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- [00:01]
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- [00:29]
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- [01:01]
Mia Sorrenti
Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. Our relationships with our siblings often last longer than any others in our lives. Yet despite their lasting influence, they are often overlooked in favor of relationships with parents, partners or children. On today's episode, author Catherine Carr speaks to host Maithili Rao about how these early bonds shape our identity, our families, and the people we become.
- [01:28]
Maithili Rao
Together.
- [01:28]
Mia Sorrenti
They explore how these lifelong bonds shape who we become, from birth order and family dynamics to estrangement, grief and the challenges of caring for aging parents. Let's join our host, Maitha Lee Rao, now with more.
- [01:41]
Maithili Rao
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. Katherine Carr, welcome to the show.
- [01:45]
Catherine Carr
Thank you very much for having me, Katherine.
- [01:48]
Maithili Rao
I feel I should start by saying that I'm not someone who particularly needs convincing about the value of sibling relationships. I've always looked up to my older brother. His influence on me has been enormous. We live on different continents now, but he's still someone who's very important to me. And actually the earrings I'm wearing today are a gift from my brother. They're shaped like boxes of fruity mango, which is a juice that used to be. I think it's still sold in India, but it references a time 30 some years ago when I vomited fruity mango all over my brother on an Indian Airlines flight. This is an airline that doesn't even exist anymore, but something obviously neither of us have forgotten. So basically I know what it's like to get very lucky in the sibling lottery. And for me, as a parent, one of the great joys of parenthood has been seeing the bond between my two kids grow as they get older. Your relationship with your own siblings is pretty fascinating as you write about in this book, and it's something I want to ask you about, but I thought maybe we could just start with the etymology of the word sibling itself, which I did not know about until reading this book. So where does the word sibling come from? Because I think it kind of will put us in a good headspace for this conversation.
- [02:58]
Mia Sorrenti
Yeah.
- [02:58]
Catherine Carr
So this is something that Susie Dent, who you'll know from Countdown and from Nothing Rhymes with Purple and other podcasts like that, told me, which is the word sibling comes from the word godsib, which was sort of. Well, sort of the root, I think, of the word godparent as well, which was a woman who would help another woman through labor and maybe like a doula today would be in that quite privileged and intimate space and would be gossiping and sharing wisdom and kind of bonding in that female to female way. So it's also the root of the word gossip. If I'm right in remembering, if I feel like you're testing me on a dissertation that I wrote a long time ago. But I think it's quite interesting that the two roots, like gossip and godparent and sibling, and this idea of being intimately connected at an important point in life is part of where we get the word sibling from. And I think it first appeared in text in Shakespeare, I think, in the 16th century, if I'm right.
- [03:55]
Maithili Rao
Yeah. When I read that, I guess what struck me was that it was less about mapping a biological relationship than commenting on the way people were brought together or the ways they had to look after each other or some other kind of connection they have, which I think we think of the word sibling as a very literal descriptor of relationship people have. But obviously it's not just that, it's many other things.
- [04:24]
Catherine Carr
I think you're right. And I think that kind of cuts across the whole story about siblings, really, which is we expect intimacy and closeness to be delivered by blood, but it can't always and doesn't always. And yet with the way that birth rates and the shapes of families are going, we're going to be finding families that look outside of those DNA connected or blood connected relationships to build families. So you have chosen sisters and chosen brothers and urban families and things like that. And I think you're right. There's an idea of affinity or sharing important things in life which can that can happen with somebody that you just know terribly well, doesn't have to be related to you. And in the book, I think I talk about the. Well, I know I talk about the proverb that the blood, you know, blood is thicker than water, actually has been sort of reimagined or reinterpreted to be closer to the biblical original, which is that the blood of the. No, the water of the womb, the blood of the covenant, is thicker than the water of the womb, which sort of means actually the covenant which binds us as spiritual brothers and sisters can be more binding than the water of the womb in which, you know, natural siblings would share. And I, I really like that idea that if this big ought about being close to our brothers and sisters, we ought to be close to them. They're our brothers and sisters. If that doesn't work for you because of upset reasons or you just don't get on, or maybe you don't have any siblings, that that intimacy is actually available somewhere else. And it goes right back to the beginning meanings of the word. It's kind of neat.
