Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We've been reading our April Get Lit with All Of It book club pick, and tonight we'll discuss it. I will be in conversation with author Laila Lalamy at 6:00 PM at the New York Public Library. If you have tickets, I will see you there. If you don't, you can watch it from the comfort of your own home via Livestream. For more information, head to wnyc.org/getlit. That's in about five hours. Now let's get this hour started with The Family Dynamic.

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Alison Stewart: Have you ever encountered a group of highly successful siblings? Maybe one's a doctor, the other's a CEO, the third a Broadway star, and wondered what's their secret? I mean, think about it. The Wright brothers, Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen, Rahm and Amaria Emmanuel. For years, New York Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus has been on a mission to answer that question. Her new book is titled The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success.

She profiles six families of high achievers, kids who grew up to be authors, Olympic athletes, founders of major companies, judges, Tony Award winners, and more. She talks to the siblings and their parents to uncover what factors help create a family of ultra successful adults. Susan Dominus will be speaking on Thursday at Greenlight Books with Emily Nussbaum. First, she joins me in studio now to discuss. It's nice to meet you.

Susan Dominus: It's so nice to meet you too.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. Are you part of a group of successful siblings? What do you think led to your success? What practices did your parents instill at home that you think help you achieve what you wanted to? Or maybe you're the parent of a high achiever. What do you think are the secrets to raising successful kids? We are taking your calls. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. This is a no-judgment zone. You can call in and brag about your kids. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can text that number or you can call in. How did you go about selecting the families for this book?

Susan Dominus: It's a great question, and I have to say it was a little bit idiosyncratic in the sense that I decided that I was just going to follow my own interests, the kinds of people whom I tend to admire. For me, that's artists, it's innovators, it's people who've overcome hardship. It's civil rights activists, it's philanthropists, and the book is really populated by people who kind of fit that description. I was looking for people who really had dreamed big in some way and bit off some kind of large goal and had achieved it.

Alison Stewart: Yes, that was my question, is what does success mean in terms of this book?

Susan Dominus: Yes, that's a great question also. As I said, it's I think success means you have set a very high goal, usually about something that has some value to the public beyond simply making more money, that kind of thing, and achieved it. Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, because you write in the book it was actually difficult to find families, and you witnessed mild insult slinging among family members. How did those arguments among people, as you watch them debate about whether or not to be a participant in your book, how did it help you write the book, I guess?

Susan Dominus: I think I understood just how complicated sibling relationships are, and also how you can have five siblings in one family and every one of them is going to have a different opinion about whether they, for example, wanted to participate in this book. I think I also got a sense of how primal sibling relationships are. I think for a lot of families, it was just too hot to the touch. They just didn't want to go ther, and that was intriguing to me, even as it was frustrating sometimes to get families to agree to let me talk to them.

Alison Stewart: The big question is nature versus nurture. We'll get into that in some depth, but as you're working on this book, what do you think had a bigger impact? Nature or nurture?

Susan Dominus: Increasingly, I think geneticists are coming to the conclusion that it's not one or the other. They're not in opposition to each other. They're deeply intertwined. In fact, Dalton Conley has this great book out right now called The Social Genome, in which he talks about that. You kind of create your own environment. One example is if you're naturally pretty fast, then your coaches maybe give you a lot of feedback about what a great runner you are, and then you start seeking out training grounds where they're going to enhance your fastness, or if you love books, you're going to surround yourself in libraries. Libraries are going to enhance your bookishness.

It's also true with how you respond to people. Let's say you're born agreeable and you're very easygoing. The world responds really nicely to agreeable people, and that can make you more agreeable. It's not exactly in opposition. One thing feeds the other.

Alison Stewart: What did parents tell you about why they thought their kids had been so successful?

Susan Dominus: I would say that a lot of them pointed to independence, and that's something Esther Wojcicki talks a lot about. In a lot of the families I wrote about, there was a sense of fearlessness. In fact, I remember this great quote from Marilyn Holifield, this wonderful trailblazer, Black female law partner and civil rights activist in Miami. She said about her parents, fear was not their thing. That meant they were the kind of parents who let their kids take chances, do things that might be hard.

