From the issue dated March 5,
2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i26/26b00601.htm
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For Siblings, Inequality Starts at HomeBy DALTON
CONLEY
As the presidential campaign gets
into full swing, candidates profess their undying devotion to what's now become
the cliché of American family values. In stump speeches and debates, terms like
"marriage promotion" and "working families" permeate the rhetoric of both
Republicans and Democrats. The underlying image they're trying to conjure up? A
mom and dad and their children battening down the hatches against the swirling
winds of society: moral breakdown on one hand and an increasingly competitive
economy on the other. Why does such an image resonate with us? Because as a
culture we desperately want to view the family as a haven, a sheltered
port from the maelstrom of social forces that rip through our lives, a port
where, certainly, every family member starts out on an equal footing.
But
a number of sociological and economic studies now show this to be nothing but
wishful thinking. All around us is evidence -- evidence we contrive to
ignore -- that siblings all too often diverge widely in social status: the
president and the drug dealer; the professor and the murderer; the attorney and
the bricklayer. For it is a fact of American life that class identity is not
necessarily shared by brothers and sisters. After all, if our society values
meritocracy and ruthless competition in a free market, what makes us think
things should be any different at home?
In fact, the best way to
understand why, in America, at least, one person succeeds and another does not
is not to compare randomly selected individuals but rather to examine the
differences within families -- to compare siblings. Siblings provide a
natural experiment of sorts. They share much of their genetic endowment; they
also share similar environments. So there is reason to pay attention to the
astonishing news from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed
5,000 American families since 1968: Differences between siblings represent 75
percent of all differences between individuals.
In plain English, that
means that if we lined everyone in America up in rank order of how much money
they have -- from the poorest homeless person to Bill Gates himself
-- and tried to predict where any particular individual might fall on that
long line, knowing how her brother or sister fared would reduce our uncertainty
only by about 25 percent. In other words, if you start at the dead middle of the
American income ladder, then your brother or sister is more than a third likely
to end up outside the 30th to 70th percentile range. And if you come from the
richest 5 percent of American families, you have got greater odds of not
ending up in the same bracket than you do of keeping pace with your brother or
sister. A similar pattern holds for educational differences. For example, if you
attended college, there is almost a 50-percent chance that one of your siblings
did not (and vice versa). The dice are weighted by which family we come from,
but they are not loaded.
The real story of American families is not the
stuff of political slogans. In each household, there exists a pecking order
among siblings, a status hierarchy. That pecking order is not necessarily
determined by the natural abilities of each individual -- nor even by the
intentions or will of the parents. There are larger social forces at work:
gender expectations, the economic costs of education, changing labor-market
conditions, divorce, early loss of a parent, geographic mobility, religious and
sexual orientation, and even arbitrary factors such as luck and accidents. In
other words, the family is not a simple sorting machine. It grows and contracts;
it goes through economic ups and downs (along with society at large); and it
experiences personal triumphs and traumas. Each of these changes is stamped upon
the offspring differently depending on their age, sex, birth position, and other
individual propensities. As a result, we cannot readily predict nor control our
children's fates as much as we'd like to.
But we can come to grips with
what really goes on within families and how intimate events interact with larger
cultural ones. In general, there are three different levels of change that
create sibling differences. One involves broad social or economic changes that
take place in the society as a whole, one results from changes in the family as
a whole, and a third operates directly on individual siblings. To take the first
kind of change, for example, think of one kid coming of age during the early
1990s -- before the Internet revolution -- and compare her economic
opportunities to those of her younger brother who jumps into a completely
transformed labor market just a few years later.
Or take the case of
Skip, 56, and Jim, 50, two brothers from a middle-class household who matured at
different points in the 1960s (these case studies and others are from in-depth
interviews). Their family history shows just how subject the American family is
to cultural trends.
