Siblings under lockdown: Has there been an upside?

During these strange and surreal times, as we all try to adjust to a world in which life as we knew it has been turned upside-down, I have been observing families closely. Through my work as a psychotherapist I know something about the considerable strain and desperation experienced by many families – not just coping with regular sibling quarrels and sulky teenagers, but literally feeling on the edge of managing.  I have spoken to parents at the end of their tether trying to work and parent and teach their children. I have spoken to parents who fear the future – who have lost their jobs, who don’t know how they will survive – to parents who are desperately unhappy, who feel imprisoned and forgotten, or who are being abused or harmed.

These parents need help. They need help from society. They need help from the government. They need help from professionals.

But many families benefitted from lock-down. I continue to see something new – parents and children out together, chatting, sharing stories, riding bikes. I observe companionship and laughter – brothers and sisters discovering the joys of one another, playing together and learning from one another. Parents have been telling me about new relationships developing between their children. Older siblings discovering new playmates or confidantes, younger siblings being allowed to join in games, feeling included and valued. Siblings who under normal circumstances might take little notice of one another have been compelled to find ways to connect – to survive fallouts and get over arguments, learning to cooperate and collaborate.

Adults too have been reaching out to their brothers and sisters in new ways. It is possible that being faced with our vulnerability and feeling closer to potential mortality has made us recognise the importance of our families. Siblings who might have taken one another for granted or who are rarely in contact have been connecting – making regular calls, setting up online family meetings. My clients have been talking about renewed sibling bonds. They have been more eager to heal old wounds and reach out to one another.

So are we valuing our siblings in a new way?

Maybe we have been given an opportunity.

The hidden value of siblings

We often dismiss our sibling connections because they may cause great pain and distress. But these relationships can cause us pain precisely because they are important to us; because they matter. In fact, they are vital.

Siblings are important to us because we share our worlds with them. In fact, our sibling relationships play a crucial role in the development of our social selves: in how we take our place in the world; how we interact with friends, peers, and colleagues. They shape our sense of who we are; how get noticed; how we deal with our needs and emotions.

If we don’t have brothers and sisters, we hold a space for them in our minds – we imagine them, dream about them, wonder where they are; what they would be like. Children who grow up alone may have siblings who exist elsewhere, who are unknown, or lost through separation or death. Somewhere deep in our minds we know about these lost brothers and sisters – we miss them.

Sibling relationships are generally the longest-lasting relationships we have in our lives. Our siblings may live close-by and share in our lives. They may move far away. We may lose contact. Sibling relationships can be sources of intense pain and sorrow but also great joy and companionship. We may love and cherish them, or feel bitterly resentful towards them. Sibling relationships can be volatile and unstable, full of passionate extremes of love and hate. Siblings can have bitter quarrels which never resolve. But they are rarely forgotten.

But the value of the learning that can take place between siblings – finding our way through fallouts and disappointments, developing ways of sharing and collaborating, dealing with difference, developing compassion for others – is crucial. It is not only crucial to us as individuals, it is crucial for society.

We need to rekindle their significance.

Parental Politics

For decades, if not centuries, our human world has become dominated by greed, possession, monopoly, and competition, We have put ourselves into the hands of leaders who behave like authoritarian parents, who, rather than fostering our wish to share and feel connected, focus on narcissistic politics, encouraging us to grasp onto what we have, close our borders, hold onto our wealth, look out for ourselves, and ignore the plight of others.

We have been choosing leaders who allow us to believe that we can have anything we like and don’t need to worry about the consequences. And we have been behaving like spoilt squabbling children.

We have become accustomed to striving for ourselves because we have created a world based on taking what we want at the expense of others. But this is not making us happy. It is making us confused and dis-satisfied, distrustful of one another. We are lonely and isolated, living in our ivory towers of consumption and greed.

It has taken a microscopic virus to make us sit up and think.

During the weeks of lockdown, we saw some extraordinary acts of kindness and altruism. People put their own lives at risk to save others, or enjoyed looking out for their neighbours, reaching out to those who are isolated and alone. We saw locked-down communities come together in shared singing and dancing and yoga sessions. Far from letting ourselves be imprisoned in our homes, we have found endless intriguing ways to communicate and maintain our sense of connection. This is intrinsic to our nature, and key to our survival as human beings.

Suddenly we are being made to look around us and wake up.

What about our global brothers and sisters?

