THE FAMILY DYNAMIC: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success, by Susan Dominus
Once, when I was giving a lecture on health policy, I’d thoughtlessly failed to turn my phone off, and unexpectedly it rang. “It’s my brother,” I said.
Someone called out, “Answer it, it’s the White House!”
“No,” I said, “it’s the other brother — the successful one.”
Afterward, a crowd gathered to ask questions, but they weren’t interested in the substance of my talk. Instead, most asked some version of, “What did your mom put in the breakfast cereal?”
I often get that question from anxious new parents wanting to know how they can raise their children to be “successful.” Susan Dominus had that question, too. Finding no book on the subject, she set out to elucidate the commonalities among families that had “more than one high-achieving child.” The result is her wonderfully engaging new work, “The Family Dynamic.”
Dominus, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, expertly interweaves stories of the Brontë sisters with those of contemporary families and academic studies on factors that contribute to children’s excellence. She makes clear that the current research provides no definitive set of answers to the cereal question. Instead, it hints at certain heuristics, which are illuminated by Dominus’s careful, detailed portraits.
One such is that helicopter parents are doing their children a disservice by assiduously removing obstacles and challenges. Dominus cites research showing that when children confront a problem, parental intervention is demotivating. Children whose parents (or, in this case, the adult assigned them in an experiment) finish a puzzle for them actually try “less hard on the next task or game” they undertake. Instead, parents should emphasize “resourcefulness and self-sufficiency” — children are capable of more than you think, and you won’t always be there to rescue them.
A second takeaway is that the parents of the hyper-successful tend to avoid effusive praise; the case-study parents in Dominus’s book were anything but exuberant when their children accomplished remarkable feats, like, say, swimming across a nine-mile lake in record time at age 14.
Of course, this withholding approach may drive children to soar, but it can also lead to a complex of never resting, feeling perpetually unfulfilled, always having to accomplish more. As one of the high achievers puts it, “What the three of us have in common is the idea that whatever we do, we always feel like it’s not good enough.”
As a rule, the children in Dominus’s exceptional families combine what outsiders might consider to be conflicting tendencies: They relentlessly compete, and yet are incredibly supportive of one other. Repeatedly, we see that the “exceptional” children are not just out to accomplish, but to encourage, aid and pave the way for their siblings.
Take the Murguia family: Amalia and Alfredo immigrated from a small region in central Mexico to Kansas City, and had seven children, five of whom shared three beds in one of the house’s two bedrooms. Alfred, one of the older children, excelled academically and was the first in his family to enroll in college — and, at every stage, helped guide his siblings into a variety of educational and social opportunities. As Dominus writes, “What the siblings had going for them above all else was one another.” They “pushed one another but also provided logistical support, connections and counsel,” along with “unquestionable loyalty.”
Similarly, the Chens, who immigrated from China after having violated that country’s one-child policy, settled in Virginia, where they opened a restaurant. While the parents had high standards, they had little time to guide their children. Instead, their cousin tells Dominus that “when he pictures one Chen child playing piano, a sibling is on the bench as well, refining the younger sibling’s technique; they leaned over homework together, the older teaching the younger.”
In large measure, the families Dominus portrays are not particularly well off. But what she calls “enterprising parents” go to great lengths to expose their children to music, theater, museums, libraries and, most important, mentors. One of the customers at the Chens’ restaurant was the head of a high school marching band; he volunteered to give their child lessons — and that child became a drum major.
Laurence Paulus, a producer of arts television programming and of modest means, took his children to openings at the Metropolitan Opera. Unable to afford tickets, they sat outside the theater to absorb the charged atmosphere, a transistor radio broadcasting the music. They waited in line for free performances of Shakespeare in the Park; they played music at home. One daughter became a world-famous theater director; another, the principal harpist in one of Mexico’s premier orchestras; their brother would co-found NY1, one of the nation’s first 24-hour community TV stations.
Creating “exceptional families” comes at a cost. Inevitably, parents — perhaps mothers in particular — end up sacrificing a great deal. Ying Chen ran the restaurant seven days a week without vacations. Amalia Murguia worked endless hours cooking and homemaking for her nine-person family. To pay for enrichment classes at the National Academy of Ballet, and ultimately to send her children to private schools, Teruko Paulus started a business sewing elaborate soft furnishings for the residents of Park Avenue and Palm Beach (Jackie Kennedy had one of her tablecloths remade into a skirt). Teruko’s daughter recalls her falling asleep as the lights dimmed at a play her mother had been anticipating.
What emerges from all of Dominus’s moving vignettes is no formula but a portrait of the complex interaction between nature, nurture and luck. Dominus tells the story of László Polgár, who raised three daughters to be the most successful female chess players in history. A neuroscientist explains the extraordinary case of the Polgár girls as arising from a combination of the innate long-term memory and higher-level processing speeds common to chess champions with their father’s push to “devote their very young lives to chess” — which further developed this special brain circuitry.
Maybe the most interesting story in this book is not about humans at all, but about a mouse experiment. Forty genetically identical adolescent female mice were placed in a space filled with appealing toys. For three months, their every movement was recorded. The result? Some mice turned out to be explorers; others, homebodies. Huge personality variations seemed to be linked to variations in the earliest experiences — which were then amplified over time. A behavioral geneticist concluded that “it’s not genes or their rearing environment that make the difference.” Rather, “it’s this path-dependent response to initial serendipity or randomness.”
This may be frustrating to parents who want a pat prescription
for world domination. However, Dominus leaves us with common-sense things to avoid, and things to do: Expose children to enrichment opportunities, socialize them and read to them. (For what it’s worth, I will say these heuristics do ring true to my own childhood experience.) But this alone will not ensure anything, because, as Dominus makes clear, ultimately every situation is the product of a lot of unpredictability and luck.
And, after all, it’s this interaction with genes and the environment — not cereal — that gives humans their individuality.
THE FAMILY DYNAMIC: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success | By Susan Dominus | Crown | 368 pp. | $30
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