“Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form. Assuming you all reach a ripe old age, they’ll be with you until the very end, and for that reason, there is an intimacy and a familiarity that can’t possibly be available to you in any other relationship throughout your life. Certainly, people can get along without siblings. Single children do, and there are people who have irreparably estranged relationships with their siblings who live full and satisfying lives, but to have siblings and not make the most of that resource is squandering one of the greatest interpersonal resources you’ll ever have.”
- Jeffrey Kluger, The Sibling Effect
This. this is the reason i will consider having another child.
we’d always talked about and planned on two but once my little one came along i couldn’t imagine ever having another. unlike most people i’d love to go through pregnancy and labor again, in fact i really want to, i’m just not sure i want another baby. i love mine so much and i really just can’t imagine having to take ANY attention away from him. i can’t imagine having another baby and NOT being able to focus on them the way i have been able to with him. but this, this is the message my mother tries to impart on why i should reconsider giving him a sibling. she says it’s not fair to make him go through the death of his parents alone. which i get, but still… ugh, it’s such a tricky thing. luckily it’s not something we have to decide right now. but i assure you the clock is still ticking…
