The Differences Between Brothers and Sisters

What a wonder of the Creator, exalted be He! Out of brothers and sisters who grew up in one and the same surroundings and were raised by the same parents, He makes personalities so unlike one another that you would imagine each of them had been brought from a different country of the world. How often we stand bewildered before this disparity!! Can God have in it a wisdom whose essence we cannot grasp??? Come, madam, let us lift the curtain together from this obscure riddle...

The two elements that determine a child's stamp are heredity — that is, what he inherits from his parents and grandparents — and the surroundings in which he lives. Brothers and sisters resemble one another in what they inherit; but is it true that the home surroundings remain one and the same, working in the very same way upon them all? Parents, however much they suppose they have raised their children in the same way, have in fact affected each one differently. Being new to the raising of children, they usually fall into mistakes in the training of their firstborn which they will not repeat afterward; and what a difference between their training of the family's youngest and the training of his elder brothers and sisters, for through their struggle in life they have grown more restive under its tangled cares and worries, and fatigue has taken no small toll of their nerves. It is worth mentioning that outside factors — economic, social, and the like — affect them directly. And since their state of mind affects the child in its turn, is it then logical to consider their effect on all their children the same? Our life is full of examples of mothers who, in the distant yesterday, were models of calm and gentleness, and who have turned into short-tempered women flying into rages at the slightest trifling cause. The reason may be a deep grief over some dear one lost, or simply strained nerves, life having been hard on them. And this change in them brings about a change in their effect upon their children.

So much for the parents' influence. As for the child's personal experience, it differs from the experience of his brothers and sisters, just as his knowledge, his hobbies, and perhaps his mentality differ too. Nor should it escape our mind that his place in the family — I mean his being the only child, or the second, or otherwise — stamps him with a stamp all his own. Can we still wonder, after this, at the existence of this difference between a brother and his brothers and sisters??