Marilyn actually desegregated a high school in Tallahassee at a very difficult time, and that was not her parents' choice, that was her choice. I'm sure they were really worried about it, but they knew her well enough to know she could handle it, and they let her try it. It was extremely challenging, but it was also very formative.

Alison Stewart: That's what the parents would say. They were independent and they were fearless. What did the siblings say about one another?

Susan Dominus: How they affected each other, you mean?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Susan Dominus: I think that in some cases, even if it's painful, sibling rivalry can really be something that fuels people. Because it is so primal, there's no other motivation like it, in a way. This terrific, award-winning novelist Lauren Groff talks about how her older brother, who, like many older brothers, seemed smarter and a little bit superior maybe, was hugely motivating to her. So much of what she drove her for many years, not anymore, but for many years, was her desire to prove something to her brother.

I also think siblings give each other really good advice because they can see the future in a way that their parents maybe can't. They're pulling each other along professionally, sometimes as a network or sometimes just because they have vision that parents don't always necessarily have.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Susan Dominus. We're discussing her new book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Listeners, we want to hear from you. Are you part of a group of successful siblings? What do you think led to your success? What practices did your parents instill at home that help you achieve your goals? Or maybe you're the parent of a high achiever. What do you think is the secret to raising a successful kid? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can take text in or you can call us on that number.

Let's talk to Beverly who's calling us from Long Island. Hi, Beverly. Thank you for making the time to call All Of It. You're on the air.

Beverly: Hello. Thank you for having me. I just wanted to brag a little bit. I'm one of eight. I have a doctor in my family, a nurse practitioner. My brother was a Broadway actor who traveled the world. I'm a teacher, financial advisor in my family. I'm just super proud of just my family and my siblings, and I attribute a ton of that to my parents. They were always loving. They always encouraged us to follow our dreams. Yes, just a shout out to all the good work that parents do out there, and supporting your kids, and letting them chase.

We probably were all lost at one point in their life and we had to figure it out, and our parents always backed us.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, Beverly, was there anything that you and your seven siblings have in common?

Beverly: I guess high achievers, big dream? I don't know. I think that, yes, we were always supported in what we wanted to do. My brother who's a doctor now, he's a pilot in the Air Force as well. We just always backed each other. I think we just always had each other's back.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious, when you say that your parents encouraged you to pursue your dreams, how did they articulate that to you? What were the kinds of things they used to say that made you know that they felt that way?

Beverly: I think we were a very tight-knit family, and we always just supported each other. We did not come from money or anything like that. We all had to climb the ladder. I think that we all supported each other, and we all just told each other to go for it.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in, Beverly. Let's talk to Steve from Westchester. Hi, Steve. Thank you so much for calling WNYC. You're on the air.

Steve: You are very welcome. Thank you. My immediate family, my brother and my sister, we are all successful in monetary terms and that kind of thing, but I'm really calling about my father's first cousins. All of us were second or third-generation Americans, recent immigrants. We don't go back in the US beyond 1910 or so, but these first cousins of my father went to Ivy League colleges at a time when it was very difficult for Jewish people to achieve entry into those schools, and both of them became people that served the world and their country.

One of them became a important research physician in the world of children's blood diseases, and the other one became an important lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. Both of these men, who were their only siblings, each to the other, were dramatically gifted and used their gifts for good. I can only say that that was likely related to the way they were brought up, because that was the way we were brought up at my house.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Steve, thank you so much for calling in. I do want to get to our next caller, who is Mark from North Plainfield, New Jersey. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hi, this is Mark. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing great. You're on the air.

Mark: Sure. I mean, I don't know what the secret is, but I have three eminently successful children. Kid in the Naval Academy, going to great colleges, and a high schooler. I think it's really a couple of things. It's a mix of I caught the right amount of pushing. You don't want to be these parents screaming from the sidelines or pushing the kids over much. Also, it's kind of saying, you know what? You have gifts, you have skills, you're blessed, reach your potential. It's pushing just that right amount.