- [06:04]
Maithili Rao
You write about your own sibling story in this book, which is quite unusual. Very complicated in some ways painful, I think, from your childhood, but it's also brought so much love and richness into your life. The shorthand version as you describe it is that you were, quote, the trio of sisters, step siblings in two countries, seven kids in the mix. So tell me a little more about your siblings and about that arrangement.
- [06:29]
Catherine Carr
Yeah, it is unusual. So I was, I am one of three girls and I'm the middle and my older sister's 20 odd months older than me and my little sister is six years younger than me. So quite a big gap there. And then when we were all little and the baby was very little, we moved to the Netherlands for my father's job. And then after a while, six years, my parents split up, which is, you know, very common. But what was a bit less common was that they split the children up too. So my little sister stayed with my mom and then me and my older sister stayed with my dad. And then quite soon after that, me, my older sister and my dad, if you're keeping up, moved back to the uk and my mom and my little sister stayed in Holland. And so I think what that did was sort of set up this, well, all sorts of things. It set up a sort of nature nurture experiment. You get raised in this country by this parent and you get raised in this country with this parent, you have no siblings most of the time. Around you and you have a sibling most of the time around you. But also it blew out of the water for me, the taking for granted of siblings, which I think you can have if you grow up in the same house as your blood step or half siblings. You know, this idea that actually they're always there and you kind of get annoyed with them and you wish they weren't. I never really had that. I was always missing them. And so a lot of my adult life has been since late teens, kind of particularly with my little sister trying to get back to being intimate enough to be annoyed with her rather than being polite or just not really knowing what was going on in her life.
- [08:08]
Maithili Rao
I wanted to ask more about the annoyance factor because one thing I did enjoy about the book was how often you reached for comparison in children's books about siblings, and in particular Judy Blume's Super Fudge and that series and Beverly Cleary's Ramona series, both big hits with my kids and books that I grew up with. And recently rereading them as an adult like you, I've appreciated even more the way they celebrate how annoying siblings can be. And I say that as the annoying one, the little sister. But revisiting them again, you know, I've also really kind of drawn the conclusion that the books have a message that being annoying is the glue of a sibling bond.
- [08:49]
Catherine Carr
Do you.
- [08:49]
Maithili Rao
Do you agree with that?
- [08:50]
Catherine Carr
I do, and I think it's borne out by research, too. So Dr. Clare Hughes, who's the head of the Family center for Research at Cambridge University, says that actually the sort of mild rivalry and annoyance almost serves the same psychological function as the getting on well with your siblings in terms of increasing your aptitude for sociability, your ability to make friends, your development of theory of mind, all the things that you can get by being a sibling. And I would put parenthesis having a close cousin or people that you see regularly, but those can also be increased or served or whatever the right word is. By being annoyed, you learn, we all know this if you have a co worker who's irritating. We learn a lot about ourselves and about how to operate in the world by learning to do the job and getting on with the annoying co worker. So you just have to extrapolate that backwards. We learn a lot as kids by being annoyed by each other and with. It's very intimate. You know, we're a gaggle in a nest or in a. Whatever the equivalent analogy is, you're kind of stuck and you have to make the best of it.
- [09:58]
Maithili Rao
We all know the various cliches about birth order and what the firstborn is supposed to be. And you draw on a lot of research on family dynamics in this book. And it is surprising how not all of the research supports our beloved, our well loved beliefs about what the oldest, what the baby, so on does and how much of it is shaped by cultural context and varies from country to country. What really surprised you as you got into this research?
