I doubt you can ever identify why your sons & your nephews are different (obviously you know this of course!) but I have a theory, as below.

Theory: if nurture (ie, children learning from messages given to them) is relevant to development at all, then the larger the arena from which the messages come, the more effective the messages are. Put simply: in a big family, a child gets messages about social interaction/what's annoying & what's not/independence vs. dependence options/role models as to how to entertain yourself & how not (& consequences of not doing so) - from all sides, siblings and parents alike. This must have a kind of intensifying/pincer movement effect. Put even more simply: your sons have, in this area, an advantage over your nephews.

(I was thinking about this because I was mulling over my own son's social difficulties (yet lovely relationship with his single sibling), & deciding someone like him would probably have really been best as a member of a great big Victorian-type family. Too late now, of course.)

I do think about this a lot. My sister every week asks me why mine play together (we both have non identical twin boys) and hers need her and it's not just that hers are 7 and mine 9. I think it's when mine interrupt me I try (don't always manage it) to break off smile, deal with them and then resume whereas she gets into a kind of awful state, shouts about how she never gets any peace etc and perhaps one of hers is just a higher need child and possibly part of it is in our house there are usually other people, older children, students etc so like any big household with grannies and uncles and even cleaners around the children may well be interacting with one of those others rather than just me all the time (and who wouldn't rather play vigorous garden games with 20 year old boys and girls when the alternative is a 40s mother... there is some method in my apparent madness in liking the older children around (free au pairs)

Xenia - maybe you've hit the nail on the head with breastfeeding! Mine would have been latched on 25/7, had they not been bottle fed - and then I would indeed never, ever have been able to do anything else!

I also have a slight cop-out in the form of my husband, who would read to our son after lunch when he was a toddler and our daughter was a baby, just so I could play the piano! Were it not for that, I don't think I'd have done anything other than see to their needs when they were that age.

That did seem to train them so that they now occupy themselves quietly and don't disturb me for 20 minutes. That said, it all goes very pear-shaped during a nine-week school summer holiday, when there's more scope for them to occupy themselves by squabbling very noisily!

But, yes, as Xenia says, they get older and easier, and then you can do more of the things you like doing because they are that bit less needy!

..also I remember when the youngest three were little and I commuted to the city to work how much more time for my own activities I got because I worked, that relief we both felt in handing three of them to our daily nanny at 8am knowing you had an hour to sit down and read a book on the train, chance to settle yourself at work, glance at the paper, have people in a sense serving you at work, then stroll out to get lunch even if it were a quick sandwich, ability to pace your day, no child asking for things all the time, time your breast milk expression sessions at your leisure (although I do prefer feeding to expressing), then take the train home with time to read that good book on the way and arrive at home having had that lovely break from children to their lovely welcome of you (or tantrum or whatever but much easier to handle because you've had a balanced day and life in having both work and children in it which is what most men want and indeed most women with under 5s achieve too as most of them work).

I have yet to have a toddler who would not come up to the piano and interfere if I played it. Same for my sister. Same for my brother. We might have particularly difficult children but I don't think so. On the other hand now if I want to play I just make sure I close the door (or else I'm accompanying them anyway) so it's always just a temporary problem whether you work or not. They get older and easier.

I am much more interested in the issue of time to do what you want when you have under 5s than I am about arguing over women working or not working.

We certainly found with 3 under four, baby, 1, 3 there really wasn't a second free not to be dealing with them if you had them alone (this would be days when we were home alone with them). I don't think that's because we were otherwise working parents and I am very non interventionist with the children. The now 9 year olds are very self sufficient even if I am in the house.

It was similar with the twins as babies except if they slept at the same time. It may depend on number of children. If you've got one at nursery school in the mornings and a baby who has a morning nap then you may get some time. If you haven't given birth to a baby whose ideal is to be latched your breast 24/7 (which seemed to be the preference of most of mine) then you might have more free time. I suspect it's an age of child and numbers of children you have issue.

But my sister's 7 year olds never seem to give her a second's peace and mine always did and she keeps asking me what is the difference. What has she done different from me that I can read the newspaper or even work on a Sunday morning and she can't even sit down for 2 minutes.

I used to tell her it changed at age 5 and they got easier.

Yes, it does get easier. When mine were one and three, the idea of being able to breathe for 30 seconds without someone needing something seemed laughably impossible. It was in the run-up to DS starting school (which I postponed until the end of Reception, glutton for punishment as I am) that light started to appear at the end of the proverbial tunnel!

it does get easier, my kids are 7 and 10 now and honestly, it gets a bit easier

Believe me, I do try very hard to leave them to their own devices for a while during the day... luckily I don't suffer from overcompensating guilty working mother syndrome

But mine are 4 and 10mths so there is absolutely no point in picking up a newspaper or starting to weed a bed because someone is guaranteed to kick off or need attneding to after 5 mins.

Happy, no delirious to believe that it will get easier though!

It also occurs to me, a propos of Pendulum's post, that it's arguably easier for SAHMs to be a bit more hands-off with the children than it is for working mothers, on the grounds that they see the children for a good 13 hours per day and it is therefore not unreasonable to spend some small amount of that time doing something other than actively looking after them!

Pendulum - I have them well trained with a kitchen timer. When it rings after 20 minutes, they are allowed to disturb my post-lunch piano playing .

DS was jealous of the piano for a number of years, but has now asked me to teach him (I think he has finally realised that this means extra attention!!)

Gardening is very easy with two toddler "helpers". For starters, they like pointing out which roses need dead-heading, and they love poking around with trowels. The can now tell the difference between flowers and weeds, which is a bonus. Writing does have to be done when they're asleep, but we do a lot of reading (my brain is so sleepy that Jake Cake is sophisticated enough for me during the day).

My children are a bit older now (4 and 6), but I have always sneaked some of my own interests into looking after them. I never mastered the "going to the loo without having to take two toddlers with me" thing, though...