Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin for Brian today. Are you fascinated by families whose kids have all achieved great heights in their often very different professions? Maybe you think the parents get the credit or maybe the blame for their children's achievements? Who's had the biggest influence on your life, your successes or failures, your interests and talents? Was it your parents? My next guest has spent years researching and interviewing families and researchers on this topic and argues that the influence of siblings is underappreciated. Journalist Susan Dominus is a New York Times magazine staff writer and the author of a new book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success, that talks about high-achieving siblings, some of whom you've probably heard of, the effect of class on these dynamics, the costs of being one of a set of brothers and sisters set on success, and the latest research on the nature versus nurture question. Susan, welcome back to the show. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this.

Susan Dominus: I'm so thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Now, we're going to get back to the idea of super-achieving families, but first, let's talk about the influence of siblings in general. In the New York Times article adapted from your book, you begin with a bit of a story. It demonstrates this idea of sibling influence, and also a bit meta in explaining how it came by you to write this story. Can you share that and that story about you and your older brother?

Susan Dominus: Oh, sure, absolutely. I was a ninth grader who was basically lying around reading one afternoon, and my brother, who was home from college, said, "I think you should join the high school newspaper," but our high school actually didn't have a high school newspaper at the time, which I told him, and he was very outraged by this. He insisted that my response to that should be to start a high school newspaper. He basically bullied me into doing it.

I didn't want to have to get a lecture about the decline of democracy the next time he was home from college. What was amazing to me is that I ran track and I played piano, but it really wasn't until I started working on the high school newspaper that I realized, "This is exactly what I'm meant to be doing." It was a really interesting example of how siblings sometimes know their siblings really well. They can be very influential. Also, I think that siblings sometimes take that kind of advice from other siblings when they might not take it from a parent, especially during adolescence.

Brigid Bergin: It's really interesting. I'm wondering, this idea of sibling influence, does it connect to the idea of how birth order matters, the so-called oldest daughter syndrome, or is it different from that?

Susan Dominus: The funny thing about birth order is that it's actually much less powerful than people have thought all these years. I think it was a way of explaining entire personalities and family systems to people in a way that felt intuitively right, but the more we know about birth order, the more we know that it really doesn't affect your personality. It does, however, seem to have some effect on basically like academic strength or cognitive strength.

The oldest sibling, much research finds, does have a bit of an academic edge. The thinking is that because they're the only one in their family who was ever an only child, they were the only one who had all of that concentrated attention and enrichment. There's also some thinking that oldest children do more instruction of their younger siblings, and that's a way of consolidating information. That more than personality, such as conscientiousness, seems to have an effect on how things play out ultimately.

Brigid Bergin: You shared that story of how your brother influenced you. Did it work the other way around too? Did you influence your brother?

Susan Dominus: No, I don't think so. Although, I do wonder if he was in a way differentiating, like maybe he-- my brother ended up a lawyer, and if he hadn't ended up a lawyer, I think there's a pretty good chance that I might have. Maybe he was steering me away somehow from what he was going to end up doing. I don't know.

Brigid Bergin: Well, listeners, we want to involve you in this conversation. What kind of influence do you see playing out with your siblings? Do you see it with your kids? Tell us about where you fit into these family dynamics, or do you have a question for Susan Dominus about sibling influence? You can call us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Text us if you can't get through on the phones. The Times book review got a super sibling, Ezekiel Emanuel, to review the book, he approved. What are some of the other families that fall into that category?

Susan Dominus: Well, I wrote about the Groff family, which is a family that includes Lauren Groff, the esteemed award-winning novelist, her sister Sarah True, who is an Olympic triathlete and world-class Ironman champion, and their brother, Adam Groff, who is a serial and very successful healthcare entrepreneur. I also wrote about the Murguía family, Latino American family from very humble roots whose ranks include the head of the single biggest Latino civil rights organization in the country, Ninth Circuit Chief Judge, major Latino philanthropist. I write about the Holifield family, a family of civil rights activists from Tallahassee, Florida, and so on. There are many others. I write about the Brontë sisters, too, who, some of the themes that played out in their family actually played out in many of the families that I wrote about.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, that's so interesting. Well, I want to talk about a local family that you wrote about, the Paulus siblings. People might know Diane Paulus' theater work. Can you tell us what their story is?

