You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.

— Elizabeth Berg.

I have always wondered how my family affected my personality and the way I interact. This is because I grew up as an only child. Technically, I am not an only child. In fact, I have two older sisters, one of whom lived in with me for the first three years of my life. Some of my extended family will get irritated with me when I tell them I’m an only child, but as I was growing up, I never had any siblings to talk to or mess around with because they had disappeared from my life. Given that they are both about 20 years older than me, I now understand why I never had a relationship with them as a child.

My childhood is what prompted me to want to research this topic and what I found was quite interesting. What surprised me the most was how little research has been done to determine how siblings affect each other, so I used this as an initiative to come to my own conclusion. I pulled resources from academic texts, ted talks, and magazine articles to figure out what the main consensus could be. In one of the journals by Black, Betty, and Arliss, I found that a child’s social status in school is majorly correlated with the amount and type of communication they have with their parents. It was discovered that children who have better communication with the their parents are more popular among their peers. I don’t know how true this is, for I had great communication skills when I was younger, and I definitely was not the most popular girl in school.

When it comes to sibling relations, I used Cisneros’s journal from the text Writing About Writing. She discusses how her entire life was lived with the purpose to show her father that she is as good as her brothers. She explains that her father would always say “I have seven sons” instead of “I have seven children”. This ties into the psychological affects of having siblings, specifically older siblings. This can be found quite often in younger siblings of sports starts, famous actors, and presidents. In Kluger, Jeffery, and Cray’s article in the New York Times, they discuss how Teddy Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliot feel in to drinking/drug problems and deep depression. They also used the example of Peyton and Eli Manning. They both have been part of the NFL as quarterbacks, but Peyton is like more by the media, so he is more popular among the people. On the educational side, it was found by Faldo that only children have a 22 point greater IQ than those with siblings. He also discovered that first born’s tend to score higher on tests. This could easily come from the teacher they do with their younger siblings. Whether that be on homework or social teachings.

From my research, I have come to the conclusion that siblings and your family dynamic definitely affect your way of interacting in adult life. I take a lot of this from my personal experiences. I find that I am more mature than the average person my age and that I have always preferred speaking with adults than with my peers because I search for a sense of responsibility and respect in the people I communicate with. When it comes to having siblings, I see a huge correlation in how well people can speak their minds and be more outgoing when they grew up with siblings close to their age.

I think it would be very interesting for this topic to be researched more scientifically, but I see no humane way of conducting the research. The experiment would look something like this: use the understanding of economics to find two virtually identical children where the only difference in their live is the number of siblings they have and follow their ways of communicating throughout their childhood and into their adult life. There is much more to be discovered in this topic, and I think it would affect the way certain children are treated in school. If there was more research done that found only children have poor communication skills in their adult life, that could be part of their early schooling to help prevent that.

I find that I do not fit this stereotypical idea of an only child in every way. I have never been described as selfish or rude in nature, so I can see how many people would believe that the only thing affecting our interactions is our brain chemistry from the moment we were born and nothing else, but I still find this research to be incredibly fascinating.

Works Cited
Black, Betty, and Arliss Logan. “Links between Communication Patterns in Mother-Child,Father-Child, and Child-Peer Interactions and Children’s Social Status.” Child Development, vol. 66, no. 1, Feb. 1995, pp. 255–271. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/1131204.

Calin, Cassandra. “7 Truths About Being an Only Child.” CollegeHumor, CollegeHumor, 2 May 2016, http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7037216/7-truths-about-being-an-only-child.

Ciciora, Phil. “Siblings Play Formative, Influential Role as ‘Agents of Socialization’.” ILLINOIS, 15 Jan. 2010, news.illinois.edu/view/6367/205739.

Cisneros, Sandra. “Only Daughter.” WRITING ABOUT WRITING, by ELIZABETH WARDLE, BEDFORD BKS ST MARTIN’S, 2019, pp. 101–105.

Falbo, Toni. “The Only Child: A Review.” Journal of Individual Psychology (00221805), vol. 33, no. 1, May 1977, p. 47. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=a9h&AN=9093007&login.asp&site=ehost-live.

Polit, Denise F., et al. “The Only Child Grows up: A Look at Some Characteristics of Adult Only Children.” Family Relations, vol. 29, no. 1, 1980, pp. 99–106. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/583722.

Kluger, Jeffery, director. The Hidden Power of Siblings: Jeff Kluger at TEDxAsheville. YouTube, YouTube, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFBIPO-P7LM.

Kluger, Jeffrey, and Dan Cray. “The Power of Birth Order. (Cover Story).” TIME Magazine, vol. 170, no. 18, Oct. 2007, pp. 42–48. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct =true&db=a9h&AN=27180761&login.asp&site=ehost-live.

Nuttall, Ena Vazquez, and Ronald L. Nuttall. “Child-Spacing Effects on Intelligence, Personality, and Social Competence.” Journal of Psychology, vol. 102, no. 1, May 1979, p. 3. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00223980.1979.9915088.

Swanson, Ana. “The Type of Family That’s Best for Children.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 2 Jan. 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/small -families-are-better-for-children-research-finds-a6793936.html.

Walton, Alice G. “The Pros And Cons Of Being An Only Child Show Up In The Brain.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 15 May 2017, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/ 05/15/the-pros-and-cons-of-being-an-only-child-show-up-in-the-brain/#723d46c63374.