Then, the second piece, a little off on the fringe, is the works of Joseph Campbell and myth, and seeing their lives not simply as, okay, you're a 21st-century kid in New Jersey or whatever, but seeing your life as a part of a larger story, their story, making themselves a role, and looking at hardships, and I call it the hero's journey, as crazy as that sounds. Every test, every teacher that's difficult, staying up late to study as the hero's journey. Part of the hero's journey, as Campbell teaches, is there is a fall. There are those dark times.

My takeaways from being a parent of fairly successful kids is the right amount of pressure, not too much, not too little, and seeing their lives in not grandiose, but seeing themselves in larger terms.

Alison Stewart: Mark, this is going to crack you up. Not crack you up. Joseph Campbell was my mother's thesis advisor,-

Susan Dominus: Wow.

Alison Stewart: - and she used to make us read that book, The Hero's Journey, when we were little. It's interesting what he was saying about thinking of yourself as part of something bigger.

Susan Dominus: Do you think that you and your siblings did?

Alison Stewart: I don't know if we did, but we thought it was kind of cool. [laughs]

Susan Dominus: Yes. Jenny Wallace is working on this beautiful book called Mattering. I think it's about the sense why are you doing something? Because you're contributing. Because it matters in some more profound way than just achievement for achievement's sake.

Alison Stewart: What is birth order? How does that factor into it?

Susan Dominus: Well, so we all have these ideas in our head, I think, about what birth order is going to tell us, the oldest is the most conscientious, for example, but it turns out that really well conducted studies of very large sample sizes finds that there is very little effect of birth order on personality after all. It's very typical that someone thinks that the oldest sibling in a family is the most conscientious, but of course, that person is the oldest, so they are going to seem the most conscientious.

If you take that person, this oldest sibling, and compare them to the rest of the population, they're not necessarily going to be more conscientious relative to the broad population. There are certain things we know about the oldest child. A lot of research points to the oldest child having a slight cognitive edge or academic edge over younger siblings, probably because they get the most enrichment during that first year of development, but the idea that we can all explain ourselves by where we are in the birth order, nost people think that you might be able to explain yourself in your family dynamic that way, but in the world as you operate, less so.

Alison Stewart: What surprised you as you were reporting this book?

Susan Dominus: I went into the book thinking I was going to talk to tons and tons of parents and find out from them what the secret was and what were the sayings they had around the house, what were the rituals, the rules. When I really drilled down, I saw how much of these young people's success was due siblings instead. I talk about how it's almost like the parents send the arrow of ambition soaring into the air, but then the siblings help direct it, focus it, land it in families where there is a lot of collaboration and cooperation.

I think when you see a number of siblings succeed, if they come from a disadvantaged background in particular, it almost always requires some kind of collaboration, networking, really pulling each other along. They need that extra boost that other people who come from privilege have from other resources.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mary, who's calling in from Pearl River, New York. Hi, Mary. Thank you for taking the time to call All Of It. You're on the air.

Mary: Thank you. Thank you for taking my call. Listening to the segment, I'm an adult child, obviously, of immigrants, and one of the things that stuck out from listening to the previous stories was I had a father who thought his daughters could do anything they wanted to do. I think that that, in looking back, was so important to how myself and my sister developed and succeeded really well in the business world, whereas when I would look and talk to other friends, I never heard that, like, "My father was really supportive," that you could do anything you wanted to do. I just want to point that out.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Susan Dominus: I mean, I think one of the things that you see in the children of immigrants is let's think about how challenging it is to immigrate in the first place. Maybe you're coming from somewhere. You come to America, you barely speak the language, you're starting a new life, you're finding a home, you're starting a business. I think a lot children of immigrants want to honor that hard work, but they also see, "Wow, if my parents could build a life, and they came here not even speaking the language, what can't I do? I'm starting in such an easier place."

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. This text says, "My father was the child of immigrants, and they immigrated twice. I grew up understanding that a life can be built from nothing if you focus on what is actually possible to do rather than focusing what is normal or the way things are usually done.

