them away from the home, so the sibling spillover effects are more
powerful in disadvantaged families. And even this well known idea that the oldest child has the greatest cognitive advantages, you don't see that in families for whom English is a second language, because the first kid is just trying to figure out what's going on, apparently, and then the second child benefits from the fact that the older child now was fluent in that language, so they kind of get acclimated into the culture a little bit more easily, and
the parents, by the second child have figured out how the system works a little bit better. So I think they're probably you know, when parents immigrate, like the older child, if you know, can be the one who's struggling the most because the parents are struggling so much at that time.
Very interesting, So that's interesting because it's like a micro generation. Yeah, so like you might all be three years apart, but like a lot can happen. It's just like a family moving here, it's going to be harder for them than obviously you know, their kids and then follows and it's the same for even just the siblings.
Yeah. Yeah, one of the families she profiles in the book The Chen's this really comes out because the older sister is like, you know, all of the older kids are the family owns a Chinese restaurant, but they don't speak English, so the kids are the ones like talking to the landlord and like negotiating bills, right, Like they have this sort of like they got to grow up real quick. Yeah, you know, they're working at the restaurant
basically as kids. So it's like, yeah, then they have the youngest other kids named Devan has this like huge advantage because they've done all this groundwork. So I did ask Susan, you know, if you had to pick, after doing all this research and looking at all these studies, who is more influential parents or siblings?
I think that what I usually say is that parental effects are overestimated by the general population and sibling effects are underestimated.
I don't know that they.
Have more of an effect than parents, but I do think that siblings are more integral to helping each other find their paths again because of this idea that they're occupying the same world, so they can see the future in a way that parents can't, and they can provide connections and introductions and expand the horizons in a way that I mean, you know, in most families, parents kids don't have parents who are incredibly well connected and can
make introductions. But if your sibling, if your sibling is succeeding, you know, beyond the station from which they came, then they can help you along in a way. And so I think of it as like the parents often in the families that I wrote about, they kind of sent like an arrow of ambition into the air with some kind of energy, or they'd set some example.
Of having just succeeded or overcome.
A lot of the parents were kind of quiet overcomers, extraordinary people who weren't famous but had lived tremendous lives. And then the siblings helped direct the arrow, they helped it find its direction. So, you know, I think they're very practical things that siblings can do to help each other along.
So now, after hearing out our research, what are your thoughts.
I feel more strongly that it's my siblings who influenced or impacted my life. But I do I feel like I learned a lot more about how exactly, whereas before I'd just been like, well, yeah, he's they're my siblings. Like I see them all the time, obviously naturally influenced and impacted by them, but it was really interesting learning exactly like the ripple effect and how they can how they lead as an example sometimes.
Especially in your you know, upbringing, like you're saying, being a first gen yeah, you know, and a lot of the like you're saying, cultural things.
Yeah, in a way, I think I was set up to be more impacted by my siblings than the average person.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that comes out in her book too, where you know, the families that she profiles, which our first gen, the siblings are really really paving the way.
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah for me, if I had to pick, i'd still stay say my parents.
Were the more influential.
But then it's easy to point to all these different things, whether it's the specific college or you know, or I would have done better academically if my brother didn't exist, you.
Know, gonna taken all the resources exactly so well, even the lanes that you decided.
And things like that. It's like, yeah, so that could have just changed my trajectory as far as you know, maybe I would have gone down a different career path or that sort of thing.
Maybe you would have been more of a politics john exactly.
I could have been maybe the Democratic nominee for mayor you know, my brother existed, So that's fine, you know, I love them.
Yeah. It makes me think about how you parent your kids to interact with one another, Yeah, and the importance of that, and like making sure that they have good relationships, that they support one another, that you know, because they do play such a big influence. It's not just like
a random other kid in the house. Yeah, And also kind of makes me feel a lot better about, like as a parent, not being so stressed out about the prospect of like how every little thing that I do is going to completely change my kid's life if I forget to say, you know, thank you one time, like they're gonna me talking about that what they're doing is thirty years from now.
Yeah, But thinking about the spillover effect specifically, it does seem like, you know, you really just want to nail that first.
Yeah, get that first one, really good, focus on that, and then you're and then you know, then you're done.
Yeah, you give up one parent thing after you get that first one set up.
It kind of sounds like it go one vacation.
Yeah, hey, we got the first kids set up and where I.
See you touch, thank you.
Touch, thank So.
That's it for our episode this week, Thanks once again to Susan Dominus. Her new book, The Family Dynamic is out everywhere and now we'll link to it in the show notes. There was this great fight that I just couldn't find a space for any episode about parents talking to their kids about STEM classes that I'll include in the newsletter. Most of such things produced by many fidel I don't know if Daman and me Devin Joseph. The theme song is by Manny. Edition of music for this
episode by Zeno. Reminder will be out for a few weeks, but check out our instagram. No such thing on show. Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll be the first to hear about when we're coming back. All right, Bye,