Stop Calling Siblings ‘gifts’

Within months of having her first child, Samantha Savran began hearing from family and friends that she should have a second. Doing so would be the greatest “gift” that she and her husband could give their son, people told them.

At first, Savran agreed. Growing up with a brother, she had liked having a live-in playmate and confidant. But the more she thought about her situation, she grew hesitant. Her birth experience had been traumatic. And she wasn’t sure if having a sibling would be the best for her son, who was thriving. What she and her husband could offer him—Montessori preschool, a family trip to Japan—might not be possible with a second child. But she also knew that sibling relationships could turn painful. In adulthood, her connection with her brother had splintered. They had disagreements that had spiraled into a full-blown falling out, and their relationship was now “difficult,” she told me. “It’s hard to say that I still see it as a ‘gift.’”

The notion that parents should give children a sibling is common. “Life Is Better With Siblings,” declared the headline on a recent New York Times op-ed by the Catholic University professor Catherine Pakaluk, who argued that, unlike small families, “large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat.” In a column last year for The Guardian, a writer explained that she had “gifted my daughters each other,” and that doing so was a way of “quietly healing my childhood loneliness.” On social media, heartstring-tugging posts of small children holding hands and nuzzling underscore the point: “A baby brother is the universe’s way of giving a little girl her first real love story,” one mom captioned a video.

When I asked online about this kind of messaging, I heard from dozens of parents who had been on the receiving end. A New York City woman who works in health care, fresh off maternity leave, said a patient had told her that she would be “selfish” not to have a second child. Scarlet de Lemeny, a recently married retail consultant based in Boston, told me that before she’d even set a wedding date, people had advised her to have multiple children—because “they need a friend.” This month, the British celebrity Kate Lawler, who has one 5-year-old, wrote in Metro: “I’m now regularly hounded with abuse when I talk about the positives of having just one, as if raising my daughter without a sibling is the cruellest thing I could possibly do.” This prodding isn’t limited to one-child parents. A mother of two boys told me that she keeps hearing she should “definitely try for a third, so you can have a girl.”

The people who implore women to have more kids usually mean well. It’s lovely, and reasonable, to hope that a sibling might become a child’s lifelong friend and source of support. But the “gift” messaging isn’t always benign. For parents, it can add pressure, guilt, and anxiety to an already huge life decision—particularly for women, who in addition to giving birth tend to bear the brunt of fertility expectations, care responsibilities, and mental and physical health burdens, and to take a hit to their long-term employment and earnings prospects.

The “gift” phrasing also rests on a shaky premise. People, after all, aren’t inanimate objects. They are unpredictable beings with a will and their own motivations. And not even the best of intentions can guarantee that a child will experience a new sibling as a gift.

The sibling bond can be unlike any other. I’ve heard people describe their siblings as their “first phone call,” their “life raft,” their “village.” Some siblings can finish one another’s sentences or seem to sense when something is wrong even when they’re far away, in another state. One of my friends is so close with her brother that he made her the “best ma’am” at his wedding. Another person told me that, when her parents kicked her out, her sister took her in—the same weekend the sister was getting married.

Broadly, research shows that sibling relationships tend to be more positive than negative. One large, recent U.S. survey found that more than half of respondents ages 25 to 35 had “tight-knit” relationships with their full siblings. Although events such as starting their own family can cause siblings to drift apart, they typically experience a “rebound,” the sibling researcher Megan Gilligan, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, told me. In one study, a sample of older adults found that most reported warm, low-conflict sibling ties.

But these bonds can be uniquely complicated. “Sibling relationships are different than our other family ties, and they tend to be more complex,” Gilligan said. “We use the term ambivalence: They can be both very positive and very negative, simultaneously.” The same factors that can make these relationships go so right—growing up together; knowing one another’s triggers, foibles, and flaws—can also make them go very wrong. When aging parents need care or die, for instance, their grown children might find benefits to sharing the costs, decision making, and emotional burden, Gilligan said. But in some families, the same situations can cause conflict and resentment.

[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]

Research also indicates that it isn’t simply having a sibling that benefits children—it’s having a good relationship with one. That may sound like plain common sense, but the distinction is crucial. A paper last year identified sibling aggression and abuse as “invisible and widespread public health problems.” One watershed 2013 study found that children who endured sibling aggression, including name-calling and “mean” comments, had worse mental health than those who didn’t.