Susan Dominus: That, I think, encapsulates it absolutely beautifully.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success. If you want to share, if you're part of a group of successful siblings, we want to know why. What did your parents do? What did you do? Give us a call. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Steward. My guest is Susan Dominus. We're discussing her new book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Did I say your last name right?

Susan Dominus: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Okay, good. One of the things in your book, you talk to people, some people come from wealth, some people don't. What did you observe about socioeconomic status?

Susan Dominus: As I mentioned before, I think that when there are families who come from a more disadvantaged place financially, I think that the sibling dynamic there requires more collaboration and cooperation. Sociologists have written about this. Kids who come from less advantaged homes do fewer curriculars, so there's less individuation in a way because there's no one to run them around to violin lessons versus tennis lessons, aut also, they spend more time together.

Sibling spillover effects are also more pronounced in disadvantaged families. If there's an intervention of some kind that's going to raise the academics of a young person in a disadvantaged family, it actually has ripple effects that affect the whole family, making that intervention all the more valuable.

Alison Stewart: There's this interesting chapter in the book about these identical twins in Columbia who are separated at birth, and their story reveals something because they go to the hospital, there's a mix up. There's an A set of twins and a B set of twins, and they get mixed up. They go home in different groups, so there's a set of AB twins that go home and a set that goes home, an AB twin. These two sets of twins are not related. They think they're fraternal. They go home to very different environments. What happens in their paths that you found to be interesting? What happens in their life that you kind of expect?

Susan Dominus: Yes, this is a fascinating natural experiment that happened because these twins actually, through a series of coincidences, were eventually reunited and met each other. What was amazing was that two of the twins who were separated at birth, identical twins, one grew up basically serving in the military, and he worked on a farm, and he never got to go to school. His identical twin grew up in Bogota, got a tremendous education, had speech therapy, and went on to have a very upper middle class life.

When they met, there was so much that was different about them in their bearing, but they were both fantastic dancers. They were both a little bit more brusque. They were both always on time. The other set of identical twins, same thing. They had very different upbringings, but personality-wise, they were remarkably similar. They were always late, for example, but they were also incredibly easygoing. Even the fights that the two separate sets of twins used to have mirrored each other because they had the same conflicts over and over.

The genes were clearly very powerful, but at the same time, their life outcomes were so different because of the experiences, the education, the environment in which they'd grown up. One of the twins who'd been raised in Bogota was extremely optimistic, and his identical twin who'd been raised in the country and had been denied an education, who'd had just a much harder life, just didn't have that same sort of irrepressible spirit, I would say, because life, in fact, had been much harder for him.

Alison Stewart: That's a wild chapter in the book. Let's talk to Marguerite. Hi, Marguerite. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Marguerite: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. It's funny when you mentioned if you're one of a high-achieving family, I thought, "Oh, no, no, that's not me." Then, I said, "Wait a minute. We're two professors, a medical doctor, a rocket scientist, a CFO, and a computer engineer, so I think maybe, yes, I do." I think part of our success is that we had this inner thing instilled in us. Our parents were children of the depression. They didn't go to college. It was just that you did what you had to do. You did your homework, you studied when you didn't really have to.

I think the fact that the six of us are also very different, and my parents did not hover. There were not rules. We did our homework as soon as we came home from school, and that was that. It was a very self-directed kind of learning. Three of us started at community colleges, and my brother and I are both professors, and we started community colleges. I have a PhD, my sister has an MD, so it's very interesting. I think that we could sort of over-- It had to be something inside, and it had to be something that we got from our parents, that this is the way one behaves or this is the way one goes about in the world.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Saul. Hi, Saul. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Saul: Hi. Thank you for taking the call. I wanted to comment on the guests mentioned that sometimes siblings make the biggest impact. I'm the youngest of three. I have two older siblings that are within a year of each other, and then I came five years later. My parents and my siblings were all high academic achievers. My parents both went to Ivy League schools, and my siblings got into great schools.

