Siblings - Inequality Starts at Home

Excerpted from
The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become
By Dalton Conley

When there are disparities between siblings, what predicts which siblings will or will not succeed, and why? In The Nurture Assumption. psychologist Judith Harris argues that the influence of parents on children has been overstated and that genetics and peer influences are of much greater salience (and thus might explain sibling differences). I am sympathetic to such arguments, but wary. Harris takes the 50 percent sibling similarity and chalks it up to genetics; then she takes the remaining 50 percent and chalks it up to genetics and peer groups. She spins a convincing argument that other than providing their genes, parents have little effect on their kids. For example, she points out that children of the British upper class were at one time raised almost exclusively by working-class nannies. They spent very little time with their parents and were soon sent off to boarding school. Harris points out that with almost no "quality rime" to instill parent-child socialization, these kids still came out speaking exactly like their parents and not like their less educated governesses. Why? According to Harris, it did not make much difference who was doing the day-to-day raising of these kids, since they learned how to talk from one another. Strike one against the importance of parents.

Another powerful testament to the noninfluence of parents, Harris claims, is the case of immigrants. If immigrant children arrive before the approximate age of thirteen, then they adopt the syntax and accent of their peers in their adopted country, leaving their parents to speak in broken sentences and thick accents for the rest of their lives. Harris takes this as evidence that peers, not parents, teach us how to speak. Strike two for parents.

However, if I read Harris' examples in another way, they show the enormous power of parents-albeit not through the direct socialization process that she decries. Why do British elites speak like their parents (and often reproduce their parents' class status)? Because of their parents: their parents exercise their class resources to send their children to a select boarding school where they encounter other kids from similar environments, where highly trained teachers instruct their offspring in the "proper" way to speak. In short, while these parents may not have read to their children every night, they do a lot to ensure that they are not disappointed with their offspring. The same is true for immigrant parents. Could there be a more important choice, one that affects the life course of their children more, than their decision to immigrate? They are, indeed, the reason that their children speak differently, though the mechanism is not direct socialization.

In both these cases, parents set up an institutional structure to presumably generate good socioeconomic outcomes for their kids. Clearly, parents do matter.

Siblings also affect one another's level of success and failure. I find that they affect one another's likelihood of success in school, and the further away from the parents the siblings are in birth order, the more strongly they influence each other. For example, the similarity of the likelihood of being held back a grade between the secondborn and thirdborn is three times as strong as the similarity between the firstborn and secondborn-indicating that as the family grows, the influence of siblings on one another grows and the effect of parents probably becomes diluted.

In fact, what all my research shows is that the family is a complex network of affiliations stewing over with the potential for politics and intrigue. Usually the tensions inherent in these interdependent relationships are safely ensconced within the rhetoric of intra-family equality and universal love (Share; No. it's his turn: Hitting isn't nice). Other rimes they spill out into bitter, often lifelong fights: think of sibling battles for large inheritances. The family is a tangled web.

So nothing about it is simple. Therefore, nothing about why one sibling succeeds and another doesn't is reducible to one clear and present factor. Sometimes even simple variables like birth order are difficult to pin down. How do we classify the birth order of Justin, who was born second but never knew his older brother since he died when Justin was an infant? What do we say about Ray, whose older sibling died when he was ten? What about Selena, whose mother s second marriage was to a man with two kids of his own, thus causing Selena, at age five, to go from being the first of two to the third of four?

Besides, is overall birth order the pivotal factor in success and failure, or is it gender-specific birth order that is most important? Naturally, the answer varies depending on the family. There may be such gender specific specialization that the only real reference group worth talking about is those siblings of the same sex. For instance, being the last-born boy of five is a lot different when the first four children are also boys than when they are girls.

Even defining who is in the family and who is our can be difficult sometimes. Who really has an impact on children? Is it only those who raise them? With one-third of all births to unmarried parents, kids do not always have two parents. Take the case of Malik and Jim. Malik is the product of a relationship his mother had with a Black Panther wanna-be while in high school. His father has, in addition to Malik, four other sons and two daughters with other women. His half brother Jim is the result of a brief marriage their mother had to another man. Jims father now has three other sons. Jim had some contact with his father growing up-leading a relatively stable life, he would come to important life events like graduations. But, having received enough small doses of his dad over the course of his childhood, Jim's father did not figure so large in his psyche or life history. Jim did his own thing and today is an accountant in San Diego.

By contrast, Malik did not have any contact with his father until he looked him up during his freshman year of college at Stanford. Having won the state championship in debate, he was the shining jewel of his extended family in Bakersfield, California. He was able to go to Stanford clue to a combination of loans, work study, and scholarship money. Though the proverbial apple initially fell quite far from the tree in Malik's case, it soon rolled right beside the trunk. In an attempt to establish the relationship he had always craved with his father, he moved in with him for a year in Oakland, which caused quite a bit of trouble for him. By the middle 1980s, his father had developed a heroin habit, and so Malik also began to use the drug. At first he tried to commute to Stanford and take care of his school work while snorting (never sharing) heroin at night as he and his father hit the jazz clubs of San Francisco and the Ease Bay Soon, however, the double life proved too difficult and he withdrew from college for a time.

After six years-and tens of thousands of dollars of student debt Malik eventually finished his degree, but the experience with his father threw him off kilter in a way that-chough he no longer uses drugs at all-affects his career path even today. After he finished college he still wanted to emulate his dad and so spent several years trying co found and manage a jazz record label with a couple of friends. After two and a half years of sleeping on couches and mounting arrears on his student loans, the company finally sputtered out. Since then Malik has worked a series of office jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment. Though he still dreams of politics or big business, he has never fulfilled the promise that he showed back when he aced his SATs and marched triumphantly onto the sun-drenched Stanford campus. Ironically, his father had a much greater impact on his life through his absence than did Jim's dad with his occasional presence.

What constitutes a family? Do we count Malik's or Jim's father as family members even though they didn't raise their children? Malik's absent father turned out to be the seminal influence in his life.

And what about divorce and adoption? They certainly throw family composition into disarray and affect sibling success and failure. Today, slightly more than half of all divorces involve couples with children under age eighteen. In a given year, about r.7 percent of American children experience a marital disruption-this rate has risen three-fold since 1960. As for adoption, rates have also risen in recent decades. In 1944-the earliest year for which reliable data are available-there were about 50,000 adopted children. That figure peaked in 1970 at about 175,000 and has since stabilized at somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000. The result is that today, about 2 percent of children are adopted. One consequence of the transformation of the American family is that the transmission of class status from one generation to the next is a lot messier thanks to complicated kinship relations.