← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Why Are Some Families Full of Highly Successful People?
00:28:16
Susan Dominus discusses her new book 'The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success.'
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Susan Dominus
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We've been reading our April get lit with all of it book club pick and tonight we'll discuss it. I will be in conversation with author Leila Lalamy at 6pm at the New York Public Library. If you have tickets, I will see you there. If you don't, you can watch it from the comfort of your own home via Livestream. For more information, head to wnyc.org getlit that's in about five hours. So now let's get this hour started with the family dynamic. Have you ever encountered a group of highly successful citizens, siblings maybe? One's a doctor, the other's a CEO, the third a Broadway star and wondered what's their secret? I mean, think about it. The Wright brothers, Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen Rahman Emanuel. For years, New York Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus has been on a mission to answer that question. Her new book is titled the Family A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. She profiles six families of high achievers, kids who grew up to be authors, Olympic athletes, founders of major companies, judges, Tony Award winners and more. She talks to the siblings and their parents to uncover what factors help create a family of ultra successful adults. Susan Dominus will be speaking on Thursday at Greenlight Books with Emily Nussbaum. But first she joins me in studio now to discuss. It's nice to meet you.
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Susan Dominus
It's so nice to meet you too listeners.
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Alison Stewart
We want to hear from you. Are you part of a group of successful siblings? What do you think led to your success? What practices did your parents instill at home that you think help you achieve what you wanted to? Or maybe you're the parent of a high achiever. What do you think are the secrets to raising successful kids? We are taking your calls. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. This is a no judgment zone. You can call in and brag about your kids. Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. You can text that number or you can call in. How did you go about selecting the families for this book?
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Susan Dominus
It's A great question. And I have to say, it was a little bit idiosyncratic in the sense that I decided that I was just gonna follow my own interests, the kinds of people whom I tend to admire. And for me, that's artists, it's innovators, it's people who've overcome hardship, it's civil rights activists, it's philanthropists. And the book is really populated by people who kind of fit that description. So I was looking for. Really had dreamed big in some way and, you know, bit off some kind of, you know, large goal and had achieved it.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, that was. My question is like, what does success mean in terms of this book?
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Susan Dominus
Yeah, that's a great question. Also, as I said, it's. I think success means you have set a very high goal, usually about something that has some value to the public beyond simply making more money, that kind of thing, and. And achieved it. Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting because you write in the book was actually difficult to find families, and you witnessed mild insult slinging among family members. How did those arguments among people, as you watch them, debate about whether or not to be a participant in your book, how did it help you write the book?
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Susan Dominus
I guess, you know, I think I understood just how complicated sibling relationships are and also how you can have five siblings in one family and every one of them is gonna have a different opinion about whether they, for example, wanted to participate in this book. And I think I also got a sense of how primal sibling relationships are. I think for a lot of families, it was just too hot to the touch. They just didn't wanna go there. And that was intriguing to me, even as it was frustrating sometimes to get families to agree to let me talk to them.
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Alison Stewart
The big question is nature versus nurture. We'll get into that in some depth. But as you're working on, what do you think had a bigger impact? Nature and nurture?
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Susan Dominus
You know, increasingly, I think geneticists are coming to the conclusion that it's not one or the other. They're actually. They're not in opposition to each other. They're deeply intertwined. In fact, Dalton Conley has this great book out right now called the Social Genome, in which he talks about that. But you kind of create your own environment. So one example is, if you're naturally pretty fast, then your coaches maybe give you a lot of feedback about what a great runner you are. And then you start. Start seeking out training grounds where they're gonna enhance your fastness. Or if you love books, you're gonna surround yourself in libraries. Libraries are gonna enhance your bookishness. So it's also true with how you respond to people. Let's say you're born kind of agreeable and you're very easygoing. The world responds really nicely to agreeable people. And guess that that can make you more agreeable. So it's not exactly in opposition. One thing feeds the other.
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Alison Stewart
What did parents tell you about why they thought their kids had been so successful?
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Susan Dominus
I would say that a lot of them pointed to independence. And that's something Esther Wojcicki talks a lot about. In a lot of the families I wrote about, the parents were. There was a sense that of fearlessness. In fact, I remember this great quote from Marilyn Holifield, this wonderful trailblazer black female law partner and civil rights activist in Miami. She said about her parents, fear was not their thing. And so that meant they were the kind of parents who let their kids take chances, do things that might be hard. Marilyn actually desegregated a high school in Tallahassee at a very difficult time. And that was not her parents choice, that was her choice. I'm sure they were really worried about it, but they knew her well enough to know she could handle it and they let her try. Was extremely challenging, but it was also very formative.