I think because I was much younger observing all of this and I got, let's say, less parental attention, although I didn't realize it at the time, I grew up with this sense of doing better than my siblings, getting that attention, that led me into my own Ivy League education, and then professionally and even personally, I've led a much more, what would be called a typically successful life. I'm the only one married with children. I've had a professional career where I've earned much more money than my siblings.

It wasn't something intentional that I sought out, that I was conscious of doing better, but I think it was probably a quest for attention in my childhood that led me into that. I've done things that I've always wanted to do, in the relationships I've wanted to be in, and in the profession, and pursuing the passions I've wanted to. It's interesting that in some families, the older one is the rock, the successful one, and the younger ones maybe flail a bit, but in my family, it's actually the reverse.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling us, Saul. We appreciate that. Did you hear anything that you wanted to comment on?

Susan Dominus: I think more that it just speaks to a little bit the law of averages, right, just because we know that on average, the oldest person tends to be the most cognitively strong and therefore, makes the most money, things can get twisted around. Also, I think it speaks maybe to this idea of differentiation, like you wanted to distinguish yourself somehow, is what I'm hearing you say. I think that is something that developmental psychologists believe is a real phenomenon in families.

Alison Stewart: You have twins.

Susan Dominus: I do.

Alison Stewart: What question did you have about raising twins as you were writing this book and getting all of this research?

Susan Dominus: Well, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that when you start to research childhood success and parenting, pretty quickly, you come into a body of research that tells you that parenting effects are much smaller than we think that they are. Parenting matters. Of course it matters. It's just those individual decisions that you think are so monumental about whether to punish someone a certain way or have a chores chart or not, or co-leep, these little variations that loving parents can really agonize over probably don't really translate into certain kind of personalities, let's say.

Or if you enforce homework rules, you're not necessarily going to have a more conscientious child. As the mother of twins, we saw that all the time. We parented them precisely the same way. We read them the same books. I mean, hours and hours of-- We fed them the same food. We did have the same rules. One of them grew up to be the social chair of his fraternity at the University of Wisconsin, and his twin brother's only version of Greek life was that he studies ancient Greek at a tiny liberal arts school of 400 students. They couldn't be more different.

We raised them. They heard the same stories, they heard the same values, the same family history all the time. I like to think that we had a positive effect, but obviously, we've had very little control over their general leanings.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Carol from Montclair. Carol, you've got about a minute.

Carol: Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me. I just want to say, I think my family, I come from a large family, six siblings, and I think we're successful in a number of ways. We're all educated. We have teachers, professors, lawyers in the family, and everybody's in the same marriage 40, 50 years later, things like that. Everybody lives a good life. They're good people. I think part of it was a big family. My parents just set examples to be responsible and to also help other people, but you also have to be independent, because there's only so much parental time to go around. We all learned to be self-sufficient and--

Alison Stewart: And how to get long, and how to get along with one another among six kids. Somebody asked my dad, "How are your daughters so successful?" He said, "I don't golf," which meant he was around on the weekends.

Susan Dominus: Wow. I actually wanted to ask you about something, which is a lot of the parents in the book that I wrote about, a disproportionate number turned out to be educators, and if I'm not mistaken, your mom [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: My mom was an educator, yes.

Susan Dominus: I'd love to hear about how you think that trickled down into your own way that you moved through the world.

Alison Stewart: I saw a woman take her role as an educator extremely responsibly. It was her job to educate those kids, and she told us that was our job, to be educated. You go to work every day, you go to school every day, I go to work every day, and she instilled that in us. Then, to your point, when you're around something long enough, when you're around education long enough, you develop interests in other things. That was how she dealt with it. My dad goes like, he was just always home on the weekends. He couldn't be there during the week, but he was always home on the weekends.

Susan Dominus: Yes, I think that presence really makes a difference, and just always instilling the value of education. Obviously, we know that is a reliable path to success. If it's clear that that's a family value and it's not just something your parents say, but they live and breathe it, I think it has to reinforce that.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Family Dynamic. It is by Susan Dominus. Thank you so much for coming in and taking calls with us.

Susan Dominus: It's truly been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.