Susan Dominus: Yes, and just for timeliness, Diane is actually going to be directing a revival of Phantom of the Opera that was just very recently announced, and her brother Steve Paulus was one of the major forces behind New York 1, the creation of it, which was so influential for local news nationwide, and a third sibling, Janet Paulus, is a harpist with a world-class orchestra in Mexico.

I love that story so much because their parents basically soaked up everything there was to soak up in New York City. They lived just a few blocks from Lincoln Center, and that was the local art center and that was the local dance studio. Diane was actually dancing with the American Ballet Theater and their kids auditioned for Broadway shows whenever there was an opportunity. Their father was a consummate New Yorker. They didn't have a lot of money. They waited online for cheap tickets, but they regularly found a way to go to the opera.

Their father, in particular, was just exuberant. He did some arts programming in New York City for CBS, WCBS TV. A lot of their neighbors back then-- Lincoln Center was a village of performers. A cellist who performed in the CBS orchestra gave Janet-- sorry, a harpist gave Janet free harp lessons. They were there at the birth of the Metropolitan Opera. The day that it opened. They couldn't afford tickets, but they brought the whole family.

The story is that they put a transistor radio in the stroller that Diane was in as a baby to broadcast the music that was playing inside, and a of other music lovers gathered around them. I love this image of Diane at the center of this electric historical moment in New York City around the opera. She's also gone on to direct many operas, which was her mother's favorite.

Her father was this exuberant lover of New York City. Her mother was a Japanese immigrant who had met her father overseas in Tokyo when he was a high-flying GI and she was a grieving orphan. Eventually, she married him in the States and they built a life together. On a pretty humble budget, they managed to really give their kids the best of everything New York City had to offer.

Brigid Bergin: Well, if you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian today. I'm talking to Susan Dominus, author of The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan, I want to share some of the texts and calls that we're getting from listeners. One listener wrote, "I'm one of four. Completely agree that sibling relationships are extremely important, informative. One aspect that seems missing so far here is how siblings can protect from or step in parental roles, depending on a family's dynamics."

We have another listener who wrote, "My sister and I were two years apart and inseparable. She passed away when she was 39 and I felt like I lost half of myself, and still do. In the years when I found out that growing up, kids spent more time with their siblings than anyone else, it helped explain that loss. One question and one very poignant story. Can you weigh in at all about the role that siblings play in stepping into those parental roles?

Susan Dominus: Oh, absolutely. One of the families that I wrote about in this book is the Chen family. They were a family of Chinese immigrants, and their parents were basically working round the clock at a Chinese restaurant in Appalachia to try to just get by. Although the mother had very high expectations, she really wasn't even present enough to enforce them, and the oldest sibling in that family really took charge of her younger siblings education. Each of the oldest one really looked after the younger one in terms of coaching them on what classes to take and what teachers to avoid.

When three of them were already away living their lives, and the youngest sibling, the fourth sibling, was living alone with his parents and applying to colleges, they formed a book club to make sure he was reading challenging material. Each of them took a part of his college applications as their own responsibility. They really stepped in for each other and the bond among them is so incredible. I think there were many painful things about their upbringing, but their sibling relationships were so protective.

As for the second comment, it's so astute. There's nobody you spend more of your life closer to than your siblings. In the natural order of things, you outlive your parents, and friends come and go, but the siblings, they're there from the beginning and they're with you for the duration of your life, and they've seen everything that's important in your early stages of development, which are so crucial. Yes, it's a very unusual-- it's a unique relationship.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Raj in New Providence, New Jersey. Raj, thanks for calling.