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Alison Stewart
So that's what the parents would say. They were independent and they were fearless. What did the siblings say about one.
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Susan Dominus
Another and how they affected each other, you mean?
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Susan Dominus
So I think that in some, you know, even if it's painful, sibling rivalry can really be something that fuels people because it is so primal. There's no other motivation like it. In a way, this terrific, you know, award winning novelist Lauren Groff talks about how her older brother, who, you know, like many older brothers, you know, seemed smarter and a little bit superior, maybe was hugely motivating to her. So much of what she drove her for many years, not anymore, but for many years, was her desire to prove something to her brother. I also think siblings give each other really good advice because they can see the future in a way that their parents maybe can't. So they're pulling each other along professionally, sometimes as a network, or sometimes just because they have vision that parents don't always necessarily have.
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Alison Stewart
We're talking to Susan Dominus. We're discussing her new book, the Family A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Listeners, we want to hear from you. Are you part of a group of successful siblings? What do you think led to your success? What practices did your parents instill at home that help you achieve your goals? Or maybe you're the parent of a high achiever. What do you think is the secret to raising a successful kid? Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. You can text in or you can call us on that number. Let's talk to Beverly who's calling us from Long Island. Hi, Beverly, thank you for making the time to call all of it. You're on the air.
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Beverly
Hello. Thank you for having me. I just wanted to brag a little bit. I'm one of eight and so I have a doctor in my family and nurse practitioner. My brother was a Broadway actor who traveled the world. I'm a teacher, financial advisor in my family and I'm just super proud of just my family and my siblings. And I attribute a ton of that to my parents. They were always loving, they always encouraged us to follow our dreams. And yeah, just a shout out to all the good work that parents do out there and supporting your kids and you know, letting them, letting them chase. And we probably were all lost at one point in our life and we had to figure it out and our parents always backed us.
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Alison Stewart
I was going to ask you, Beverly, is there anything that you and your seven siblings have in common?
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Beverly
I guess high achievers, like big dream. I don't know. Like, I think that, I think that, yeah, we just, we, we were always supported in what we wanted to do. And you know, my brother who's a doctor now, he's a, he's a pilot in the Air Force as well. Like my, we just always backed each other. I think we just always had each other's back.
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Susan Dominus
And I'm curious, when you say that, you guys, your parents encourage you to pursue your dreams, how did they articulate that to you? What were kinds of things they used to say that made you know that they felt that way?
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Beverly
I think we were a very tight knit family and you know, we always just supported each other and we, we did not come from money or anything like that. Like we all had to like climb the ladder and I just, I think, I think that we all supported each other and we all just kind of told each other to go for it.
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Alison Stewart
Thanks for calling in, Beverly. Let's talk to Steve from Westchester. Hi Steve, thank you so much for calling wnyc. You're on the air.
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Steve
You're very welcome. Thank you. So my immediate family, my brother and my sister, we are all successful in monetary terms and that kind of thing. And, but I'm really calling about my father's first cousins, all of us were second or third generation Americans, recent immigrants. We don't go back in the US beyond 1910 or so. But my these first cousins of my father went to Ivy League colleges at a time when it was very difficult for Jewish people to achieve entry into those schools. And both of them became people that served the world and their country. One of them became a important research physician in the world of children's blood diseases, and the other one became an important lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. Both of these men, who were their only siblings, each to the other, were dramatically gifted and use their gifts for good. And I can only say that that was likely related to the way they were brought up, because that was the way we were brought up at my house.
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Alison Stewart
Steve, thank you so much for calling in. I do want to get to our next caller, who is Mark from North Plainfield, New Jersey. Hi, Mark.
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Mark
Hi, this is Mark. How are you?
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Alison Stewart
I'm doing great. You're on the air.
