wandgestaltung kinderzimmer mint
translator: ted translators adminreviewer: camille martãnez ted has already persuaded meto change my life in one small way, by persuading me to changethe opening of my speech. i love this idea of engagement. so, when you leave here today, i'm going to ask youto engage or re-engage with some of the most importantpeople in your lives: your brothers and sisters. it can be a profoundlylife-affirming thing to do,
even if it isn't always easy. this is a man named elliot, for whom things were very difficult. elliot was a drunk. he spent most of his lifebattling alcoholism, depression, morphine addiction, and that life endedwhen he was just 34 years old. what made things harder for elliotis that his last name was roosevelt. and he could never quiteget past the comparisons
with his big brother teddy, for whom things always seemedto come a little bit easier. it wasn't easy being bobby, either. he was also the sibling of a president. but he adored his brother, jack. he fought for him, he worked for him. and when jack died, he bled for him, too. in the years that followed,bobby would smile,
but it seemed labored. he'd lose himself in his work, but it seemed tortured. bobby's own death, so similar to john's, seems somehow fitting. john kennedy was robbed of his young life; bobby seemed almostto have been relieved of his. there may be no relationshipthat effects us more profoundly, that's closer, finer, harder,
sweeter, happier, sadder, more filled with joy or fraught with woe than the relationship we havewith our brothers and sisters. there's power in the sibling bond. there's pageantry. there's petulance, too, as when neil bush, sibling of both a presidentand a governor, famously griped, "i've lost patience for being comparedto my older brothers,"
as if jeb and george wwere somehow responsible for the savings and loan scandaland the messy divorce that marked neil in the public eye. but more importantthan all of these things, the sibling bond can bea thing of abiding love. our parents leave us too early, our spouse and our childrencome along too late. our siblings are the only oneswho are with us for the entire ride.
over the arc of decades,there may be nothing that defines us and forms usmore powerfully than our relationshipwith our sisters and brothers. it was true for me, it's true for your children and if you have siblings,it's true for you, too. this picture was taken when steve,on the left, was eight years old. i was six, our brother gary was fiveand my brother bruce was four. i will not say what year it was taken.
it was not this year. (laughter) i open my new book, "the sibling effect," on a saturday morning, not long before this picture was taken, when the three older brothers decidedthat it might be a very good idea to lock the younger brotherin a fuse cabinet in our playroom. we were, believe it or not,trying to keep him safe. our father was a hotheaded man,
somebody who didn't take kindlyto being disturbed on saturday mornings. i don't know what he thought his lifewould be like on saturday mornings when he had four sons, ages four years old or youngerwhen the youngest one was born, but they weren't quiet. he did not take to that well. and he would react to beingdisturbed on a saturday morning by stalking into the playroom and administering a very freewheelingform of a corporal punishment,
lashing out at whoeverwas within arms' reach. we were by no means battered childrenbut we did get hit, and we found it terrifying. so we devised a sort ofscatter-and-hide drill. as soon as we saw or heardthe footsteps coming, steve, the oldest, would wriggleunder the couch, i would dive into the closetin the playroom, gary would dive intoa window-seat toy chest, but not before we closedbruce inside the fuse box.
we told him it wasalan shepard's space capsule, and that somehow made it work better. i dare say my father was neverfooled by this ruse. and it was only in lateryears that i began to think perhaps it wasn't a good ideato squeeze a four-year-old up against a panel of old-style,un-screwable high-voltage fuses. but my brothers and i,even through those unhappy times, came through them, with somethingthat was clear and hard and fine: a primal appreciationfor the bond we shared.
we were a unit -- a loud, messy brawling, loyal, loving, lasting unit. we felt much stronger that waythan we ever could as individuals. and we knew that as our lives went on, we could always be ableto call on that strength. we're not alone. until 15 years ago, scientists didn't really pay muchattention to the sibling bond.