The global outrage at George Floyd’s horrific murder and the consequent groundswell of passionate support for the Black Lives Matter movement is a striking example of this. A touch-paper waiting to be lit. But why have we waited so long? Why have we allowed our societies to become so divided and unequal? Why have we been so blind?

The fact is that deep in our ancient roots there is another way of being – our ancient ancestors were collaborators, not fighters.

The human species Homo Sapiens surpassed the Neanderthals not because they had superior strength, or larger brains (they were in fact weaker on both fronts) but because of their unique ability to cooperate, share and communicate. (Boehm, 1999; Boehm 2012; Harari, 2011; Bregman, 2020). These attributes are in fact innate and instinctive to our species. And, because they are innate and instinctive, they can be seen in the very earliest stages of our lives – in the way young babies want to communicate; in the pleasure infants show as they smile and laugh with those around them. Babies are not born greedy and acquisitive –they are taught this. They are taught to strive for themselves – to be ‘winners.’

This social instinct – an innate ability to bond and connect – is hard-wired into our ancient homo sapiens brains. We need to re-discover it, and in so doing find a truer more collaborative way of living together.

Interestingly, it is children without parents who have something to teach us – a group of tragically orphaned infants.

The ‘Terezín children’

The 6 ‘Terezín children’, as they became known, were discovered at the end of the Second World War in the ‘Ward for Motherless Children’ in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Poland. Their parents had all been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.  The children arrived at the camp when they were between six months and one year old. Abandoned, with minimum food, no toys, and limited space for play, their survival was entirely due to the extraordinary way in which they cared for one another.

At around 3 years old the children were rescued and eventually brought to England and were given into the care of the Dann sisters who had worked at the Hampstead War Nurseries with Anna Freud.  The orphans’ attention and concern for one another was remarkable. Anna Freud described them as ‘a closely-knit group of members with equal status, no child assuming leadership for any length of time, but each one exerting a strong influence on the others by virtue of individual qualities, peculiarities, or by mere fact of belonging’ (Freud, 1936,pp.166-7). They demonstrated no competition or jealousy; indeed, they took pleasure in helping one another and sharing their possessions. It was only when they began to develop individual attachments to the adults that they started to demonstrate any rivalry.

These children who grew up without any adults to guide them were not taught to share, they chose to. Their needs were linked to the needs of the others, and their capacity for mutuality and concern was instinctive.

If these unparented siblings showed such natural ability to care for one another, what do we need to do as a society, as a world, to rekindle our connectedness and altruism?

As a psychotherapist and group analyst I know that people develop happier and more fulfilled lives when they can find ways of fostering close and creative connections with others. How can we encourage parents, teachers, leaders and politicians to foster not rivalry and division, but collaboration and concern for others?

This is our challenge. It is the only way forward.

The value of play

Play is a vital tool for learning and development. It is in play that siblings, and later peers, learn to get over their battles, to find ways to share and cooperate, and to respect their differences. If we want to build a new more collaborative, and arguably much more contented and happy society, this needs to start at home.

So, has time away from school been altogether a bad thing? Could the fact that families have been thrown together, leaving brothers and sisters to find ways of getting along, been an opportunity – an opportunity to learn to care and value one another?

As children return to school how can we maintain these new habits? How can we continue to foster collaborative sibling bonds? We need to help parents to raise their children in a way that encourages them to find their way through rivalries and disagreements, relishing opportunities for the young to play rather than ‘work’.

Building a better world needs to begin at our very roots – in childhood.  Learning cooperation and respect with those who live alongside us – first our siblings and then our peers, could be a key to developing a less divisive world; a world which takes us back to our innate and deepest roots – those we have from the moment we are born.

As a human race we need to find a way to reconnect with our natural siblinghood. If we are to live together as global brothers and sisters, it is essential for us to recognise that we share our world and our planet. We need to focus less on our individual selves and strive together for a deeper and truer sense of belonging.

References

Boehm, C., (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, C., (2012). Moral Origins. New York: Basic Books.

Bregman, R., (2020). Humankind: a Hopeful History. London:  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Freud, A., (1936). An experiment in group upbringing. In The Writings of Anna Freud: Volume IV. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, pp.163-229.

Harari, Y.N., (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage, Penguin.

Val Parker
25th September 2020
Psychotherapist and group analyst and author of the book ‘The Group-Analytic Exploration of the Sibling Matrix: How Siblings Shape our Lives’ published by Routledge.
val.parker@cooptel.net