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Mark
Sure. So, I mean, I don't know what the secret is, but I have three, you know, eminently successful children, kid in the Naval Academy, going to great colleges and, you know, a high schooler. And I think it's like really a couple of things. It's a mix of I caught the right amount of pushing. You don't want to be these parents, you know, screaming from the sidelines or, you know, pushing the kids over much. But also it's kind of saying, you know what, you have gifts, you have skills, you're blessed, you know, reach your potential. So it's a push, pushing just that right amount. And then the second piece, a little off on the fringe, is the works of Joseph Campbell and myth and seeing their lives not simply as, okay, you're, you know, you know, 21st century kid, you know, in New Jersey or whatever, but seeing your life as a part of a larger story, their story, making themselves a role, you know, and looking at hardships. And I call it the hero's journey, as crazy as that sounds. But, you know, every test, every teacher, that's difficult, you know, you know, staying up late to study as the hero's journey. And part of the hero's journey, as Campbell teaches, is there is like a fall. There are those dark times. So, you know, my takeaways from, you know, being a parent of fairly successful kids is the right amount of pressure. Not too much, not too little. And seeing their lives in not grandiose, but seeing themselves, you know, as in larger terms.
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Alison Stewart
Mark, you're gonna, this is Gonna crack you up. Not crack you up. Joseph Campbell was my mother's thesis advisor and she used to make us read that book, the Heroes Journey when we were little. And it's interesting what he was saying about thinking of yourself as part of something bigger.
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Susan Dominus
And do you think that you and your siblings did?
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Alison Stewart
I don't know if we did, but we thought it was kind of cool.
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Susan Dominus
Yeah, I mean, everybody, you know, Jenny Wallace is working on this beautiful book called Mattering. And I think it's about the sense that you're, you know, why? Because you're contributing. Because it matters in some more profound way than just achievement for achievement's sake.
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Alison Stewart
What is birth order? What is. How does that factor into it?
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Susan Dominus
Well, so we all have these ideas in our head, I think, about what birth order is going to tell us. The oldest is the most conscientious, for example. But it turns out that really well conducted studies of very large sample sizes finds that there is very little effect of birth order on personality after all. Like, it's very typical that someone thinks that the oldest sibling in a family is the most conscientious. But of course that person is the oldest, so they are going to seem the most conscientious. But if you take that person, this oldest sibling, and compare them to the rest of the population, they're not necessarily going to be more conscientious relative to the broad population. So it's. There are certain things we know about the oldest child. A lot of research points to the oldest child having a slight cognitive edge or academic edge over younger siblings, probably because they get the most enrichment during that first year of development. But the idea that we can all explain ourselves by where we are in the birth order. Most people think that you might be able to explain yourself in your family dynamic that way, but in the world as you operate less so.
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Alison Stewart
What surprised you as you were reporting this book?
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Susan Dominus
You know, I went into the book thinking I was gonna talk to tons and tons of parents and find out from them what the secret was and what did they do in order to. What were the sayings they had around the house, what were the rituals, the rules. And when I really drilled down, I saw how much of these young people's success was due to their siblings. And, you know, I talk about how it's almost like the parents send the arrow of ambition soaring into the air, but then the siblings help direct it, focus it, land it in families where there is a lot of collaboration and cooperation. I think when you see a number of siblings succeed, if they come from a disadvantaged background. In particular, it almost always requires some kind of collaboration, networking, really pulling each other along. They need that extra boost that other people who come from privilege have from other resources.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Mary, who's calling in from Pearl River, New York. Hi, Mary, thank you for taking the time to call, all of it. You're on the air.
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Beverly
Thank you.
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Mary
Thank you for taking my call. Listening to the segment. I'm a adult child, obviously of immigrants. And one of the things that stuck out from listening to the previous stories was I had a father who thought his daughters could do anything they wanted to do. And I think that that in looking back was so important to how myself and my sister developed and, you know, succeeded really well in the business world. Whereas when I would look and talk to other friends, I never heard that, like, you know, my father was really, you know, supportive that you could do anything you wanted to do. So I just wanted to point that out.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you.
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Susan Dominus
I mean, I think one of the things that you see in the children of immigrants is let's think about how challenging it is to immigrate in the first place. Like maybe you're coming from somewhere. You come to America, you barely speak the language, you're starting a new life, you're finding a home, you're starting a business. I think a lot of of immigrants want to honor that hard work, but they also see, wow, if they could, my parents could build a life and they came here not even speaking the language. What can't I do? You know, I'm starting in such an easier place.
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Alison Stewart
That's interesting. This text says my father was the child of immigrants and they immigrated twice. I grew up understanding that a life can be built from nothing if you focus on what is actually possible to do rather than focusing what is normal or the way things are usually done.
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Susan Dominus
That I think, encapsulates it absolutely beautifully.
