It’s hard enough when your close friend or next-door neighbor is wealthy and you’re struggling. But what happens when the person rolling in the dough is your sibling?
This show of brotherly love, the legend says, inspired Dovid Hamelech to choose that site for the Beis Hamikdash. Though the veracity of this story may be questionable, it remains an ideal model for sibling relationships: each brother considering the other one’s needs and doing his best to anticipate and fulfill them.
Following this archetype in modern family life, however, may be a little more complicated. In an economy in which the middle class has become an endangered species, it’s become increasingly common for siblings to have widely disparate income levels. How does that play out in family relationships? What happens when siblings have a harder time sharing — or not sharing — the wealth? How does a struggling couple give gifts to the nieces and nephews who have everything? Can parents prevent hard feelings when their resources are mainly directed at one financially challenged sibling?
According to Dr. Dalton Conley, Professor of Sociology at New York University, the differences in wealth among siblings are greater than differences in wealth when you compare most other social groups to each other. For every power sibling pair like President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, you have many more pairs like Bill Clinton and his unsuccessful brother Roger. (President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy was also a general public embarrassment).
After analyzing large sets of sibling data, Dr. Conley found that siblings from small families tend to resemble each other in terms of economic level. But families that are larger and poorer produce greater diversity. “Social class also influences how parents allocate funds to their children,” he explains. “Higher-income parents tend to use money in a compensatory way, they’ll give money to the child they perceive as being at a disadvantage. But lower-income families act in the opposite way; having limited resources, they’ll invest whatever they can spare in the child who looks like he’ll make something of himself.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