and with good reason: you have just one mother,you have just one father if you do marriage right,you have one spouse for life. siblings can claimnone of that uniqueness. they're interchangeable, fungible,a kind of household commodity. parents set up shop and begin stockingtheir shelves with inventory, the only limitation being sperm,egg and economics. as long as you can keep breathing,you may as well keep stocking. now, nature is perfectly happywith that arrangement,
because our primal directive here is to get as many of our genesas possible into the next generation. animals wrestle withthese same issues, too, but they have a more straightforward wayof dealing with things. a crested penguin that has laid two eggswill take a good look at them and boot the smaller one out of the nest, the better to focus her attentionson the presumably heartier chick in the bigger shell. a black eagle will allowall of her chicks to hatch
and then stand back while the bigger onesfight it out with the little ones, typically ripping them to ribbons and then settling backto grow up in peace. piglets, cute as they are, are born with a strangelittle outward set of pointing teeth, that they use to jab at one another as they competefor the choicest nursing spots. the problem for scientists was that this whole idea of siblingsas second-class citizens
never really seemed to hold up. after the researchershad learned all they could from the relationships in the family,mothers and other relationships, they still came up with sometemperamental dark matter that was pulling at us, exerting a gravity all its own. and that could only be our siblings. humans are no different from animals. after we are born, we do whatever we can
to attract the attention of our parents, determining what our strongestselling points are and marketing them ferociously. someone's the funny one,someone's the pretty one, someone's the athlete,someone's the smart one. scientists call this "deidentification." if my older brotheris a high-school football player -- which, if you saw my olderbrother, you'd know he was not -- i could become a high-schoolfootball player, too
and get at most 50 percent of the applausein my family for doing that. or, i could become studentcouncil president or specialize in the arts and get 100 percentof the attention in that area. sometimes parents contaminatethe deidentification process, communicating to their kids subtly or not, that only certain kinds of accomplishmentswill be applauded in the home. joe kennedy was famous for this, making it clear to his nine children
that they were expected to competewith one another in athletics and were expected to win, lest they be made to eatin the kitchen with the help, rather than in the dining roomwith the family. it's no wonder that scrawny second-born jack kennedyfought so hard to compete with his fitter firstborn brother, joe, often at his peril, at one point, engagingin a bicycle race around the house
that resulted in a collisioncosting john 28 stitches. joe walked away essentially unharmed. parents exacerbate this problem further when they exhibit favoritism, which they do overwhelmingly,no matter how much they admit it. a study i cite in this time magazinecovering in the book "the sibling effect," found 70 percent of fathersand 65 percent of mothers exhibit a preferencefor at least one child. and keep in mind here --the keyword is "exhibit."
the remaining parents may simply be doinga better job of concealing things. i like to say that 95 percentof all parents have a favorite, five percent are lying about it. the exception is my wife and me. honestly, we do not have a favorite. it's not parents' fault that they harborfeelings of favoritism. and here, too, our naturalwiring is at work. firstborns are the first productson the familial assembly line. parents typically get two yearsof investing dollars, calories
and so many other resources in them, so that by the timethe second born comes along, the firstborn is already ...it's what corporations call "sunk costs," you don't want to disinvest in this one and launch the r&d on the new product. so what we begin to do is say,"i'm going to lean to the mac os x and let the mac os xi come outin a couple of years." so we tend to lean in that direction. but there are other forces at work, too.
one of the same studies i looked atboth here and in the book found that, improbably, the most common favoritefor a father is the last-born daughter. the most common favoritefor a mother is the firstborn son. now, this isn't oedipal; never mindwhat the freudians would have told us a hundred years ago. and it's not just that fathersare habitually wrapped around the fingers of their little girls, though i can tell you that,as the father of two girls, that part definitely plays a role.
rather, there is a certainreproductive narcissism at work. your opposite-gender kids can never resemble you exactly. but if somehow they can resembleyou temperamentally, you'll love them all the more. as the result, the fatherwho is a businessman will just melt at the idea of his mba daughterwith a tough-as-nails worldview. the mother who is a sensitive typewill go gooey over her son the poet. birth order, another topici covered for time,
and another topic i cover in the book, plays out in other ways as well. long before scientistsbegan looking at this, parents noticed that there arecertain temperamental templates associated with all birth rankings: the serious, striving firstborn; the caught-in-a-thicket's middle born; the wild child of a last born. and once again, when sciencedid crack this field,
they found out mom and dad are right. firstborns across history have tendedto be bigger and healthier than later borns, in part, because of the head startthey got on food in an area in which it could be scarce. firstborns are alsovaccinated more reliably and tend to have morefollow-up visits to doctors when they get sick. and this pattern continues today.
