You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Stacey.
Vanek SmIth Infomerial Sagara, so I am an only child, and I've always been so jealous of my friends who have siblings because I just thought having a sibling sounded so amazing, you know, like an older sibling who would watch out for you or lend you clothes or give you great advice, or a younger sibling who would look up to you and just think everything you did was amazing.
A sibling just seemed like a friend, a confidant, like a partner in crime that was built right into your family unit.
Of course, family, it's always complicated.
And sibling relationships are, of course, no different.
My experience with having more siblings, I feel like it's just greater opportunity for trauma.
I think that my sister wants deeper connections in the family.
I wish I could just talk to my younger brother.
I think, yeah, we've never had a relationship where communication was a normal thing.
Siblings, they grow up alongside us.
But sometimes people grow at different paces or in different ways, and that can make it really hard to keep a healthy relationship going.
A great relationship when we're younger will sometimes just not translate into a great relationship later on in our lives.
And when these changes happen, it can be hard to know where to turn because sibling relationships are often less emphasized and less examined determined than parent child relationships or romantic relationships.
So journalist Ruth Tam wanted to explore the sometimes complex journeys that we have with our siblings, how those relationships can repair and grow from childhood all the way into adulthood.
On this episode of Life, kit how to have a healthy relationship with your sibling and how to repair a relationship thats been damaged.
I'm Ruth Tam.
When I meet someone new at some point, we'll get around to talking about our families.
We'll trade facts about how many siblings we have, and we'll try to guess each other's birth order.
Lately, people I talk to guess that I'm the youngest child.