- [10:32]
Catherine Carr
I think I like to think of it now, and I didn't put this in the book. I'm a big fan of a slightly tortured metaphor, but I like to think of it now like a. Like your sibling identity is a bit like a train. Bear with me. So almost the engine is the birth order, where you sit in the family. So this is sort of immutable really. And it's been shown in research. Even if a child dies in childhood, people still stick to the spot that they had when that sibling was alive. It's sort of quite identity forming in our heads. So you have that as the engine. And then I think all the different carriages that you kind of click on are different things. So maybe gender, maybe you're the, whether you're the eldest boy or the eldest girl, that matters because you could be the second or third born, but you're still the oldest daughter. And then culture. So whether you're born in the west or elsewhere, and so the expectations of culture are like little carriages. What does it mean being the oldest boy, let's say in the sub Saharan Africas, In Sub Saharan Africa, the study by Michael Tanuque that I mention in the book, what does it mean in some of those countries to be the firstborn boy? And how does that differ from being the firstborn boy? Maybe in the States? So I think you have this, you're right, these beloved ideas about birth order. But most people, when they're talking about siblings, this is why I wrote the book, just look at the engine. Oldest, middle baby. Oh, well, here's the cliches. And then they never look beyond it. They never look really at gender, they never look really at culture. They don't really look at socioeconomic circumstances, they don't look at history. You know, read China and their move from a one child policy to advocating for three children, all of these things, that's general. And then also add on to that your particular family circumstances, you know, whether your parents continue to accrue wealth or lose it, or whether something terrible or wonderful happens to a family, you move to a big house or a little house, all of these environmental factors which kind of swill around that individual who's the eldest, middle or baby. It influences them all. So as a concrete example, in the west, you know, there have been studies which show that the oldest child is, quote, unquote, more intelligent. Whatever. They score slightly higher on an IQ test. Doesn't mean they're actually more intelligent. It might mean that they've had more parental resources in terms of attention and time funneled into them as the first child when they were the only child in the family. Doesn't always mean that, but let's just say sometimes it does. They may then go on to attain a sort of quote, unquote, better career or for want of a better expression, be a doctor or a lawyer. But actually, in other parts of the world, the firstborn child may not even finish tertiary education because very quickly they're asked to go into the world of work, not as a doctor or a lawyer, but maybe working for a daily wage to support their siblings. So it might be the second born in those cultures who is quote, unquote, cleverer simply because they have the resources funneled into them. So I think it isn't a book which looks enough for all the different cultures because then I would have ended up writing seven volumes. But I think it's really worthwhile thinking about how these stereotypes just aren't enough.
- [13:58]
Maithili Rao
I could just stay on those global variations for a moment. You also write about some of the unexpected impacts of the one child policy in China, as you just mentioned. What happens to a country that tries to legislate only having one child?
- [14:13]
Catherine Carr
I think that's so interesting. And some of the researchers from Cambridge University that I spoke to, one of them, she was a very rare child who had a sibling during the time of the one child policy and how she felt this absolute kind of comprehensive cultural disapproval of her family setup. I think what's interesting about that is how you might assume families in certain socioeconomic circumstances. You might assume, for example, that a white collar family with one child, that child may go on to have all sorts of advantages and do better in life because of their position. But actually, in China, it's been shown that those families are often owning their own businesses or working really, really hard to attain that standard of living. And those resources I've described don't funnel down into that one child. In more blue collar families, the research has shown that that child could end up doing better because there's more time available to then invest in that child. But across the board, I think it creates a very Strange sort of. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, sort of dynamic where one child, whatever resources have been funneled into them, is very alive to the fact that as the little king, as they describe it, is wearing a really heavy crown. And that when they get older, they're going to be. Because policies for health and social care being what they are in China, they're going to be responsible for their parents and grandparents and then their own children as well. So what is funneled into them, even more than in the West, I would argue, where we do in the end look after our parents. But in China, it's like this incredible burden. And so when they look now at the advice to have three children, which is what the government would quite like, policies haven't moved on. And these kids, only children who are now having their own children, are thinking, there's no way we can afford that because I'm paying for all of these elderly people in my life. So it's a very, very interesting shift. And the reasons why it hasn't happened in the way the government would like are fascinating. I think the coming out of China about that transformation is really interesting.
- [16:29]
Maithili Rao
There's a whole chapter in the book as well, about only children, not just in China, but more broadly, in which you make the argument that it might be time to, quote, press harder for a wholesale rebrand of their reputation. And of course, the stereotypes about only children are maybe that they're selfish, that they never quite develop the full range of social skills that children with siblings naturally acquire, that they have a. Yeah, they are missing something by not growing up with siblings. But you say a closer look at the research debunks some of that. What does the research show?