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Alison Stewart
We're discussing the book the Family Dynamic A Journey into the Mystery Sibling Success. If you want to share, if you're part of a group of successful siblings, we want to know why. What did your parents do? What did you do? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll have more after a quick break. This is ALL OF it. You are listening to ALL OF IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Steward. My guest is Susan Dominus. We're discussing her new book, the Family A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Did I say your last name right?
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Susan Dominus
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
Okay, good. One of the things in your book, you talk to people. Some people come from wealth, some people don't. What did you observe about socioeconomic status?
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Susan Dominus
So as we, as I mentioned before, I think that when there are families who come from a more disadvantaged place financially, I think that the siblings, the siblings dynamic there requires more collaboration and cooperation. And you know, sociologists have written about this. You know, kids who come from less advantaged homes do fewer curriculars. So there's less individuation in a way because there's just, there's no one to like run them around for, to violin lessons versus, you know, tennis lessons. But also they spend more time together. And so sibling spillover effects are also more pronounced in disadvantaged families. So if you can, you know, if there's an intervention of some kind that's going to raise the academics of a young person in disadvantaged family, it actually has ripple effects that affect the whole family, making that intervention all the more valuable.
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Alison Stewart
There's this interesting chapter in the book about these identical twins in Columbia who are separated at birth. And their story reveals something. Because they go to the hospital, there's a mix up. There's an A set of twins and a B set of twins, and they get mixed up. So they go home in different groups. So there's a set of AB twins that go home and a set that goes home, an AB twin. These two sets of twins are not related. They think they're fraternal. They go home to very different environments. What happens in their paths that you found to be interesting? What happens in their life that you kind of expect?
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Susan Dominus
So this is, yeah, this is a fascinating natural experiment that happened because these twins actually, through a series of coincidences, were eventually reunited and met each other. And what was amazing was that two of the twins who were separated at birth, identical twins, one grew up basically serving in the military and he worked on a farm and he never got to go to school. His identical twin grew up in Bogota, got a tremendous education, had speech therapy, and you know, went on to have a very upper middle class life. You know, when they met, there was so much that was different about them in their bearing, but they were both fantastic dancers. They were both a little bit more brusque. They were both always on time. And the other set of identical twins, same thing. They had very different upbringings, but personality wise, they, they were remarkably similar. They were always late, for example, but they were also incredibly easygoing. Even the fights that the two separate sets of twins used to have mirrored each other because they had the same conflicts over and over, but so there were. So the genes were clearly very powerful, but at the same time, their life outcomes were so different because of the experiences, the education, the environment in which they'd grown up. So one of the twins who'd been raised in Bogota was extremely optimistic. And his identical twin, who'd been raised, you know, in the country and had been denied an education, who'd had just a much harder life, just didn't have that same, you know, sort of irrepressible spirit, I would say, because life, in fact, had been much harder for him.
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Alison Stewart
That's a wild chapter in the book. Let's talk to Marguerite. Hi, Marguerite, thank you for calling, all of it.
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Marguerite
Hi, thank you for taking my call. It's funny when you mentioned if you're one of a high achieving family, I thought, oh no, no, that's not me. And then I wait a minute, we're two professors, a medical doctor, a rocket scientist, a CFO and a computer engineer. So I think maybe, yeah, I do. And I think part of that, I think part of our success is that we had this inner thing instilled in us. Our parents were children of the depression. They didn't go to college. It was just that you had to do, you know, you did what you had to do, you did your homework, you studied when you didn't really have to. And I think the fact that the six of us were also very different and my parents did not hover, there were not rules. We did our homework as soon as we came home from school and that was that. And it was a very self directed kind of learning. Three of us started at community colleges and my brother, you know, my brother and I both professors and we started community colleges. I have a PhD, my sister has an MD. So it's very interesting. I think that we could sort of over. It had to be something inside and it had to be something that we got from our parents, that this is the way one behaves or this is the way one goes about in the world.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Saul. Hi Saul, thanks for calling all of it.