When Skip entered high school in Fairfax, Va.,
Kennedy was in the White House, and America was still very much as it had been
in its postwar halcyon slumber. It was the age of the space race and the missile
gap -- really still the 1950s -- and the family reflected that: Skip
and Jim were raised in a strict household dominated by Robert, their critical
and demanding father, who was a career Army officer. Robert was the only son of
a South Boston Irish Catholic family. His escape from a tough neighborhood came
with his World War II experience: He was a fighter pilot who was shot down more
than once and spent significant time in an internment camp. He returned from the
European campaign a hardened man, resentful of the limited opportunities that
Irish people from scrappy backgrounds enjoyed, despite his sacrifices for the
country. So he stayed in the Army and treated his sons as if they were soldiers
in his command, offering a hand to shake in lieu of a hug or kiss -- up
until the day he died in 1994.
Skip met or exceeded all of Robert's
expectations: starting on the Fairfax High School football team, being named
All-State, and then gaining admission to the U.S. Air Force Academy. At first,
father and son had trouble getting a congressman to sponsor Skip's entry into
the relatively new military academy, since local congressmen were already
committed to other candidates. Then they sought the help of Rep. John W.
McCormick of Massachusetts, speaker of the House at the time, who also happened
to be from South Boston and had known Skip's grandparents from the old
neighborhood. They finally gained his ear, only to have their hopes dashed when
he told them that the slots had already been taken for that year. But then, an
hour or two after they had returned home disappointed, the phone rang. It was
McCormick, informing Robert that one of his nominees had been disqualified for
medical reasons.
Skip's timing had been impeccable -- and it
continued that way. Since his pilot training took so long and since deployments
were based partially on experience, he escaped doing any time in Vietnam, other
than flying a few airlift missions in 1974, after formal U.S. involvement had
ended. After a distinguished career as an officer, he retired to the private
sector in 1989, working as a highly paid lobbyist for the Northrop Grumman
Corporation, one of the largest defense contractors. (Of course, now he says
that he wished he could have been an artist or a guitarist.)
Jim, by
contrast, came of age after the countercultural revolution of the '60s and found
himself caught between his father's values and those of his peers. It was the
early '70s, and even playing sports was not considered cool at the time. Drug
use was rampant, tie-dye was the fashion of the day, and the antiwar movement
was raging. Jim's behavior reflected the new trends. He dressed too casually for
his father's taste and practically made his old man's blood boil with his long
hair. But he tried his best to please his father -- he joined the Reserve
Officer Training Corps, first at a junior college and then at a four-year
institution. But by then, ROTC students who wore their uniforms on campuses were
often jeered at or worse. The Army was hitting a low point in terms of morale
and respect. Jim ended up torn between the expectations of his father and the
social unrest that surrounded him.
As a result, he was ambivalent about
everything his brother had pursued. Set by his father on the same path, Jim's
career never matched that of the golden boy Skip. Though he eventually did
become an Army officer, he held a series of low-status positions, and after
leaving the service ended up teaching high-school-level Junior ROTC in Florida.
Today Skip makes two to three times what Jim makes and has significantly more
wealth.
The consequences of their distinct trajectories are not just
economic, however. The siblings rarely speak. "My mother is sort of the
intermediary," Skip relates. "I'll ask her how my brother's doing." Both
brothers are at a loss for why they don't communicate more, chalking it up to
the age difference, spaced just a few years apart -- but separated by a
generation gap. Siblings in American society already have less contact than
those in most other countries, so when a relationship is fraught with social and
economic differences, nothing is written in blood -- so to speak
-- saying that siblings have to stay in touch. Of course, with an
emotionally distant father, family psychological dynamics probably didn't help
matters between Skip and Jim.
Other factors that create sibling
differences take place not in society but within the family itself. For example,
Maureen and her five younger siblings experienced a terrible tragedy when their
father died suddenly in a car accident. When their mother was forced to go to
work full time, it fell to Maureen, 13 at the time, to bear the twin burdens of
housework and child-rearing responsibilities. In her case, a family transition
led to a Cinderella-like existence that turned her life inside out, while her
younger siblings were spared.
