to ask those of you who aren't close to your siblings whether your parents are to blame?

[MinutesOfMeetings]

In RL most of my adult friends with siblings are either very close friends or slightly distant but generally loving. On here I see a lot of posts from people saying they hate their siblings or are not in contact, these posts are especially common on threads debating only-children.

I was an only child so have little insight into sibling dynamics but I now have three kids and would be so sad if they grew up with negative feelings about one another.

Are there things a parent can do to foster a good sibling dynamic? Those of you with bad sibling relationships, do you see it as all down to your sibling's personality or something else?

I don't hate my sister, and see her regularly (at my parents' house), but we are not close and don't get on very well when we do see each other.

Hard to say how much of this is down to my parents. DSis has mild dyspraxia which has led to my mother wrapping her in cotton wool, whereas I have been expected to be independent. I don't resent this different treatment at all (I would've hated the cotton wool treatment) but it has certainly made us even more different. I actually think Dsis would have done much better if she'd been expected to be more independent. And we'd have been more similar.

Some of the things I have read on here have been really helpful. I think for many years I refused to blame my parents because they were my parents, and somehow having parents who got things wrong was too scary.
Now I look at my grandparents and can see why they are the way they (my parents) are and how it translated into the way they treated DSis and me.
However, DSis and I are not particularly compatible so even if our parents had been brilliant parents I don't think we would have been close as adults.

I love my sister and get on well with her. Not in a 'best friend / deep and meaningful' way but more as in we can chat away about normal stuff and I enjoy spending Tim with her husband and my nephews.

She's always been nice to me (12 years older) and I think that is mainly down to her being a good person and she likes having her family around her, but suppose in part that my parents did a good job with us too.

If be very sad to loose her and her husband and my nephews from my life.

I'm close to my two siblings (one older brother, one younger sister), apart from a period with no contact with my brother, but then none of us had contact with him then. That was nothing to do with our parents, as we were older then, and everything to do with his controlling and abusive ex-wife.

DH is close to two of his brothers, but has no relationship with his other brother, and that is to do with his parents. The other brother (AKA the Golden Child) is their parents' favorite, they have never tried to hide it. As a result, DH and my two BILs became their own unit of three. None of them are close to the Golden Child, not without effort on their part, it was Golden Child who burned the bridges. My ILs favoritism of the Golden Child, gave him a superiority complex, and he views his brothers beneath him, and they weren't even invited to his wedding. It's all very bizarre to me, as I come from such a close, tight-knit family, especially now that DH's relationship with his parents has broken down too.

DH and I hope our children will all get on, we can't guarantee they'll be close, but we just want them to grow up and at least speak. I think the best way to do that, is to just let them build their own relationships, rather than trying to "force" them to get on.

My sister is nearly nine years older than me. We grew up virtually as only children - when I was in Primary school, she was in secondary - when I was in secondary, she had left home to go college etc.

We have very little in common and although we only live 20 mins drive away, rarely see each other apart from exchanging of presents for birthdays and Christmas.

I blame the big age gap, so I would say it was my parents' fault.

With DC2 on the way this is something that concerns me so I read "Sibling Rivlary". think it contains some useful insight and strategies for trying to promote the best possible relationship between your children. One of the most useful bits it includes is the fact that you have to accept that you children may just not have complementary personalities and just not be the best of friends that you hope for. It's also made me realise a lot about my own background.

I am one of 5 children and am nc with my parents and 3 of my siblings. My mother was a narc who manipulated all of us and we are all in different ways damaged by our childhoods.

I think we might not have been close anyway - distance, different personalities etc, but I will never know. She did so much damage that it's impossible to tell who we would have been without that.

I have an older brother (3 years older) and we are not at all close. Growing up he wanted nothing to do with me, which I understand as what boy wants his younger sister following him and his friends around? By the time I started secondary school we were distant, in fact lots of people in my year had no idea that he was my brother, and I went to a small secondary! Around university time we started to get along, we didn't become closer but we stopped fighting. We both live in different countries now so we only have sporadic, rare communication.

Honestly, I don't know if my parents could have fostered a closer sibling relationship. I tend to think in my case, the older sibling being a brother who was actually rather immature made it harder for a close relationship to develop. This is just my theory. My DH has an older sister (2 years older) and they are very close. I tend to think that girls mature emotionally earlier and so his sister got over the fighting stage and was naturally more protective of my DH while they were still in their mid teens.