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Saul
Hi, thank you for taking the call. I wanted to comment on the guests mention that sometimes siblings make the biggest impact. And I'm the youngest of three. I have two older siblings that are within a year of each other. And then I came five years later and my parents and my siblings were all high academic achievers. My parents both went to Ivy League schools and my siblings got into great schools. But I Think because I was much younger, observing all of this, and I got, let's say, less parental attention, although I didn't realize it at the time. I grew up with this sense of doing better than my siblings, getting that attention that led me into my own Ivy League education. And then professionally and even personally, I've led a much more. What would be called a typically successful life. I'm the only one married with children. I've had a professional career working. I've earned much more money than my siblings. It wasn't something intentional, you know, that I sought out, that I was conscious of doing better. But I think it was probably a quest for attention in my childhood that led me into that. I've done things that I've always wanted to do in the relationships I've wanted to be in and in the profession and pursuing the passions I've wanted to. But it's interesting that in some families, the older one is the rock, the successful one, and the younger ones maybe flail a bit, but in my family, it's actually the reverse.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling us all. We appreciate that. Did you hear anything that you wanted to comment on?
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Susan Dominus
I think more that it just speaks to a little bit the law of averages. Right. Like, just because we know that on average, the oldest person tends to be the most cognitively strong and therefore makes the most money, things can, you know, get twisted around. But also, I think it speaks maybe to this idea of differentiation, like, you wanted to distinguish yourself somehow, is what I'm hearing you say. And I think that is something that, you know, developmental psychologists believe is a real phenomenon in families.
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Alison Stewart
You have twins?
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Susan Dominus
I do.
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Alison Stewart
What question did you have about raising twins as you were writing this book and getting all of this research?
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Susan Dominus
You know, well, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that when you start to research childhood success and parenting pretty quickly, you come into a body of research that tells you that parenting effects are much smaller than we think that they are. It's not parenting matters. Of course it matters. It's just those individual decisions that you think are so monumental about whether to, you know, punish someone a certain way or have a chores chart or not, or co. Sleep. These. These little variations that loving parents can really agonize over probably don't really translate into certain kind of personalities, let's say. Or if you. If you enforce homework rules, you're not necessarily gonna have a more consc. And, you know, as the mother of twins, we saw that all the time. Like, we parented them precisely the same way. We read them the same books. I mean, hours and hours of. We fed them the same food. We did have the same rules. And one of them grew up to be like the social chair of his fraternity at the University of Wisconsin. And his twin brother's only version of Greek life was that he studies Ancient Greek at a tiny liberal arts school of 400. So they couldn't be more different. And we raised them. They heard the same stories, they heard the same values, the same family history all the time. So, you know, I like to think that we had a positive effect, but obviously we've had very little control over their general leanings.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Carol from Montclair. Carol, you've got about a minute?
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Mary
Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me. I just want to say, I think, you know, my family, I come from large families, six siblings. And I think we're successful in, you know, a number of ways. We're all educated. We have teachers, professors, lawyers in the family. And everybody's in the same marriage, you know, 40, 50 years later, things like that. And everybody, you know, lives a good life. They're good people. I think it was, you know, part of it was a big family. My parents just set examples to, to be responsible and to also help other people and. But you also have to be sort of independ because, you know, there's only so much parental time to go around, you know, so we, we all kind of learn to be self sufficient and.
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Alison Stewart
And how to get along and how to get along with one another among six kids. You know, somebody asked my dad, how are your daughter so successful? And he said, I don't golf. Which meant he was around on the weekends.
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Susan Dominus
Wow. I actually wanted to ask you about something, which is a lot of the parents in the book that I wrote about, like a disproportionate number turned out to be educators. And if I'm not mistaken, your mom.
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Alison Stewart
My mom was an educator, yes.
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Susan Dominus
And I'd love to hear about how you think that trickled down into your own way that you moved through the world.
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Alison Stewart
I think because I saw it as. I saw a woman take her role as an educator extremely responsibly. It was her job to educate those kids. And she told us that was our job, to be educated. So you should go to. You go to work every day, you go to school every day. I go to work every day. And she kind of instilled that in us. And then to your point, like when you're around something long enough, when you're around education long enough, you develop interest in other things. So that was kind of how she dealt it. And my dad was like, he was just always home on the weekends. He couldn't be there during the week, but he was always home on the weekends.
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Susan Dominus
Yeah, I think that presence really makes a difference. And just instilling, always instilling the value of education. Like, obviously we know that is the, you know, that is a reliable path to success. And so if it's clear that that's a family value and that's it's not just something your parents say, but they live and breathe it, I think it has to reinforce that.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the book is the Family Dynamic. It is by Susan Dominus. Thank you so much for coming in and taking calls with us.
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Susan Dominus
It's truly been my pleasure. Thank you for having me. NYC now delivers breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening. By sponsoring our programming, you'll reach a community of passionate listeners in an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to learn more.