Or take the most common form of family
disruption -- divorce. Here the debate is most often about whether or not
divorce scars the long-term mental health and economic prospects of kids. The
results of studies on that issue are mixed. Some experts (take Judith
Wallerstein in The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce) argue that divorce
almost universally damages children's self-esteem and developmental
trajectories. Others (like E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly in /I>For
Better or Worse: Divorce Reconsidered) say that such negative effects are
overstated and that most kids bounce back from family breakups. The truth is
that neither set of experts is right -- or wrong. One of the best ways to
see this is to look at sibling differences. When parents separate, then divorce,
there's no one readily identifiable response by the children but a whole range.
And children react to the breakup idiosyncratically, whether they're from
different families or the same one.
Caryn, 31, and David, 27, are a case
in point. They were raised in a tightknit household in Philadelphia where
-- they both agree -- they were treated equally by their parents.
Their mother and father were upwardly mobile, both doing stints as
schoolteachers after having grown up in working-class families. Their dad
attended a historically black college before earning an M.B.A. at the
prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, at which point he
left the classroom to enter the world of commerce, eventually starting a
successful business aiding restaurants in fire prevention. Caryn and David's
parents formed part of the "talented tenth" -- in the century-old words of
W.E.B. Du Bois -- the highly educated segment of the African-American
population that served as leaders and role models within their
communities.
Because their parents saw the value of education firsthand
in their lives, they made it a point to send their children to private high
schools (despite, or perhaps because of, their teaching in the public system).
The goal was to maximize their children's social advantages and solidify their
entry into the upper middle class. Both kids, initially at least, seemed to rise
to their parents' expectations, achieving good grades as well as participating
in extracurricular activities. Caryn elated her parents in her senior year of
high school when she gained admission to Harvard University on a scholarship.
Everything seemed on track for the family's "class project" of upward mobility.
But then during Caryn's time at Harvard, family trauma struck: It came to light
that her father was having an affair.
Their dad had always preached those
same family values that the politicians speak of, so his behavior came as a
particular shock to the family. The marriage quickly dissolved. Almost
immediately, both Caryn's and David's grades dropped. It was a good thing for
Caryn that she was already safely ensconced in the Ivy League. Away from home
and thus directly avoiding the painful aftermath of her parents' divorce, she
buried herself in activities and schoolwork, slowly reviving her grades. But
David was left to face the family's dissolution head on -- and alone
-- and during the critical high-school years. His grades slipped only for a
time, but for him, the academic dip made all the difference in the world. He did
not gain acceptance to the colleges to which he applied and instead was forced
to enroll where his mother knew someone who worked in the admissions department.
Turned off by his classes, he soon dropped out.
David has since shuttled
in and out of a series of three majors, four colleges, and countless marginal
jobs. Now approaching 30, he claims that he is finally "turning his life
around." He earnestly hopes to complete his college degree soon -- and
fantasizes about following in his father's footsteps to obtain an M.B.A.
Caryn, meanwhile, finished a master's degree and has earned a salary
approaching six figures, working in educational administration. David, big
dreams aside, makes about a tenth of his sister's income. The divorce disrupted
his academic trajectory, and it set into play a whole set of male-identity
issues that may have also affected his career. He both longed to emulate his
now-absent father and felt ambivalent about him. That undoubtedly helped
contribute to his lack of commitment to any one set of goals. So in Caryn and
David's case, not only did their respective ages at the time of their parents'
divorce create an important distinction in their responses but their respective
genders did as well.
Finally, some sibling differences are determined by
events unique to specific brothers or sisters. Christy, for example, was an
accident victim. She slipped on wet concrete, fell, and struck her head against
a wrought-iron chair, suffering a basilar skull fracture. After she underwent a
series of surgeries, her life was forever different from her siblings'
-- all because of chance.