Raj: Good morning, Brigid. Thank you very much for having me on. Yes, I just have a really quick story about my younger brother. He's three years younger. He and I were the first two born in this country. A,s you can imagine as kids, my parents would be strict and nagging us about studying and all that, but we eventually found a bond in playing trivia, whether it was as kids playing board games or eventually in our 20s going out for bar trivia and things like that.

To cap it all off, my brother, his name is Nikhil, he just won a couple of games on Jeopardy just about a month ago. I thought it was just great for us to share that bond and develop our own language where we didn't have to always just listen to whatever our parents were saying, and just have this trivia bond between us. To cap it all off, to watch him on Jeopardy was an honor. I'm just so proud of him.

Brigid Bergin: Raj, thanks so much. Congratulations to your brother. That's so exciting. I want to get a couple more callers in for you, Susan, before you can react. Let's go to Tom in Erie, Pennsylvania. Tom, thanks for Calling.

Tom: Hi. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be able to talk about my family. I have an interesting dynamic about seven brothers and two sisters. I'm a twin. I'm number seven in the family unit. My mom was more of the manager of these 10 kids. My dad was a car salesman, so we would see him mostly on weekends. The influence of the brothers and sisters was very much there. I would probably say one of my oldest brothers filled in the role of father, and it worked out fine.

The thing I want to say is, and then one interesting thing is one of my brothers was my school teacher because of the age difference. He was teaching me, my twin brother, and two other brothers while we were in school. He was Mr.-- and then when we go home, we call him by his first name.

Brigid Bergin: That's great. Tom, thank you so much for that call. Certainly a very large family with very large sibling dynamics there. I think that was 1 of 10, Tom would be, if I added up the number of brothers and sisters correctly there, Susan. Two really interesting stories, one about their own language, another about, really, I think it looks like how one could be playing a role of outside of the family and inside the family. What did you take away from those callers?

Susan Dominus: Well, just the idea that in the case of the language of the brothers, I think that there is a sense that two can be better than one. To have somebody who is also just always there and available to you. If there is a common interest or a common skill, it's just reinforced. In fact, you see sibling effects on each other, let's say, in terms of grades and things like that. They tend to be a little bit more intense in disadvantaged families. The thinking there is that it's simply because those siblings spend more time in each other's company because their parents don't have time to shuttle them around to different extracurriculars or they can't afford all those extracurriculars. We know that siblings can really have an effect on each other's success in that way.

As for the families of 10, and a lot of the larger families that I spoke to, one got the sense that the family became the most important unit. I interviewed one person from a pretty prominent large family. They didn't end up participating in the book, but I do remember him saying, "It was the opinion of the other kids in the family that mattered the most to us. We didn't care so much about what the outside world thought." I think you can really only have that when you have a big family, and it creates its own ecosystem.

Brigid Bergin: You touched on something there that I'm curious about, which is, the families that you talked to who ended up not wanting to be part of this book, is that because some of what goes into super achievement is actually pretty hard on the kids? I think you wrote in the introduction that, "Their stories are at least as likely to console those outside the stratosphere as they are to inspire them." What can you tell us about some of the costs of this super achievement within these families that may have complicated dynamics?

Susan Dominus: I think that things like anxiety and depression are common in all kinds of families, but I think what I would say is that being high achieving certainly does not protect you from it. Many of the families were very frank with me about the fact that there is sacrifice involved in really aiming to achieve at the level of the people I wrote about, which is to say, people who were trailblazers, innovators, who made it to the very top of their field, who were trying to do something new or imaginative. Those things, you sacrifice something, whether it's personal relationships or peace of mind.