I hate one of my 3 sisters and am completely NC with her. I don't hate my other sisters and brothers, but I don't spend a lot of time with them and rarely talk to them. We're just different people. I'm the only one married and the only one in full time employment, they all seem to just drift in and out of things, my Mam is the same. I'm the only one who has really taken after my Dad. It's hard to go see him though, I don't get to talk to him when I do cos my Mam and youngest sister blather on and on about their latest drama. I get a major headache everytime I go up. I spend a lot more time with my in laws, they are much more like me.

I'm an only so not relevant, but DH has one brother he isn't particularly close to. They get on fine when they're together, they just have nothing in common and don't go out of their way to see each other. It has nothing to do with the PILs, who were / are very fair and impartial.

I get on with mine, but on a superficial level - we have different outlooks on life and we're very definitely siblings rather than friends. However, my test is "would I trust you to look aft my children if I died" and the answer is categorically yes. Same with my BIL/SIL on DH side.

My parents were emphatic that we had each other's backs. I think this stemmed from my dad's awful upbringing where his mother and father seemed to actively turn siblings against each other - right through adulthood until the twisted buggers died. His mother would say "DS2 asked me if you were on the fiddle to be able to afford that holiday" - just utterly banal, spiteful stuff. Plus there was a lot of alcohol involved. The siblings get on much better since their parents died.

I have had no contact with any of my family for a year now.

Before that me and my sisters had little contact. My father is a narcissist and my mother and my sisters are completely under his control.

I would very much like to have contact with my mother and my sisters but at age 50 I had to break contact with my father. I have told my mother and sisters to contact me at any time and they are welcome in my house.

They are too frightened to contact me.

My father has no contact with any of his relatives at all. Every single one has cut off contact.

Thanks for all these responses. This thread makes sad reading and i really hope I can raise my three fairly so that at the very least they don't resent one another. It's hard as my middle child can be vile to her siblings and she is only five, deciding how to manage her resentment without deepening it is a real challenge.

Me and dsis are close, although we see each other rarely (other end of the country). We go through stages of phoning regularly, and will talk for a couple of hours-or until the battery goes.
If she phoned and said she had a crisis could I come, I'd be on the train in a twinkle and I know that she, barring work commitments, would be the same.
We're very different personalities though. I was always the girlie girl wearing pink, playing dolls etc. She would be found in muddy jeans half way up a tree.

I'm not close to my db, and looking back it is my parents' fault. He was the youngest, and the most difficult. When he was 18yo, my dm said in telling me something was, as usual, revolving around him, "you have to make allowances, he's going through a difficult time" to which I turned round and pointed out she'd said this for 10 years. About 15 years later she still says this to excuse revolving round him.

The thing is I think four fold problem.

1. He is much more likely to make a fuss if he didn't get his way than me. So there would be times I'd be pushed back, and pushed back and pushed back because at each stage it was easier for them to ask me to back down than tell him he had to. Sometimes I didn't mind, other times I was really upset, but if I said so often I was made to feel that I was being mean. And it still went his way.

1. Dm could see that he struggled/s socially. He really does. So I think she felt that I would have friends etc. and he would find life harder, and tried to make up for it, so she felt I shouldn't complain if things at home revolved round him as I could go out with friends that he didn't have.

Now I am very shy and find making friends difficult, so I found this really hard as I put a lot of effort into this. So I felt I was being penalised for putting this effort in.

1. Because they would never correct him, he didn't learn. He has learnt a little now in the real world, but he takes any criticism either as not valid or that they've taken a dislike to him, not something to learn from. Dp tend to encourage that feeling too.

1. They encouraged him to have/do the same things as me, and always compared us with him favourably even when it was clear (looking back) I was better. He's 3 years younger, so I always had this champing on my heels feeling.

If I give an example of the musical instrument we both player (violin). He's tone deaf, and took 10 years (and 4 attempts) to pass grade 1, so he wasn't good. Dm would talk about it along the lines of "oh yes DeWee and DeBro both play. DeWee finds the tuning easier, but DeBro has really good bowing technique and style, he's got such good control, it's beautiful to see..." Other than looking back, dm wouldn't know that sort of thing anyway, but then people got the impression he was much better. Dm was aware I was better (grade 3 in 2 years) so she over compensated.

There were also things that he took for granted that me and dsis would have only dreamed of. Shop bought cakes were one thing. A shop bought cake for me and dsis was one chelsea bun, divided into 5 and us all have officially one piece each (but usually dm gave at least half hers to dbro) The first time I came back visiting from university dbro had a huge strop. Dm had bought a packet of 6 donuts. His strop: well obviously I would expect one so he was now only going to have 4 (df expecting one too) rather than his usual 5. Yes, you've guessed it, me and df were only given half each.
We were late for my wedding rehearsal because we stopped for a quick snack on the way-and dbr insisted on having a full 3 course meal. Taking lunch to dsis when her baby was born, we were well over an hour late because just as dm said we would leave he decided he wanted to have a shower...

