Full Transcript for SMNTY Classics: Do Sisters Make You Happier?

just been something that's on my my brain. Yeah, and I wanted to share this, this classic episode with you about whether or not sisters make you happier. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen, we have to guest siblings. Before we did a very big podcast on birth order. We've heard from lots of our listeners about whether they think birth order makes me difference, no difference. It got a lot of it got a lot of response, right, because I think we should remind listeners that you are the oldest sibling in your family, and I am the youngest sibling in my family, and we're also different in another way, Kristen, that's going to be the topic of today's conversation. I am the oldest of three, but I have but my younger siblings are both brothers. I have two younger brothers, no sisters. Whereas you've got you've got like a mixed bag over there, we've got quite a brup party pack. Yes, I am the youngest of five counting folks, uh in five with two brothers and two sisters. And this is really gonna provide a lot of insight, I think, because today's topic is does a sister make you happier? And we didn't pull this top pick out of thin air. There are a ton of new studies and headlines coming out left and right about how sisters are the bomb dot com to throw out a golden moldie that it's a golden MOLDI that time flies, that study after study is showing that people with sisters are happier than those with brothers, not necessarily than those who only children. All comes out in the wash somehow. So we're going to kind of dive into this research and see what we can find out about the makeup the gender makeup of your family. Yes, because when it comes to research on siblings, it really didn't come around until or started to get much notoriety until the early two thousands. Before then, there had been realms of research and studies on parents and how parents affect their children. But when it came to siblings, it's kind of a newer research focus. And now that there have been more studies done on siblings, all of these sort of sister specific benefits are coming out. Because we should throw out a couple of statistics. Around eight percent of Americans have at least one sibling, and I know that in our Birth Order podcast afterwards, we got a lot of emails from listeners who are only children, and we don't want only children to feel left out in this conversation, so we will we do have some some points to make about you folks as well. But um, by and large, most folks have a sibling, and like it or not, your siblings have a pretty huge effect on you, and in some ways larger than your parents, right because you spend more time with your siblings than you spend with any time anyone else. Um, they've done, you know, stays where they follow the kids around and they realize that by and large, siblings are your main companions, and they're also the ones who are going to be there throughout your entire life pretty much. You know, parents at some point die and you meet a spouse midway through your life. Let's say that sibling is the one who saw you maybe from the time you were born to the very end. Now we should say before we get into sisters, that sibling research indicates that by and large, especially having a positive relationship with a sibling, whether it's a brother or a sister, no surprise here, has a positive impact on you. For instance, um, there was a survey of men that kind of tracked them throughout their lives and basically the ones who were doing the best at age sixty five had a close relationship with a brother or a sister. And then in another survey from Duke University, they looked at sibling relationships of a group of people over sixty five, and the majority felt strong ties towards their siblings and would be expected to either um provide support and difficult times for their siblings or vice versa call their siblings when times were tough for them. So even later in life, we have these strong sibling relationships. But then when you start to break down between brothers and sisters and how we affect each other differently, there are some variations. That's right. Let's jump to a study from Brigham Young University. It's the newest one that's come out and one that's with one that's getting a lot of press coverage right now, and it's all about how um adolescents who have a sister. So this is a much different time period than the people who are over sixty five. Those other studies you were citing. These are specifically ten year olds to fourteen year olds. They were looking up. They are less likely to report such feelings as I am unhappy, sad or depressed, and I feel like no one loves me. So they're really showing that these sisters do something to the self esteem of these ten to fourteen year olds. Regardless of their gender. They can be boys or girls, but having that sister is the key factor. And there have been similar studies that were done before this that found UH positive impacts specifically from sisters. For instance, there was a study I think from the late nineties by a guy named Robert Kraisner who he was actually going back in reanalyzing a survey on sibling impact and he felt or he found, I should say, no effect in how UM siblings sex composition, whether or not you have brothers and sisters or just sisters and sisters, brothers and brothers. He found no impact on educational attainment except among Black adults. And he found that UM brothers who grew up with a sister or had relatively more sisters had greater levels of educational attainment than people with no or fewer sisters. So basically UM for these black families, the more the more sisters that the guys had, the better off they were in the school, which is kind of interesting and all throughout. One more. A British study it was presented at the British Psychological Society last year. It found the growing up with the sister makes

