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Children born in the same family are just as different from each as the fingers of a hand are. Just look back at your childhood and recall the times when you had different attitudes, behaviors, and opinion when compared to your siblings. Perhaps you also felt that you were treated differently by your parents in comparison to your siblings. As parents, you might wonder at how your children differ from each other, despite coming from the same genes.
Psychologists in the past had thrown much emphasis on parenting and its influence on children’s personalities, but they overlooked the influence of siblings. Robert Plomin in the 1980s published a startling paper where he discusses three principle ways that psychologists had studied siblings. Physical attributes, intelligence, and personality were the three principal determinants. Plomin believed that siblings were quite similar in two of these areas. While siblings tended to be similar (and yet be different in certain ways), they are a lot more different from children when picked up randomly from a population. The same applies to their intelligence or cognitive abilities too. But the surprise determinant is their personality. When you put siblings on personality tests, it turns out that they are complete strangers. While one is an extrovert, the other could be a total introvert, as just one instance. So while children from the same family are more similar than children taken at random from a population, they aren’t much more similar than one might expect.
In reality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time. Despite sharing the genes, the same set of parents, the same routines, and living under the same roof, it might come as quite a surprise that children in the same family could be so different. But what make them different? Just think more from the environment perspective than to genes to understand this better.
Plomin and other researchers tried to study what role genes played in making personalities of siblings different and how environment played a role in bringing out those differences. They began with the assumption that growing up in the same environment would make children similar. But they found that “the environment works in a very odd way”. But it was making children different. The three main theories behind the differences are:
1. Theory of Divergence
Popularized by Darwinian named Frank Sulloway, the theory suggests that competition propels evolution. At home, children are knowingly or unknowingly competing for the attention of their parents, for instance. Where there is competition, there is also the scope for divergence, as identified by Darwin long ago. Divergence means that the child might give in to the competition, but in a different way. If a child is great at baseball, his sibling might want to excel in a different choice of sport or skill. So each of the kids ends up specializing in different areas.
The theory sounds ironical because the siblings are being raised in the same surroundings, yet it’s called non-shared environment. The theory argues that though from the outside it seems like children are growing in the same family, they are not experiencing the same things especially with siblings differing in age. What a ten-year-old experiences with a certain event in the family might not be experienced or perceived the same by his/her five-year-old sibling. Siblings differ in age, so do they in their levels of maturity and, therefore, experience the events differently. A sad event might not be just as sad a thing for a younger sibling, for instance, because he might be unaware of the gravity of the incident. Therefore, the child is not exposed to the pressures like an older child is.
On the other hand, each child has individual interests. Their different personalities also elicit different treatment from parents.
3. Theory of Comparison
Also known as the theory or exaggeration, it suggests that families might work towards exaggerating even minor differences between siblings. For instance, if one of the siblings is known as extremely extroverted individual, the other child might be labeled introverted even if he is just quite sociable but not as big an extrovert as the other child. Despite seeming like an extrovert to the world outside, this child is labeled an introvert at home. So his personality is sure to be influenced by how he is treated at home. Eventually, it may also determine the choices of the child.
So when the next time your children sound different from each other, don’t think too much. There is a reason your children are different, and it’s good!