- [17:06]
Catherine Carr
Nearly all of it. Nearly all of it. I mean, it's a fascinating story that I think he was a. I know he was a contemporary of Freud, this guy called Hall, Granville Hall. He was invited to the States, I think, by Freud originally, or the other way around. Freud was invited to the States by him. Anyway. He conducted this completely bonkers experiment. It's not really an experiment looking at peculiar and exceptional children, his words. And to sort of get his data set, if you like, he wrote to people who ran private schools, I guess, back in the late 19th century in America and gathered, I don't know, a bunch of kids. And he asked the people who ran these schools to note down which of them might be nervous or gluttonous or have a cleft palate or be, I don't know, walk with a limb or like all sorts of crazy Victorian ailments.
- [18:00]
Maithili Rao
Maladies.
- [18:01]
Catherine Carr
Yeah, maladies. Like things which, you know, bear no consequence to a person's personality anyway, by and large. And he put those under the sort of category of peculiar or exceptional. And then he crunched the data and he concluded that a larger proportion than you'd expect of the general population of these peculiar and exceptional children came from an only child family. And so that his conclusion was only children are more likely to be peculiar or exceptional. I mean, the science that it is, not science. But he also kind of looked at the natural world and was like, oh, look at the piglets and the, I don't know, the birds. They have a gaggle or a litter and look how happy they are. I mean, this was kind of. Anyway, so that stuck. That research really stuck, that they would be socially maladjusted and lonely. And it was like a sort of curse or disability idea that you'd be an only child. If you look at Victorian literature or late era Victorian literature, you can't escape the lonely only who's being saved by, you know, friends or circumstance from their terrible predicament. Add on to that the Great depression in the 1920s, when having an only child was a real stigma because it meant you didn't have enough money to have more. And it sort of doesn't matter how many studies have been been done year after year and decade after decade showing that actually only children may be a little bit socially disadvantaged by being in a more adult environment until maybe the age of 11 or 12. And disadvantaged, by the way, not across the board. Their vocabulary is probably better and they're very adept at sort of conducting themselves in an adult environment. But that can be a bit tricky when they're then at school, whatever. The scorecard shows that by the time they're 12, it's all a level playing field. And actually, I'll tell you something that happened yesterday. I was talking to my friend Stacy, who lives in the States, and she's in my acknowledgments, she's an only child and she's taught me how to stay in touch with someone who lives a long way away. She's a master at it, or mistress. And I said this to her yesterday. She's just finished the book. She phoned up to say she enjoyed it. That's nice. And to say thank you for the acknowledgement. And she said, you know, I realized that maybe I taught you how to stay in touch with friends who are far away because I'm an only child. And that's what the research shows is that only children are better at making and keeping friends because they don't take their people for granted like siblings can. They've had to work intentionally for every peer relationship they have, and as a result, they cherish them better than we do sometimes. And I thought, how perfect that my only child friend phoned up to say, oh, I realize why I am maybe the way I am now and why I'm such a good friend. And I was like, there you go.
- [20:56]
Maithili Rao
Oh, that's lovely. Let's stay on the only children topic a little longer, because you mentioned the falling fertility rate, and I think I've seen it anecdotally among women my age or a little younger, where it's more common for women starting families to have one kid and kind of be pretty sure that that's all they're going to have. And are we looking. So are we looking at a future where having a sibling is less common? And what kind of world will that be? What you've just described is almost a utopian vision where all these only children are really good at looking out for each other. But do you have any thoughts on that?
