Secrets of Super Siblings: A Rambling Discussion

I haven’t written for a while because we went on a family vacation, then recovered from the family vacation. We stayed with a few different families during the trip, which always brings up interesting comparisons of home culture (I’ve realized we have a ton of fruit, tissue boxes, and hand soap compared to other people). Family culture and parenting styles can be a difficult area to discuss—for whatever reason, we don’t have a lot of close friends here who do a lot of thinking on this topic—and it’s an area where one can be particularly prone to blind spots. It’s so affected by geographical culture, racial culture, personal experience and values that it’s hard to assess clearly, and it’s rare to know another family well enough that you can point out mutual blind spots or challenge each other constructively.

Which is why I like reading occasional articles about parenting: “The Secrets of Super Siblings” in a recent issue of TIME is far from scientific, but interesting. They examined nine different families, extraordinary in the sense that all (two to three) of the siblings excelled, and all in different fields. They found six common traits:

1. Immigrant drive: most had immigrant parents, leading to a strong sense of the family as being more important than the individual, a strong work ethic, and a sense of high standards (“less was required—but more was expected”).

2. Parent-teachers: three families had at least one professor as a parent, and all nine had parents who did some kind of teaching. The families understood the importance of at-home instruction; “their children recalled early supplementary lessons, books read aloud, regular library trips and even at-home worksheets.”

3. Political activism: families were politically engaged, outspoken for reform, involved in the community, had heated political debates at home.

4. Controlled chaos: most families described a sibling dynamic that was “wildly competitive at best and physically violent at worst.” There was a sense of misbehavior and trial-by-combat that taught resilience and a willingness to make mistakes and move on.

5. Lessons in mortality: majority of families had experiences with death, in the family or of a relative. Such experiences were credited to fuel ambition and teach priorities.

6. A free-range childhood: few siblings had parents who closely monitored their movements: “you could say it was the opposite of helicopter parenting.” They were allowed to play and develop their own ideas.

The first two describe my parents to a T: both immigrants, my professor dad left detailed explanations and alternative solutions for physics problems tucked into my textbook, and my school board-activist mom took us to the library every week. When she babysat our newborn, she claimed to have toured her around the house teaching her about each room; when she watched our two year-old, she taught him how to count to twenty in two languages. They raised three ivy-league daughters in a place where folks didn’t necessarily go to college.

We’re close enough to my parents’ generation that the immigrant mentality is present in some forms in our family too, and teaching and my belief in the importance of the early-childhood years is a major reason why I work part-time. I’m not a political activist, but hopefully Dave’s career in public service and interest in global events will rub off. I hope we have interesting discussions of current events over dinner when the kids are older; I’m challenged to travel and go on missions trips more with them.

I found the chaos point encouraging because our kids bicker all the time! There’s always some amount of debating statements (is “dang it” a bad word?), complicated trades (usually of Legos), competitions (who has the biggest? the newest? who is first? who is last which means they will be first according to Jesus?), etc. Maybe I should regulate on this and be discouraged by it less.

The free-range point is an interesting argument against helicopter parenting: here in Chesapeake, I’d say a free-range childhood is the norm (though it reflects I think a passive attitude towards parenting in general that’s not necessarily healthy), but the definite trend among parents who want their kids to be high achievers is to hover. Schedule every minute to maximize resume potential; monitor every environment to make sure it’s the best.

Yet more elementary schools in good districts are promoting self-directed learning; high schools are realizing too much stress and work is destructive. I would say we live out a relatively free-range type of day: our kids go to a Montessori school; they spend plenty of time in free play—but I do feel a sort of constant, guilty urge to be more structured, to monitor them more closely, and one semester we got to a place where we had so many activities scheduled that we canceled them all. I suppose it’s a balance between high standards and educational engagement, yet giving kids space to choose their own paths.

In the end, it boils down to your parenting philosophy more than a magical list. Like the point about encounters with mortality: no one would wish that upon their family, but our faith should have a similar impact, since we believe we are living for eternity. And that should impact not only our degree of ambition, but what we are ambitious for.

I like how my brother-in-law described the Biblical perspective on parenting: “discerning and trusting God's call for them, not making them something they're not necessarily supposed to be, focusing on helping them be faithful and accepting of the true talents God has blessed them with, and furthermore, all this not to serve their own purposes or their parents', but for God's glory.”