"every day siblings teach the necessary, if painful, early lesson that you are not the world's most important person."I guess being the last of four kids has meant that I learned that lesson too well and blog to exaggerate my self-importance. My sister would beg to differ, arguing that I was the star, the attention-getting one. But then again, I replaced her as the baby of the family, so her perspective might be skewed by her failure to prevent my existence.
The good news is that I seeing my in-laws for the holidays so any strife I have just caused will have to wait until the summer vacation.
Breast-feeding is an effective form of birth control, and the longer babies can convince their mothers to keep nursing, the more likely they are to prevent a sibling, a future competitor, from being conceived.
On the other hand, by not producing more than one kid, I have doomed my daughter to gullibility:
Having siblings gives us early practice in understanding the minds of others. For example, a study titled "Theory of Mind Is Contagious: You Catch It From Your Sibs" found that that having older siblings gave younger children a dramatic jump-start on a crucial human skill: figuring out when they were being deceived. Three- and 4-year-olds with older siblings were much better able than children without them to understand a false story and its implications.Of course, that means I can tease my daughter better. And that makes it all worthwhile.
No comments:
Post a Comment