- [21:37]
Catherine Carr
I mean, I'm not a population scientist, but I mean, if you look across the world, birth rates, rather than fertility rates, birth rates are falling, although I think in the UK they've crept up a tiny bit. But in France, where I just was a couple of weeks ago, they're right down. Right. So you sort of think, well, what will this look like for only children my age now? It's very difficult because, as I described in China, they are the only child now on the hook for emotionally and practically and sometimes financially caring for two parents, Absolutely fine. You know, you love your parents, you want to do your best. Psychologically, that's a burden. But I am, I sort of imagine in the future, if there are more and more only children and they're good at making friends intentionally and keeping them right, that maybe there'll have to be a new way of describing family. As we started the interview saying, you can have chosen brothers and sisters and you can lean on them heavily if you have good friends. So maybe only children are going to have to rely on each other, like chosen brothers and sisters to share the emotional burden of caring for elderly parents on their own. I end the chapter on only children with a letter, I think, to the New York Times saying, you know, it's fine being an only child, but you're an only child for 18 years and you're an only adult for another 60 or 70. And that can be as life unfolds, where you can feel a little bit, I'd say isolated rather than lonely. Because I think mixed into the idea of only children is this really silly sort of wrong headed idea that having a sibling will save you from being lonely. And being an only child means you must always be lonely. I think we're surely more intelligent about human relationships and human nature and what it is to be alive than that. And I've often said, you know, I, I get lonely, I've got two wonderful sisters, I think we all get lonely. That's part of being a human walking this planet. And the idea that you might have a brother or sister with whom you have an average relationship and you catch up with twice a year, but somehow they're going to magically save you from loneliness is bananas. Equally, if you're an only child, why would it necessarily follow that everything that's challenging about being a human that's alive in this world is solely down to the fact you don't have an average sibling? Crazy. So I think there is a time now for us to relook at the idea of only children. We're going to have more of them. They're going to have to find ways to find support to deal with being an only adult for all of those years. But also for those of us with siblings living alongside them in the world, I think we could probably learn from them about being emotionally more careful with people. I think sometimes part of the taking siblings for granted can lead to really ugly behaviour between siblings. Violence and upsetting behaviour that we, you know, we let kids beat each other up. Oh, don't worry, they're just siblings. I mean, that idea to an only child is an anathema. It should be one to everybody. Why are we putting sibling relationships in a special category where we allow people to hurt each other because they're siblings? So I think there is a sort of, by looking at only children, it shines a really bright light on sibling relationships too. And I think that's really interesting. When I spoke to only children for the book, it really made me examine some of my cultural preconceptions about what it is to be a sibling and the behavior that we expect and allow and the heavy burden that we place on it all over again. And it continues to do that when I think about it. So I think I could have written a book about only children. That's what I'm saying.
- [25:40]
Indeed Advertiser
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- [26:08]
Home Depot Advertiser
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- [26:40]
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- [26:40]
Maithili Rao
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- [27:03]
Catherine Carr
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- [27:06]
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- [28:11]
Maithili Rao
You also interviewed a lot of step siblings and obviously there's some in your family. And you know from your own experience how divorce and Remarriage can completely reconfigure how siblings relate to each other. When you started investigating what this looked like in other families, what did you find out about step siblings?
- [28:29]
Catherine Carr
Gosh, it's so interesting because there's such scant research about step siblings and step families and half siblings and families that are, you know, with half children and then whatever they're called, blended families. Sorry. And I think that's a theme in the whole book that sibling research is hard to do. You know, the, the train I described at the beginning with all of these variables means that once you study a family with more than two children, it almost becomes unwieldy. So it's easier really, I think, almost to have theories or ideas which you can apply to all families, regardless of shape or size. So all of that is to say, when I started to look for research about step siblings, half siblings, blended families and stuff, I found that in the States, for example, when the Pew Research center gathers data about family shape and sizes, until really recently, I can't remember where there'd be like one box to tick for siblings. And it didn't differentiate at all. There's no granular data about all of these children living in differently shaped sized and configured family setups. So it's hard to say anything with much authority, except that as one therapist pointed out to me, what we do know about children is that when the rate of change in childhood increases, so can the levels of unhappiness. It's quite difficult sometimes for children to manage the ways that all these relationships intersect and find their place and their importance and know what access they have to resources from parents in a very shifting environment. Because if, and I don't want to make people go cross eyed with this because I think complicated families are impossible to follow. But if you just imagine for a while a child who's living in a home with, let's say, a mum and a stepdad, it might mean that then on the weekend they leave that house and go and live with their dad and their stepmom. But that might mean also there's another step sibling or half sibling there who goes and lives in another house some of the time. So you have this sort of exponential web of children moving around different environments, places with different rules, places where relationships look different, where they feel more important or less important. They don't know what their USP is. And that's a really important thing about being a sibling is like, what's your niche? What's your brand? What's your role? What are you known and loved for children seek that out, I think. And that can be difficult if all of a sudden there's new step siblings who are better at football than you or cuter than you, or they're a baby and they need time and now you're not the baby anymore. So I think all of that is very, very interesting. But going back to my point about general theories is that, you know, family systems theory and change theory and all of these ideas about good therapy, they're good ideas about therapy and families. They can also be applied to these very unwieldy new families and, you know, rules like good communication and I think a little bit more understanding, which is why I wrote the book about siblings and having new language with which to describe their experience can really help parents. I didn't set out to write a parenting book, but that chapter particularly, I felt like, oh, all of these things I've learned in, let's say, quote unquote, normal families are really helpful pop psychology tools sometimes that you can then import into tricky families to give the siblings when they're grown up. But the parents, right from the start, almost like a handbook of language or ideas to help understand and explain and communicate about the situation they're in. Because the big problem with siblings is that I think unlike romantic relationships or relationships with our mums that might be complicated, about which we've understood, ideas from therapy have trickled into the lexicon. I don't think much language about siblings has trickled into everyday use and that leaves people a bit stumped. So no research. On the one hand, not much kind of common language to share ideas with. On the other hand, I don't think that's a great mix for a lot of children dealing with those sorts of situations. Does that make, you know, does that. I feel like that's quite convoluted. It's as convoluted as the families.