Most of these things are dp fault. Not because they favoured him. But because they were afraid of the fall out if they didn't pander to him. Result is that he still struggles socially because if he's never been told then how doesn he know?
Dm's often would respond with a phase, if we said things like "just go and leave him behind then he won't decide to have a shower/change his clothes/have something to eat etc. before we left very late: She'd say "I can't leave him behind. he's my son!" However I suspect if she'd done it once age 13/14 he'd probably have not done it since, so ti would have been much more loving as he now can't understand people that don't make those allowances for him.

What an interesting thread ! I grew up with a very dominant father, and a weak mother. I have two brothers who I never see also parents I hardly ever see- the reason being , I left the dominant man I married who violently put me in hospital . According to my family I should have been more compromising with him . Coincidentally he doesn't bother with his children now and neither do his family . So my children have no family at all , all because I left an abusive man - this is all lead by my abusive father and my weak mother

Interesting idea for a thread op.

God, I could write an essay on this.

I would say it's a mix of both siblings and parents. If siblings have different interests and personalities, all parents can do is try to encourage positive behavior but the siblings will probably never be that close. On the other hand, there are some parents that actively seem to wind siblings up and set them against each other. It's a control thing.

DH's family have a long history of sibling rivalry issues. Both of his parents have had falling outs with their own siblings. His father only has one sister and they are no-contact. The reason behind that was definitely in part parenting, with huge favoritism shown to the sister especially on financial issues. FIL still feels bitter and hard done by on this. The sister is also a bit batshit crazy and manipulative though so hard to tell who's really at fault.

MIL gets on with one of her sisters but has a ropey relationship with her other two sisters. She didn't even go to her BIL's funeral because of being in sulk that sister had not told her about funeral arrangements first... ?!? She has quite a jealous personality though and likes to stir things up. She does the same with DH and his brothers. He is NC with one of his brothers and just cordial with another. Partly it's the age gap as they are 5 and 10 years apart but he also just has nothing in common with them. His mother always stirred up competition between them all and encouraged rivalry rather than kindness so the resentment built up. It's a control thing with her because she feels like the queen bee having them compete for her attention. DH has stepped away from it all by living abroad.

My parents encouraged us to take good care of each other as siblings and my sisters did always look out for me growing up. As adults we have little in common though. I'm the only one of my siblings who is married with children. My parents got on fairly well with all their siblings although my father only really keeps in touch with 3 out of his 5 siblings. No idea why. He never talks about any falling out but just doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with them. My mother and her sisters always looked out for one another although they had the usual spats and flare ups over the years. She only has one sister left living now and they get on fine.

I would say in most of my family, siblings are cordial, get on fine but there is no real warmth or deep relationship there. There are strong introverted / independent streaks on both sides so people just don't reach out to one another. It's a topic that's very much on my mind at the moment as I am due DC2 soon and would love my children to be close to one another. There'll be a three year age gap and different genders though so might never happen...

There you go... I wrote an essay!

Partly because my Dad never told her off.
Partly because she was diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia (wrong diagnosis I feel) and as she is 8 years older than me it caused a lot of problems.
Partly because she makes everything about her-- even now she's 32 she only really contacts me and my parents if she wants money, the kids need something or she's fought with her husband.

I have another sister I get on well with.
They are both half siblings so step siblings- the other sister is 9 years older than me so only a year apart .
They don't speak to each other at all.
Last time probably 10 or 15 years ago?

Going to make my wedding awkward...

I'm not close to my brother at all. We were very close growing at one stage, but he became a problem as a teenager, very violent, getting in trouble with the police etc. He's in his late thirties now, has a decent job, but lives alone. He's always been a bit of an odd bod, and we have little in common. It makes me terribly sad, as my husband sees his two sisters every week, and I would love that close sibling relationship. When I found out I was having a second boy, I was thrilled, if only because I had such a negative experience growing up with the girl/boy dynamic.

I have a half brother (6 years younger) to whom I'm not close at all, and I blame my dad. My stepmother used to facilitate us spending time together when I was visiting their house. But my dad got divorced for the second time when I was 10 and after that I had virtually no contact with my half brother. And as adults we have very little in common. I consider myself functionally an only child.

DH isn't very close with his siblings but that's because he was the change of life baby. His siblings are 19 and 16 years older than him. He doesn't blame his parents.

Just to clarify, DH is not close with his siblings but in an amicable way. I am not close with my brother in a non-amicable way, if you appreciate the distinction.