I also think that just striving to be the best, to be an Olympic athlete, to be the best novelist you can be, to achieve at the level that the Groffs have, I just think it almost requires a tremendous amount of pressure that one puts on oneself. As for the families that didn't cooperate, I think for some of them, the discrepancies in the level of achievement of some of them, and in other words, in some of these families, there were two or three extraordinarily successful kids and then others who just weren't really hitting their stride. That was obviously a source of tension and pain. It wasn't something that they could comfortably talk about.

Now, I think there are some families in which that wouldn't be an issue, in which everybody could kind of agree like everybody's doing their own thing and some people's careers are more public than others, but I think in some very high -achieving families, they value achievement so much that it is painful if not everybody [unintelligible 00:18:19] at the same level.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. Let's go to Alan in Manhattan. Alan, thanks for calling.

Alan: Thank you for having me, Brigid. I'm the youngest of three boys, and it's my older brother that I want to talk about as being probably the biggest influence on my life. He was a civil rights worker back in the '60s. He was one of the co-founders of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was put in jail for demonstrating. I was only a 14-year-old boy at the time. To see my older brother stand for an idea that was so important was really-- He just was a great role model for me.

He brought home one of the co-founders of SNCC one time, John Lewis, and 50 years later, I saw John Lewis. I met him and I said, "Mr. Lewis, you don't remember me, I'm sure, but I met you in my living room in Pittsburgh when I was 14." He looked at me and he said, "You're Rick's brother?" I said, "Yes, I am."

There was that. The other that he was the biggest influence on my life in a very different way. He became the cook in his family for his wife and children. I had never thought of a man as being the cook in the family. My mother was the cook. She was a terrible cook. She was a wonderful person and had a great career, but not as a cook. My brother became a cook in his family and then I became a cook in my family. Still to this day, I cook dinner for myself all the time. I throw dinner parties. I'm on the board of a culinary institute. None of this would have happened if I didn't see my brother as a role model of, "That's the kind of man I want to be."

Brigid Bergin: Wow, Ken, thanks so much for that story. That's amazing meeting Congressman John Lewis in you're living-- Excuse me, Alan, thank you for that story. Let's go to Ken in Stamford, Connecticut.

Ken: Hi, how are you? I have a story that involves prodigies, siblings, and also immigration. My paternal grandparents came from Poland in the early part of the last century. Ended up in all places Chisholm, Minnesota. It turns out that although they were not musicians, the people who ran the Mesabi Iron Range, which Chisholm was on, were quite philanthropic and interested in culture.

An elementary school music teacher discovered that these four brothers had astonishing musical talents. The oldest started on violin, ended up in the Cleveland Orchestra, and eventually an eminent luthier in Paris. The second one played cornet, trumpet, was quite a virtuoso who ended up switching to French horn. The two younger ones played-- My dad played cello and then the youngest played piano. Dad was also a prodigy. He and his violinist brother had a string quartet. Dad was 12. They beat out a string quartet from the Philadelphia Orchestra in the teens of the century. At any rate, they moved to Philadelphia because the father decided that was the center of classical music.

The second one, who played trumpet, switched to French horn, studied with sort of the father or grandfather of horn playing in the US, who was Anton Horner from Germany. He's regarded, apparently, still as one of the greatest orchestra horn players who ever lived. He was so good the two younger ones switched from cello and piano, even though they were wonderful, to horn. All three of them eventually ended up as the first three- the mainstays of the horn section of the NBC Symphony under Toscanini. They developed a French horn, working with engineers From Caen in 1938, that became the standard all over the United States. It's still played, although it's changed a bit in this world.

Susan Dominus: It's a great-- If I could jump in. What's astonishing about that story is it really shows the complicated ways of nature versus nurture, because obviously they had this very strong genetic talent for music, but had they been in a different environment, without a dedicated teacher who discovered and nurtured it, it might have gone nowhere, could have gone unnoticed their entire lives.

Brigid Bergin: Susan, I'm sure that you get asked for advice all the time now, and I'm wondering, what kind of advice do you give parents who just want the best for their kids to be the best?