Such random acts that befall brothers and
sisters can end up overdetermining their status as golden child or black sheep.
At age 15, Riana was gang-raped at the county fair in her small New England
town. Despite having been an A student until that point, she immediately and
understandably went into a downward spiral of depression, relying on illicit
drugs to self-medicate. "After that fateful day," she explained, "I went from
this naïf loving butterflies to just this big whirling mess of stuff. I wanted
to numb myself. And I guess my parents were just trying to wait until I got
through it. But the truth was I wasn't getting through it."
Riana's
trauma was complicated by her family's desire to contain the situation. Her
parents, highly educated and psychologically sophisticated, nonetheless took
advantage of her shock and numbness to persuade her not to tell her sister. They
did not want both their daughters knocked off course by this tragedy. And they
were successful in that respect: Today her sister is an author and editor in New
York City, while Riana, now 37, is cleaning houses in her home state of New
Hampshire. (To boost her income, she has recently started a business painting
pictures on wild-turkey feathers, carrying on a craft that has been practiced
for centuries by American Indians.)
Those are among the many stories that
illustrate the complicated, rather unpredictable family life of American
siblings. We tend to think that brothers and sisters dramatically differ from
one another only in extreme cases. The truth is that some families are rafts
overcome by stormy seas, some are sailboats tacking through the wind, and some
are big, stable ocean liners unconcerned about the weather. In other words, when
parents have lots of "class" resources to go around -- time, money, social
connections -- kids often are more alike since parents don't have to
"choose" between them and can actively compensate for disparities in skill or
pluck. (Think of the Kennedys or the Bushes.) However, when parental resources
are stretched thin because of financial hardship, large family size, short
spacing between kids, single parenthood, minority racial status, and so on, kids
tend to drift apart in terms of their socioeconomic status. (Think Bill and
Roger Clinton.)
While it may be surprising to realize how common sibling
inequality is on the whole, my analysis of the Study of American Families, a
1994 supplement to the General Social Survey done by the University of Wisconsin
sociologists Robert M. Hauser and Robert D. Mare, shows that Americans are quite
aware of sibling disparities within their own families. For instance, when given
a choice of 14 categories of kin ranging from parents to grandparents to spouses
to uncles, a whopping 34 percent of respondents claimed that a sibling was their
most economically successful relative. When the question is flipped, 46 percent
of respondents report a sibling's being their least successful relative. Both
these figures dwarf those for any other category of kin.
Taken as a
whole, these statistics and stories present a starkly darker portrait of
American family life than we are used to. We may want to think that the
home is a haven in a heartless world, but the truth is that inequality starts at
home. These statistics also pose problems for those people concerned with what
seems to be a marked erosion of the idealized nuclear family. In fact, they hint
at a trade-off between economic opportunity and stable, cohesive families. The
more we promote a free-market meritocracy, the more we may be undermining the
integrity of the family by fostering inequalities within. In this way, the
cultural priorities of the Republicans and Democrats are in tension with their
economic values. For example, if the GOP claims to be the party of family
values, it is also the party of unbridled economic Darwinism, which may undercut
the family structure that Republicans say they cherish. Party politics aside,
there is a fundamental tension in American society between family and economy
that won't be resolved anytime soon.
So Skip and Jim shouldn't feel bad
that they don't speak often. As much as Jim may resent his father for Skip's
favored-son status, he's ignoring half the story -- the societal forces
that were tugging on each family member in a different way. That tension between
the wider world and the cozy home was palpable in their house growing up, Skip
recounts: "It was livable tension, it was not an unhappy house; don't get me
wrong. But we didn't run around embracing and kissing everybody either. ... It
wasn't the Waltons."
It never is.
Dalton Conley is director of
the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University and
author of The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why, published
this month by Pantheon.
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Section: The
Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 26, Page B6
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Copyright ©
2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education