Still darker and less discussed is sibling sexual abuse. There’s no way to know how common it is, Brad Watts, a Tennessee-based therapist who specializes in sibling abuse, told me. But in more than a decade of working with affected families, he has seen a theme: No family is guaranteed immunity. “It can happen in my home,” he told me. “It can happen in anybody’s home.”

Watts has three boys. He has loved watching them become close friends. But he would never tell someone to “give” their child a sibling. “I can talk about all kinds of siblings that were not ‘gifts,’” Watts said. “They were, more or less, terrors.” Even close sibling relationships aren’t always beneficial. Studies over the years have found that adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or unsafe sex, and even to break the law if another sibling did—especially if their relationship is tight.

Calling a younger sibling a “gift” can create unintended consequences, too, Whitney Goodman, a Miami-based therapist, told me. Although this is surely no one’s intent, the phrasing can imply that a child has been brought into the world in the service of another. The parental preference it suggests may cause children to feel they’re treated or desired differently—one of the most common reasons sibling relationships fracture.

Learning to navigate life with someone you didn’t choose to grow up with can be rewarding. But not always. The same large U.S. survey that found “tight-knit” relationships among many full siblings also found that up to one in five sibling relationships were characterized by “detachment”—meaning that siblings were less likely to have frequent contact, to feel emotionally close, or to offer one another social or financial support. In Germany, researchers looking at a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,000 adults found that 28 percent of respondents were estranged from a sibling at least once over the study’s six-year period.

[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]

De Lemeny, the Boston retail consultant, has amassed more than half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram by sharing about her life and childhood, and her experience going no-contact with her parents. Many followers ask about her brother, assuming that they must have “trauma-bonded.” When she explains that, actually, she and her brother don’t speak, some are shocked. Others thank her: They weren’t close to their siblings and thought they were alone in this. “It’s a dynamic that doesn’t really get spoken about,” de Lemeny said. “It’s something that carries a lot of shame.”

This silence about conflict and estrangement can have ripple effects in the broader culture. It might lead parents-to-be to assume that, barring some grave unlikelihood, siblings will be friends for life. It also contributes to the narrative that if a person doesn’t “give” their child a sibling, they will be, unequivocally, depriving them of something important.

Anna de Sapio, a social worker in the United Kingdom, gave birth during the first COVID lockdown and struggled with isolation, exhaustion, and postpartum depression and anxiety. Yet when her daughter was only four months old, de Sapio began to get the question: When are you planning to give her a sibling? It made de Sapio feel “depleted,” she told me—as if, no matter how much of herself she gave, it wasn’t enough.

Nearly every mother I spoke with expressed guilt about her decision making: one-child moms for not “giving” their child a built-in best friend; multiple-child moms who after having additional kids felt awful that they had less time and attention for their first. And these days, the pressure is coming not just from friends and family but also from politicians and other public figures: Donald Trump floating “baby bonuses”; Elon Musk arguing that the “number one threat to the West” is low birth rates; tradwives, tech bros, and other proponents of the pronatalist movement who repeat over and over that having more children isn’t a lifestyle choice—it’s a moral good.

Like the “moral good” rhetoric, which assumes that having more babies is all upside, the “gift” rhetoric ignores the fact that having one child may simply be the best decision for many families—including for solo children. Research spanning decades suggests that, contrary to stereotype, only children tend to be just as well-adjusted as kids in multi-child households, enjoy the same or better mental health, and have closer relationships with their parents. They are no more narcissistic, competitive, or lonely than those with siblings. And although they may possess, as very young children, slightly-less-developed interpersonal skills, these differences generally disappear over time.

Plus, let’s be blunt: Regardless of how much parents love every child that they have, additional children can add stress and expense. This can affect the mental well-being of parents and, by extension, their children. Kids generally fare better when their caregivers are in good mental health, can invest more time in caregiving, and are sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs. These nuances may help explain why, on average, children with more than three or four siblings have worse mental and physical health than kids with fewer or none.

The “gift” phrasing misses something else, too: When people frame siblings as gifts and being an only child as a deficit, they discount what many only-child families told me they’ve experienced: the joy that can come from having a small, tight-knit family where jealousies and conflicts are mostly absent, and parents’ time and attention are undivided.

After several years of uncertainty, Savran and her husband made a decision: They would stick to having one child. “Giving the best life we can to the one kid we have,” she said, “and making sure he’s surrounded by friends and ‘framily’ and people who love him, ended up being our priority.” No one knows what a sibling might bring. But this kind of careful decision making—which takes the capacities, joys, and temperaments of already existing family members into account—can be its own gift.