Susan Dominus: I always say parenting advice should come with the warning, "Don't try this at home," but I do think there were some themes that I discovered among the families. I think a lot of parents want their kids to feel they can achieve a lot, and then the question is how to create that without pressure. I think there's a messaging that I heard-- there was a common thread in these families, which was there was a little bit of an irreverence combined with optimism. There was the sense-- with the Murguía, their mother used to say, "With God's help, all things are possible." The Holifields told me that their unspoken family motto was, "All things possible."

I think that it's striking this balance between a sense of creating in your children a sense of possibility and optimism. "If you want to shoot for the moon, you should shoot for the moon, and we will back you." Then the sanity part of it is, "At the same time, we love you for who you are, and you don't have to shoot for the moon," or "You can try and shoot for the moon and get Close and not make it. We're going to love you anyway." I do think this sense of optimism is something that is really healthy and beautiful.

Then the other thing is I still think that most parents would say that if they had to choose between "making their kid high-achieving or having a good relationship with them," they would choose the latter. I think to the extent that parents can be really thoughtful about the ways that they outsource value building, having a really strong disciplinarian track coach for your kid, and then having the home be a safe place, I think is a better way to go than trying to be that person who forces a certain discipline into your child. That seems like a recipe for tension, especially when kids reach adolescence.

I do think parents can be really thoughtful about the mentors, the teachers, the coaches, the instructors, the adults that they cultivate in their neighborhood. All those kinds of things I think can be really helpful. The Paulus family did a lot of outsourcing to very rigorous ballet companies or boarding schools, which they did with great parsimony. Then the home was a very safe and loving place and I think it's a great model.

Brigid Bergin: Susan, a listener texted, "What about only children? How do family dynamics play out for people without siblings?" I know the focus of your work, in this particular work, is the sibling dynamic, but some of what you just said there seems like it would transfer for parents of only children or families with multiple children. Do you have any take on that?

Susan Dominus: First of all, you're right, a sense of optimism, a can-do spirit, cultivating a sense that there's nobody better than you, but you're no better than anybody else. That kind of value, that's great for only children too.

The other thing I would say is that although siblings do have the benefit of this built-in network of peers who can help advise them at every step along the way, which is something parents sometimes can't do because they're not of the same generation, but only children have something different, which is if we know that oldest children are highly enriched by virtue of having been only children, even briefly, think about the cumulative benefits that accrue to only children who have all of their parents attention, all of their enrichment, and no small thing, all of their financial resources for the duration of their lives. I think it's compensatory.

Brigid Bergin: Can you Talk a little bit about the parts that we can't control. Fate, we can call it that, or things like a COVID pandemic. How much did you find serendipity or bad luck played in these family stories?

Susan Dominus: There are some common themes that are statistically meaningful, like it's harder for the first child in a family of low income, first-generation college students to make it than it is for their younger siblings once the first one goes to college as well. I think that I really talked a lot about luck and fate in my book because there are so many things that are up to chance.

I tell the story of identical twins in the book, the Murguía twins, who were both up for this Girls State competition. It's a leadership program, very well known. Every state has one. The woman who was interviewing them decided she couldn't choose and felt they couldn't both go, and so she tossed a coin. The one who went, who won the coin toss, went to Girls State, then did so well there, she went to Girls Nation. As part of that, she went to the White House and toured the White House and ended up being a very close advisor to Bill Clinton. She moved to DC as soon as she got out of law school.

Her sister went on to become chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, Mary Murguía. She obviously thrived despite this bitter disappointment, but she lived at home until she was 30 because that was the family culture, and she hadn't had this experience that took her away from Kansas City, where they were growing up. In that family story, you just see how much a coin toss affected the shape of people's lives.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Susan Dominus is a staff writer for The New York Times magazine and author of The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan, thanks so much for joining us.

Susan Dominus: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Brigid.

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