Heartbreaking (Adult) Sibling Fights

One of my favorite familythinking.com readers named, “anonymous” responded to my recent post, When an Adult Child Cuts Off a Parent, by sending me a link that she found. It’s a post on parentdish.com that is titled “When Adult Children Fight, a Mother's Heart Breaks” and was written by Jessica Barksdale Inclan. It is well written and poignant.

She describes the distinctly different personalities of her two grown sons; one an anarchist and the other a police-academy aspirant.

Inclan writes, “At one time, these were my happy little boys, my sons who played together all day on the weekends, slept in the same room for years. They both went to the same college, called each other frequently, hiked together, laughed together. But when Nicolas began to become the man he is, their ideologies started to pull them apart. He began to despise all that Alex stood for, and their drives home from Washington State began to get ugly, full of silences or harsh words. Our last meal together, all of us sitting around the table of our new home, was as unpleasant as could be.”

“It's possible that these two will never come back to one another. The fight could be the axe that splits their relationship wide open, forever irreparable. I close my eyes and breathe in hard when I think of them forever at opposite sides. Siblings are the closest relationships in time and age and place. Siblings know each other in ways no one else can, and to see my boys approach an end to this connection is more than I can bear.”

I want to suggest two things:

These two young men drifted apart and have let their ideologies divide them. There will (hopefully) come a time in the future when they will recognize the indispensable nature of one’s nuclear family….and agree to disagree.

Second, I have faith that the (future) spouses and children of these two young men may have a profound influence on this sibling division (or not). If each brother has their own two children (which my research shows is likely) and they each try to prevail upon their own children how important sibling bonds are in life, a major-watt light bulb may illuminate (or not).

You can read Inclan's entire post by clicking here.

And be sure to read some of the frank comments that follow her post such as Debbie who stated:

I do feel a little better because I'm not the only one who is going through this. My two boys will never be friends and will never have a relationship. I think this is sad, but I'm done with all the conflict and unpleasantness. If I could go back in time, I would have had puppies and never any children.
(ASinger: Ouch!)

Close Families Raise...More? Less? (Pick One) Independent Adults

New research at the University of Haifa found that, contrary to common belief, young adults who maintain a close or moderate relationship with their parents exhibit greater independence in their personal lives than those who have a distant relationship.

In her research, Dr. Irit Yanir evaluated how a parent-child relationship is connected to one's ability to fulfill society's expectations in terms of settling down and establishing an intimate relationship. According Dr. Yanir, a close relationship with parents is one in which children talk with their parents often and regularly spend time together (eating meals together, for example), and one in which a child feels comfortable sharing his thoughts and experiences with his parents.

"An independent young adult is one who exhibits independence not only in his day-to-day life but also in the emotional sphere, and who makes his way in life with emotional and intellectual autonomy," she explained.

While a close relationship is often viewed as a sign of dependence, the research results show that those with close relationships with their parents were more financially self-sufficient, more independent in their day-to-day lives, professionally stable, felt more mature and were more likely to be involved in a stable intimate relationship. Those who maintained a distant relationship with their parents and tended to make choices out of a need to rebel against their parents' expectations were less independent into their late 20s.

So what answer did you pick for the title question? This research is a bit counter intuitive, but fascinating nevertheless. Do you think this helps make the case for the importance of eating dinner together?