- [33:14]
Maithili Rao
Yeah, I think it's. It's about, as you said, examining where do we already have a set of shared ideas and assumptions that we lean on and where are they kind of hiding in plain view these unexamined aspects of relationships that are very crucial still.
- [33:35]
Catherine Carr
So I'll give you a really concrete example if that was too nebulous, which is no child grows up in the same family. Even if you live in the same house, your two kids, Kids do not grow up in the same family. They have a totally different experience of childhood to one another. There's commonalities, but they're different ages, they have a different mum who Knows more, knows less, is older, is younger, things happen in their childhood. Two years younger than did that didn't happen in their siblings. That idea of a non shared environment childhood and how we bring out different things in our parents so have these unique relationships with our parents, that is an idea which I will confess blew my mind when I first kind of appreciated it five years ago. And it's a great idea to then transpose onto a step family because how much more significant is that idea in that complicated whereby described of kids popping in and out of homes and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that means that when you're older, if you understand that we don't share a childhood and your childhood was complicated or messy, it gives you a tool to say what did it look like for you? And when mum left or when dad was away or when you went to your stepbrother's, what was that like? Because I didn't see that bit. So you find a point of connection. You can put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, which I think is a really great exercise.
- [34:57]
Maithili Rao
Something that you write about that has not been in the popular consciousness as much but maybe is entering it more so is sibling estrangement. And of course you get into the great drama here in the UK in recent years of Prince Harry and Prince William and their difficult relationship documented in Spare Harry's memoir. A book that you write was something of a gift to the estrangement community. I someone who finds very little about British monarchy relatable. So what was it about Harry's account of his estrangement with William that so many people related to and found familiar?
- [35:35]
Catherine Carr
I think it was. I mean, look, some of the details are sort of funny and the quote I put in the book is, is sort of funny because it's palaces, you know, nurseries and palaces is not really relatable. But those experts in the estrangement community and people with experience of sibling estrangement, which I think according to the biggest study I could find, is like 28% of people have had one or more period of estrangement. Because people cycle in and out often of these things. I think they felt like, ah, thank goodness someone's talking about it. And that's because, as I said, there's not very much research about siblings, period. So there's not very much research about smaller aspects of sibling experience like estrangement or bereavement. So they felt like, great. It shines a light on something which affects over a quarter of siblings and by extension shines A light on the idea of siblings more generally. And why that's important, I think is because there's a real suspicion that people who've had experience of sibling estrangement describe of this idea. Well, if you can't even get on with your brother or sister, like, are you to be trusted as a person? Because as I said a while ago, you ought to love them. That's what fairy tales and myths in the Bible teaches us and other religious texts, by the way, we ought to get on with our brother and sister. So if you don't, you're breaking some sort of weird cultural, religious, whatever it is, code. And these morality tales often teach us that something truly terrible will happen, by the way, if we don't get on with our brother or sister. But the truth of the matter is, as I said, we can't exceptionalize these relationships and just say, oh, yes, you can beat up your brother or sister, you can treat them really badly, you can emotionally abuse them, but because we ought to stay in relation with them, being estranged is terrible. Actually, no. For some people who have been treated badly or their relationship has broken down, it is a really sensible decision not to have a relationship with that person in exactly the same way you would choose not to have a relationship with someone like that in your life who made you feel bad, treated you bad, whatever. That's not like I'm advocating for thoughtless cutting off, you know, I don't think that really happens anyway with siblings. I think it's a lot more painful than that. I think social media portrays it weirdly. I'm just saying, as I said, with only children, let's think really carefully about what this relationship is and how if it's become dysfunctional or hurtful, as an adult, I think you're allowed to say, I don't really want this to continue because it's really not nice. Just because they're my brother or sister doesn't mean I should have to. And by the way, this is, as I said about the carriages, this is often gendered. So often