The Role of Environment & Timing
The age-old question about child development is: if 2 children are raised under the same roof, by the same people, following the same rules, how do the 2 children come out so different?
Answer: variables, variables, variables.
And though I’m sure there are many more, here, I’d like to highlight just three. These include: differences in the environment, differences in the cues of each child, and differences in the caregiver.
To illustrate how differences in the environment impact the construction of ego, I’d like to share a story about my childhood pets. Three cats to be exact: Fluffernutter, Morris and Maxine.
When I was a child I had a cat named Fluffernutter. She was a gorgeous long-haired calico who loved to snuggle and love on both people and other cats. She looked a little like this cat:
Fluffernutter had two litters of kittens.
The first litter was born in our family room in a lovely nest of blankets in a medium size cardboard box where the new little family could spend their first weeks together undisturbed. From this litter of kittens, Fluffernutter had her son Morris.
Morris was skinny and orange, and was actually the runt of the litter. He had all kinds of difficulty learning to nurse from his mother and trouble successfully competing with his siblings for his mom’s attention. So my older sister ended up having to bottle feed Morris to keep him well-nourished.
Not long later, Fluffernutter was pregnant again before we were able to get her spade. So, though not planned, we again set up another nest for the second-time mom in our family room to create a supportive and safe environment for the soon-to-arrive kittens.
Unfortunately though, Fluffernutter had her second litter of kittens outside in our chicken coop, and we did not know the new litter was out there for a whole week.
Maxine was one of the kittens who was born in the chicken coop. She was not the runt of the litter. She was healthy with long pitch-black hair, and in fact quite resourceful and energetic.
Of Fluffernutter’s kittens, Morris and Maxine were the 2 we kept from each litter, and these 2 siblings couldn’t have ended up being any more different in character. Though both cats had the same mom (who was a very doting mama to all her kittens), who grew up in the same house with the same family, by all the same rules.
Morris became very similar to his mother in personality. He was quite snuggly, fat, slow-moving, kind of lazy with frequent naps throughout the day often on someone’s lap, bed or pillow.
Maxine on the other hand, developed into a very nervous scaredy-cat. We never quite knew where she was in the house because she was always hiding under a bed somewhere and she never liked to be held by anyone.
I use this very light example of my pets to demonstrate the potential role early environment can play in that critical time of ego development which could lead one child to be very different from her sibling.
In the human world, this might look like a caregiver who is doing her very best to protect and nourish a new soul, but the external circumstances of being poor in a ramshackle house might make it very difficult.
A few year later though, after a new brother or sister has come along, the family might have moved into a working class neighborhood because the caregiver got a higher paying job, though already these 2 very different environments might have been just enough to impact the construction of ego development around each sibling’s soul.
I am sure it played a role for my maternal grandmother and her sister.
My grandmother, who’s name I borrowed as pseudonym for this blog, graduated high school just one year before the financial United States Stock Market Crash of 1929. Her younger sister graduated exactly one year after.
Need I say more?
At a critical time of ego development, late adolescence, my great aunt’s environment was financially devastated from an event that could not have been prevented by her caregivers.
How could such an environmental variable not impact my great-aunt’s sense of safety and security in her own home? How could she not feel robbed?
But my grandmother, on the other hand, seemed remarkably untouched by it developmentally.
As the oldest of 4 children, in a family that valued higher education for all of their children but after The Crash of ’29 could now only afford it for one, my grandmother was sent to college at one of the great mid-west schools that had only recently integrated women. My great-aunt was kept at home until she married.
Two souls, only two years apart, who grew up in the very same house, with the very same caregivers, but who went on to lead quite different lives.
Another factor that can affect the differences among siblings in the creation of a solidified house of ego is the actual cues each child soul offers to his or her caregiver. For this illustration I’ll use my sister and I.
If we think of cues as those things we say and do to signal what we need from another, my older sister was a bold, direct communicator. She was verbal, outgoing and expressive. In fact, I would say it would have been damn near impossible for even the most self-focused of caregivers to have missed my sister’s cues for what her needs were to develop a supportive ego to house her soul.
Me on the other hand…I was harder to read for sure.
As a child I was mostly quiet and reserved, preferring to fly under the radar or behind the scenes. While my sister might have put herself center stage, I was probably not even in the auditorium, or if I was, I was acting as usher to help people find comfortable seats.
It most definitely would have required an astutely observant and inquisitive caregiver to have picked up my cues.
For this reason, it makes total sense that a seemingly small difference such as the intensity and frequency of direct and indirect communication from child to caregiver would leave 2 siblings living in the same house, with the same caregivers, with a potential sharp contrast in how their houses were constructed, or not, to the expressed needs of each soul.
The last variable to consider in the context of ego development in siblings is changes in the life stage of the caregiver.
I have a great friend who was born to a teenage mom- she only 15 years-old in fact. My friend’s mom later went on to have another child, my friend’s younger brother, when she was well into her 20’s. As one would expect, my friend and her brother had a very different experience in their ego development.
And it makes absolute sense. For most of us, the amount of inner resources we would have to construct a nourishing and protective house of ego in our teens would naturally be far less than in our twenties. Or thirties…
I myself had my son when I was 31 years-old and my daughter when I was 36. I like to think in those 5 years I changed in a lot of ways, hopefully positive, that inherently would make me a different caregiver to my daughter than I was to my son.
It’s not that I was a “bad” caregiver to my son in any way, I wasn’t.
I think of it more like the difference between a 2009 car make and model and a 2013. If you can afford it, you want the 2013 model.
In the 2013 model presumably the little tweaks and adjustments and recalls have already happened, so you can feel more confident in the newer and improved version of the same car that was already pretty good to begin with.
But what if that is not the case? What happens when the ideal and the good enough do not take place? For the individual child or the siblings?
More on the way…
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