this iq question is, sadly -- i cansay this as a second-born -- a very real thing. firstborns have a three-pointiq advantage over second borns and second borns have a 1.5 iqadvantage over later borns, partly because of the exclusive attentionfirstborns get from mom and dad, and partly because they get a chanceto mentor the younger kids. all of this explains why firstbornsare likelier to be ceos, they are likelier to be senators, they are likelier to be astronauts,
and they are likelier to earn morethan other kids are. last borns come into the worldwith a whole different set of challenges. the smallest and weakest cubs in the den, they're at the greatest riskof getting eaten alive, so they have to developwhat are called "low-power skills" -- the ability to charm and disarm, to intuit what's going onin someone else's head, the better to duckthe punch before it lands. they're also flat-out funnier,
which is another thingthat comes in handy, because a person who's making you laughis a very hard person to slug. it's perhaps no coincidencethat over the course of history, some of our greatest satirists -- swift, twain, voltaire, colbert -- are either the last borns
or among the last in very large families. most middle borns don't getquite as sweet a deal. i think of us as the flyover states. we are -- we're the ones who fight harderfor recognition in the home. we're the ones who are alwaysraising our hands while someone else at the tableis getting called on. we're the ones who tendto take a little longer to find their direction in life.
and there can be self-esteemissues associated with that, notwithstanding the factthat i've been asked to do ted, so i feel much betterabout these things right now. but the upside for middle bornsis that they also tend to develop denser and richer relationshipsoutside the home. but that advantage comes alsofrom something of a disadvantage, simply because their needsweren't met as well in the home. the feuds in the playroomthat play out over favoritism, birth order and so many other issues
are as unrelenting as they seem. in one study i cite in the book, children in the two-to-four age group engage in one fight every 6.3 minutes, or 9.5 fights an hour. that's not fighting --that's performance art. that's extraordinary. one reason for this is that there area lot more people in your home than you think there are,
or at least a lot more relationships. every person in your house hasa discrete one-on-one relationship with every other person, and those pairings or dyads add up fast. in a family with two parents and two kids,there are six dyads: mom has a relationship with child a and b, dad has a relationship with child a and b. there's the marital relationship, and there is the relationshipbetween the kids themselves.
the formula for thislooks very chilly but it's real. k equals the number of peoplein your household, and x equals the number of dyads. in a five-person family,there are ten discrete dyads. the eight-person brady bunch --never mind the sweetness here -- there were 28 dyads in that family. the original kennedy family with nine kidshad 55 different relationships. and bobby kennedy, who grew upto have 11 children of his own, had a household with a whopping 91 dyads.
this overpopulation of relationships makes fights unavoidable. and far and away the biggest triggerfor all sibling fights is property. studies have found that over 95 percentof the fights among small children concern somebody touching, playing with, looking at the other person's stuff. this in its own way is healthyif it's very noisy, and the reason is that small childrencome into the world with absolutely no control.
they are utterly helpless. the only way they haveof projecting their very limited power is through the objectsthey can call their own. when somebody crossesthat very erasable line, they're going to go nuts,and that's what happens. another very common casus belliamong children is the idea of fairness, as any parent who hears 14 times a day,"but that's unfair!" can tell you. in a way this is good, too, though.
kids are born with a very innate senseof right and wrong, of a fair deal versus an unfair one, and this teaches them powerful lessons. do you want to know how powerfully encodedfairness is in the human genome? we process that phenomenon through the same lobe in our brainthat processes disgust, meaning we react to the ideaof somebody being cheated the same way we react to putrefied meat. any wonder that this fellow,bernie madoff, is unpopular?
all of these dramas played out day to day, moment to moment, serve as a real-time,total-immersion exercise for life. siblings teach each other conflictavoidance and conflict resolution, when to stand up for themselves, when to stand down; they learn love, loyalty, honesty, sharing,caring, compromise, the disclosure of secretsand much more important,
the keeping of confidences. i listen to my young daughters --aren’t they adorable? -- i listen to my young daughterstalking late into the night, the same way my parents, no doubt,listened to my brothers and me talking, and sometimes i intervene,but usually i don't. they're part of a conversationi am not part of, nobody else in the world is part of, and it's a conversationthat can and should go on for the rest of their lives.
from this will come a sense of constancy, a sense of having a permanenttraveling companion, somebody with whom they road-tested life before they ever had to get outand travel it on their own. brothers and sisters aren'tthe sine qua non of a happy life; plenty of adult siblingrelationships are fatally broken and need to be abandonedfor the sanity of everybody involved. and only-children, throughout history,have shown themselves to be creatively, brilliantly capable
of getting their socializationand comradeship skills through friends, through cousins,through classmates. but having siblings and notmaking the most of those bonds is, i believe, folly of the first order. if relationships are brokenand are fixable, fix them. if they work, make them even better. failing to do so is a little like havinga thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. yes, you can always get your foodat the supermarket,
but think what you'reallowing to lie fallow. life is short, it's finite,and it plays for keeps. siblings may be among the richest harvestsof the time we have here. thank you. (applause)