you'll have an amenable, maybe emotional, caretaking daughter in the mix who has been asked, not always daughters, but let's just say ever since, ever since, to be the sort of helpful, amenable, putting up with it girl, you know, there's bad behavior elsewhere in the family. Well, you're the good one. You just, you mitigate for it. You kind of be the salve. And actually those women, when they grow up, are often lent on to continue to be the good girl. The amenable one, the golden child in it's easier for parents to say, I don't want to reimagine this whole family and ask X or Y to behave better. Because it's always been the case that it's easier just to ask you to put up with it. And actually I think sometimes as middle aged people, men and women, but the ones I spoke to were mainly women. They say, you know what? I don't want to carry on performing this role of the putting up person or the smoothing it over person or the looking the other way person. If my parents can't ask the one who's being badly behaved to sort it out. I think I've had enough. And I think that's very interesting. When we think as parents about what we ask our children to do sometimes, you know, it made me think as a parent, oh yeah. I wonder if sometimes I've created a dynamic that's a bit unhelpful.
- [40:01]
Maithili Rao
Right. In the spirit of a lesser figure out, just figure out how to play. Find a way to play together. I like to quote Daniel Tiger.
- [40:08]
Catherine Carr
Yeah, I think that's one thing, but I think a sort of continued narrative where you're casting one child into the just suck it up your. Whatever. You are older, more sensible, more amenable, whatever. I think that's where it gets a bit uncomfortable and that can be. Whereas adults, the cracks start to show. Not always, but that is one of the risk factors. And I found that fascinating, particularly with the older daughter, eldest daughter idea, which is kind of, which is sort of surfacing I think, in culture.
- [40:47]
Maithili Rao
I want to also touch on the pain of sibling bereavement, which you write about as being, again, as with so much in this book, unique in certain ways that's not been fully explored in other forums. And sometimes it comes with a kind of survivor's guilt. Sometimes it comes with that burden of taking on additional responsibilities and family. It maybe happens when one child is quite young, maybe it happens later in life. Are there particular things you learned about the way sibling bereavement is different from other kinds of grief that that surprised you?
- [41:28]
Catherine Carr
Yeah. I found this oddly sort of the most not enjoyable but meditative sort of chapter to write really because. And it's purposefully at the end, not to leave people feeling sad at the end of the book. But to my point about research, I felt like if I didn't tell the story of siblings generally, how could I ask people to really engage with this idea of sibling loss if they hadn't understood really What I think about siblings, which is how important they are and how foundational. What I hadn't really considered when I thought about siblings generally is the idea that these relationships go from vertical in the birth order we've discussed oldest, middle, baby, etc. To as you get into adults, to being horizontal and you hopefully become more like peers. You shouldn't really be talking about your baby brother when he's a 54 year old CFO or something, just making it sound. So you should be aiming towards something peer like, equitable, friendlike. But what that sort of means is if you lose your sibling, let's say as an adult, you're doing this sort of horizontal grief of somebody that shares so much of your history and who's known you since forever and who you're similar age to and who shared not totally your perspective on the world because we have these different experiences of childhood. But really the paradox is one of the best hopes for sharing your perspective on the world that we have. And if they go, they can take a chunk of that with them. Some of your memories, some of your like, ideas about the world and where they came from, like some of your identity. It can be very shocking because they're similar age to you and you can think, oh, it's quite frightening about your mortality as well. But I think it's just often overlooked because the parent, if they're still alive, has then lost a child, which is against the actual order of things and is abhorrent really, whatever age to lose a child. And if that sibling is an adult, they might have their own children, which means that child has lost a parent, which is just terribly painful. So these vertical griefs seem to often be preferenced or put higher up the scale than this horizontal grief of the sort of shared childhood and history loss, which is like a sucker punch. And more than that, the sibling who's lost their brother or sister is often asked to look after all these other people who are sad and rarely is the focus on them and their loss. And I found that just so, I don't know, almost I felt, felt convicted by it. Like I'd known people who'd lost twins and like siblings as children and siblings as adults. And even I end the book talking about my grandmother who lost her