people more optimistic, more ambitious, and better balanced. And Uh, siblings have either sex had a sister would score higher on tests that evaluated mental health. So there's something about having a sister that makes you more flexible, more able to deal with things. And so if you see these trends start to emerge, you've got to ask why, why is it specifically sisters that are so so wonderful, And uh, it's kind of it's kind of frustrating because at this point the researchers kind of fall back on some old gender stereotypes about how girls are a little more touchy feeling, more likely to talk for hours and hours and make you feel connected to a family. And UH, at first I was a little frustrated by that because I feel like I can talk for hours and hours with my brothers and it's not me being touchy feeling, it's not them being you know, touchy feel It just there's something about this level of conversation that I don't think researchers have quite figured out why it's, why it's so important, or why it's so different than having brothers. Well, the main reason we wanted to talk about the sister research today was because of an essay in The New York Times that was published a couple of days ago where the researcher was talking about the findings from that two thousand tens study that said that, you know, the tended fourteen year olds with sisters seemed to be more optimistic and more ambitious and all of that, and she was kind of calling out in the same way this sort of knee jerk response said, oh, naturally, sisters have a positive influence because you know, we're more emotional and more well, will communicate more and have these all these heart to hearts to make you feel so great. And she kind of took issue with that because she has actually gone in and talk to sisters and sibling pairs, and her theory is that it's not so much the content of what women are talking about, but rather how often they are. It's it's not so much quality but quantity, right, because she's saying that even uh, these brothers who are touching base with each other just don't don't talk with the same frequency that the women talk. And it's not that their conversations are any better worse in terms of the content, Like you were saying Christen, it's just that frequency of content. It seems that the sisters are better at picking up the phone or going into the brothers room or whatever they have to do to talk to the other people in their family. And also, I mean I should note as someone who grew up with two sisters, granted I'm coming at this from from the younger, and it's not all touchy feely conversations that you have with your sisters. I mean, there was my sister who was closest in age to me. We are extremely close now, but there were certainly times when we wanted to ring each other's throats. Well, a researcher would say that's pretty important. At the time article that we got a lot of our statistics from UH in terms of how many people in the United States have siblings, etcetera. It pointed out that a lot of researchers now think we're learning our conflict resolution skills and are you know, inner person all relationship skills from our siblings. That it's not uncommon for young kids to have as many as you know, ten conflicts in an hour, right, having one like every six minutes, and those aren't necessarily bad if the parents can use it as a teaching moment to help the help the child deal with the other child. So these researchers would say, you were supposed to feel that conflict with your sister so that you could learn how to you know, deal with me, or something like that. Well, it's interesting coming at this from an adult perspective as well, and and thinking about the interactions that I've had with with my brothers and with my sisters, because one thing that comes up a lot in all the sibling research is how much we tend to mirror our siblings and also how much we tend to sort of disassociate ourselves with our siblings in a process that is termed de identification. Because on the one hand, um, you have all of these findings talking about all these positive benefits. Um, there was one finding saying that that brother have a positive impact on the number of good deeds that kids will have that's actually stronger than a parent's influence on kids. But the same time, there have been surveys finding, for instance, that uh, younger sisters who have an older sister who's pregnant or four to six times more likely to also become pregnant at some point. But then you also have surveys to saying that um in a de identification kind of way, the younger siblings who have say older siblings who are who have a drug problem or drinking problem tend to follow the straight and narrow a little bit more. Well, I think it's it's a nice way for researchers to kind of cover their behind because you know, either yes, the sibling is modeling after the older one or they're de identifying from the other. But they're basically two paths that uh, they're saying, these siblings can choose, but the extent to which we do that can have really interesting, uh impacts on our friendships, on the spouses we choose things like that. So they are still trying to sess out how the gender of your sibling either causes you to de identify from that sibling or causes you to model yourself more like there's this one interesting study about friendship and they're like, they took these two, you know, two siblings, once a boy, once a girl, and they asked each of them to pick a friend, and they asked the brother and sister to kind of identify how often they had the touchy feely conversations with their pals, how often they had more just you know, shared interests that you know, they're just playing a football game together, and how often they took the lead and planning activities. And then they asked the friend, uh, you know, sort of why they're friends with the sibling. What they found was that, um, when the when there was a brother who had an

older sister, that brother was more likely to seek out the most masculine friends you could find the shared interest ones, no touchy feely conversations at all. And what girls who had brothers tended to do in their friendships was to emulate those elements of control and masculine aggression and that they've seen their brothers do. But the brothers never seemed to learn that touchy feely aspect of uh have been a personal relationships. Well, I guess that I could relate as a as a younger sibling. I guess that I could relate to picking up those sort of tactics from uh my my older brothers brothers. But as the older sister to two younger brothers, I mean, how how do you think that those findings about the brothers looking for the more masculine friends might might come about? You know, I can't. I can't think of a specific example. I was more struck by places where the research made it look bad for me because I guess I'm looking out for number one. So let's jump to another study really quick. They found that if parents break up, the families that have sisters do better, but um, only children do better than uh than a than a sister who only has brothers. So if my parents had gotten divorced, which they didn't, then I would have been, you know, in rm weill because I wouldn't have had the touchy feely sister to talk to you, whereas my brothers would have had me to do all the work. It would have been really hard for me. And that's where that's why we wanted to make that point earlier about only children, because yes, they they are left out of a lot of this kind of research, but when they're included, they do sort of fall into a middle ground because