Can siblings harm your mental health?
I read recently that people from large families have poorer mental health than those with fewer siblings.
Since I have six siblings, this caught my attention. Compounding matters, my wife tells me I’m nuts because I sometimes talk to inanimate objects. In my defense, I do this because, unlike with my wife, I can control the narrative.
Of course if inanimate objects suddenly engage me in conversation, I’ll immediately book an appointment with Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony Soprano’s leggy, bespectacled, dusky-voiced shrink.
A study published in the Journal of Family Issues analyzed the relationship between family size and siblings’ mental health.
Granted, every family is different — making this a very nuanced topic. Siblings can run the gamut from saints to scoundrels. Assuming your kin land somewhere in between, the study cited some likely reasons why multiple siblings might negatively impact you.
Limited resources are the primary culprit. With more people to care for, the more resources are divided up. Researchers call this resource dilution. Normal people like the Zielinski family I grew up in call this having dessert only on Fridays or having to choose between a cheeseburger OR fries on the infrequent occasions we went out for fast food.
A longitudinal (as opposed to a latitudinal) study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology showed that financial strain in families is a significant predictor of mental health problems, most notably anxiety and depression, in children.
Resource dilution transcends finances. Children raised in households with lots of siblings sometimes are underserved emotionally by parents who are too busy arguing why the hell they aren’t better at birth control. Such kids feel neglected, isolated, unseen and unheard.
Of course, if you’re wearing clothes that were handed down from three older siblings, it might be best to be unseen. Four out of five fashion designers and three out of four psychotherapists agree on that.
Limited resources can also create competition between siblings competing for parental attention. It’s Math 101 that more siblings equal more competition. On the rare occasions we’d go to the movies as a family, there often were fisticuffs squabbling for our dad’s attention. Not because we liked the guy all that much, but because he was holding the box of Raisinets.
Growing up in an overpopulated home with different personalities and individual behaviors can lead to a more chaotic environment with lots of noise, less privacy and more conflict.
The definition of stress is having seven kids and two parents in a house with only one bathroom. No wonder our nervous systems were perpetually toggling between in fight or flight, a hyperkinetic mess guaranteed to knock a few screws loose in even the most stable of minds.
And our meals resembled a Vikings’ banquet hall with all the yelling and wrestling for food. If you didn’t have octopus arms, cobra-quick reflexes and the sticky fingers of a subway pickpocket, you wound up as skinny as a foul pole.
We never set an example of civility at our table and an English butler never set our table. With so many voices screaming to be heard, the cacophony of noise had me considering becoming a Benedictine monk just for the silence.
Speaking of privacy, or the lack thereof, for a few months after my twin sisters were born our grandmother moved in to help out. But we were short on bedrooms. Until our dad converted the attic into a bedroom, 10-year-old me shared a double bed with my 8-year-old brother while our 4-year-old brother shared a twin bed with our grandmother — all in the same bedroom.
I won’t say things were smothering and stifling in our house teeming with kids (except in the dog days of summer sans central air conditioning), but there were dark times when we kids huddled up and contemplated moving to Guam or changing our name or faking our own death.
That was especially true whenever a stomach virus was rampaging through our house. And that seemed to happen every other week. Again, we had just one toilet. But not all was bad news. Fortunately our sink in our small bathroom was just across from the toilet. So you could sit on the toilet while puking in the sink when things were coming out of both ends.
Talk about mental health problems sprouting like dandelions in the spring. No wonder we wore masks of anxiety every Halloween. Tell me that’s not a harrowing spooktacular featuring shrieks and screams leaping from one throat to the next.
Finally, there’s the issue of older children ending up helping to care for younger siblings. This is called parentification but as the oldest of seven, I called it getting the shaftication. Whatever you call it, it has a negative impact on both the older and younger siblings.
The older siblings are prematurely forced into adult responsibility and the younger siblings get bossed around. I had one rule while babysitting my siblings: Everybody stops crying before Mom and Dad get home. And if you don’t, there’ll be hell to pay the next time they go out.
As I look back upon our sibling-saturated childhood that fried, flambéed and fricasseed our serenity, it’s truly a miracle that none of us ever wound up institutionalized speaking in tongues while ensconced in a straightjacket.