sibling when he was 21 in World War II. And I hadn't really considered that in that loss she lost the ability to know him as an adult. He was 21 and she was younger. They never got to be horizontal and to grow up together. So you lose a projected Future as well as a shared past. And there is a charity, Sibling Support. I went to an event at Parliament to talk about it. They're trying to build a database for schools, really, so that children who lose siblings are kind of recognized more in their grief in the educational setting and offered support for that because it's not really talked about. And yet imagine a little person coming to school having lost their brother or sister. Not really being known in that grief really breaks my heart. So they're doing incredible work about that. And it, you know, it has all sorts of impact into mental health for men and women, obviously, as adults as well. But, yeah, I. That's the one that I probably think about. And I've certainly got in touch with people since who I've known who've lost siblings. And when I've read some of the research and then thought about those people, I think I felt a bit guilty that I hadn't considered them properly. Not fully. Yeah. I think it's not really. It's not really a cultural idea that loss.
- [45:53]
Maithili Rao
Before we go, I wanted to return to your siblings and your sister Bex. You wrote she was about to turn 50 as you finished this book, and that the experiences of being a sibling are rarely given the requisite time or space. Obviously, this book goes a long way to remedy that. How has working on this book and the podcast that you made about sibling experiences changed how you approach your own relationship with your siblings?
- [46:19]
Catherine Carr
Well, that's such a good question. I think it's made me realize that the process I described that I went through with my younger sibling, about putting together our different perspectives of childhood and trying to be like, oh, you're the main character in your memories and I'm the main character in mine. How about that? You know, so obvious when you think about it. But we don't do it. I think when I started writing the book, I thought, yes, and I've done that. Aren't I clever? You know, that's kind of done. And then the more I wrote the book, the more I thought, actually you've written, Catherine, about the idea that these are the longest potentially lasting relationships of our lives, and they evolve tremendously. We make each other aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters in law. You know, we might be there when everybody else is gone. We might be in care homes together, reminiscing. There's all these tangly, beautiful ideas about memory and history and language and, oh, it's so rich that by the end of the book, I thought, I'm just at the foothills of this evolving bond that I have with my sisters and there's more work to do. Like if it is true that our siblings can be a source of happiness and well being in later life, if we're lucky enough to have a relationship relationship which is good and has care both ways, then what was I thinking that I'd done the work? You know, that's crazy to me. So there's more. There's more to put in and more to get out is what I was thinking. But in saying that, I don't want to sound like some sort of Hallmark card for like, you know, like sunsetty meme of nonsense because, because I also learned that, that it's okay for it to be tricky too and the evolving can be up and down and you know, and not to sort of advertise working hard on your sibling relationship to achieve some sort of sibling nirvana as like the conclusion of the book. I think if I tried to do anything with the book, it was to take a very clear eyed and comprehensive look at the sibling bond in all of its iterations. For me that means more work, hopefully to build a better bond for others. It will mean something very, very different. But that's probably where I am with my sisters.
- [48:36]
Maithili Rao
Kathryn, thank you so much.
- [48:37]
Catherine Carr
Thank you so much.
- [48:39]
Maithili Rao
I've been speaking with Catherine Carr, author of who's the the Loving Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships. I'm Maitha Lee Rao. You're listening to Intelligence Squared.
- [48:51]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Rober for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [49:28]
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- [49:58]
Maithili Rao
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [50:05]
Catherine Carr
Well I'm letting go of the worry
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Catherine Carr
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Catherine Carr
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Catherine Carr
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [50:22]
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- [50:26]
Catherine Carr
1-800-contacts. I see you.
- [50:30]
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Catherine Carr
this is the only pure thing in this world.
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- [50:50]
Catherine Carr
This is sick.
- [50:54]
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