studies show that while no, they don't have siblings to build all of these kind of conflict ridden and yet healthy relationships with with brothers and sisters, but they go they make a stronger effort to build up the friendships, to build up the social support. So in a way they are at an advantage if say, like you said, if parents get divorced, or if say, you lose a sibling as you age, I mean, only children a little bit more prepared maybe for for adulthood in that way, which I think you know is kind of the lesson we can start to take from some of the sibling research is it is just the places you have to work a little bit harder to get the same benefits as others. Like way I read some of these studies, um not having a sister, of all the benefits of a sister, it seems like what I have to do is just work harder to reach out to female friends who can take on that that role, or work harder to be the one who reaches out to my brother's whereas brothers could could read these um studies and maybe think I need I need to be the one who reaches out more to my family members. Remember it's quantity, not quality, Like you don't have to have anything to say. Is what's kind of the weird thing and the challenging thing to to take away with with all of these varied research findings, because they are kind of all over the place. When you start to list them all out. Is the fact that, yes, birth order makes a big difference. I think that I I learned from my siblings in a different as the youngest, in a different way that you maybe learned from your siblings as the oldest. And also every family is different. And also every child's experience within a family is its own sort of micro environment, depending on the type of favoritism that parents might just play, the type of conflict that parents might also display in front of kids, how they work on conflict resolution between children. I mean, there are so many factors that can influence your relationship with your siblings. Yeah, and that's we talked about that in the Birth Order podcast because you know, people will hear this and everyone will think they're the exception. You know. I was reading about how sisters make people happier. I was like, ah, I got brothers. They make me plenty happy. This is bunk. And I think that realizing that all of these studies have to have an asters by them, right, I mean you can't. I just don't think you can boil down family dynamics to all these studies. But again, I think trying to to sus out what sisters can do in a family and what they might do naturally, um can be kind of kind of cool to to take as a lesson, sure, because that is one theme. There have now been enough studies finding these positive benefits of sisters, whether it's you know, emotional support or just someone to talk to or whatever, even someone to fight with and practic us all of that conflict resolution. Sisters do play a very special role in families. Not to say, I would hate for my brothers to listen to this and think that I am in any way just seeing their influence on me, because you know, I think that I you know, they provided plenty of unique benefits for me as well in terms of socialization, conflict resolution and all of that. But I'm pretty proud to learn that sisters kind of where it's at. Well, I guess, you know, maybe I'm providing a valuable service for my brother. And I never wanted a sister growing up to be perfectly honest, because some of the stereotypes about them are that they're so cattie and jealous stealing your clothes. How many sitcoms did I watch where the sister stole the other sister's clothes that I can tell you that absolutely happened, and so I wanted no part of that. Yeah, well, I think we've said all that we can say about sisters. I think it's time to turn it over to our wonderful listeners and see what they think sisters positive, negative. I mean, I'm sure that the response is are going to be all over the place, So I can't wait to see what folks out there think from their own experience. And also, only children chime in. I mean, are you glad that you kind of missed out on the whole sibling dynamic? Was it nice to have just all that attention paid to number one? There are times when, yeah, I kind of wish that I had been the only child. So let us know what you think. You can send us an email at mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com, and also you can share it on our Facebook page. I have one here from Brittany, and it's about the Adult Acne podcast. She writes, as someone who has always suffered from severe acne that got worse in my early twenties, it was refreshing to hear you, guys to spell rumors about acnees, such as chocolate and bad hygiene being causes for zits. As a side note. I tried everything to get rid of my acne and nothing worked until I tried accutane. It's been a year since I finished the medicine and my skin is still acne free. It's important for anyone with this prompt to consult a dermatologist because I can tell you from experience that over the counter solutions don't help, but it's nothing to be ashamed of and can be easily controlled with a doctor's help. It would be great if you could share this information with your listeners, So thank you, Brittany. And you are not the only one who had success with Accutanement've heard from a few listeners who had good luck with that one, So there you go. Well, I've got an email here from Sam and she was writing in response to our podcast on motorcycles and she just got her motorcycle license in March of this year. And she actually got her motorcycle license before she got a driver's license, and she writes as a new writer. I strongly encourage anyone male or female to go take a writer's safety course before going out on your brand new bike. In Canada, where I'm from, these courses are usually offered through your Province's Ministry of Transportation. I would also recommend that new riders start on smaller bikes. The upside is a small bikes that are two or three years old have a high resale value because they're always new riders sleeping for that first bike. As it stands now, my bike is bigger and faster than my boyfriends because he only has a small scooter until he can save up for a bigger bike. And I try not to rub it in too often. So thanks for writing in, Sam and again our email addresses mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Also, we'd love to see you over on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, where we are mom Stuff Podcast and then at last you can check out what we're doing during the week. It's on our blogs Stuff Mom Never Told You at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com, the House stuff works dot com. My phone app is coming soon. 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