What Siblings Teach That Parents Cannot

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a Catholic economist and author of Hannah's Children, published an essay in the New York Times drawing on interviews with mothers of large families. Alyssa Murphy, writing in the National Catholic Register, summarizes its argument: the mothers Pakaluk interviewed were consistent on one point — raising children with good character is easier with five than with one.[^1]

To explain why, Pakaluk marshals demographic data. As Murphy quotes her directly: "Over the past 50 years, the share of American mothers with only one child has nearly doubled, from 11 percent in 1976 to about 20 percent today. Meanwhile, large families have receded: In 1976, 40 percent of mothers at the end of their childbearing years had four or more children; by 2014, just 14 percent did. The total U.S. fertility rate hit a historic low of 1.6 births per woman in 2024 — well below the replacement rate of 2.1."[^1] Europe's numbers are lower still.

Pakaluk's synthesis of those interviews produced a single observation: "large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat — as a byproduct." Smaller families, she continues, must manufacture "through summer programs and sports leagues and carefully cultivated extracurriculars, the kind of character-forming experiences that large households" produce as a matter of daily routine.[^1]

One anecdote from her reporting makes the point concrete. A mother of six described her parish priest's reaction to watching her eldest son with his baby sister in a school parking lot. Murphy quotes Pakaluk recounting the exchange: "'He carries the baby all the time,' she told me. 'He changes her diapers. He puts her down for a nap. That's just kind of a way of life.'"[^1] To the priest it was remarkable. To the mother it was ordinary household life.

What siblings provide that parents cannot

The difference is structural. Parents and children occupy a vertical relationship: asymmetrical in power, provision, and authority. Siblings occupy a horizontal one — peer-level encounter with equals who have competing claims on the same space, attention, and resources. Working through that condition daily is character formation, practiced under genuine frustration with persons who are not paid to be patient.

Murphy's piece also draws on Tim Carney's observation that overprogrammed childhoods — the very substitute Pakaluk identifies — correlate with rising adolescent anxiety, and on Maureen Ferguson's argument that middle children in large families tend to develop as natural peacemakers, acquiring negotiation skills through sheer necessity.[^1] These are not personality quirks. They are competencies built by repetition across years.

Research on child development documents the difference in measurable terms. Children raised with siblings show stronger capacities for conflict negotiation, perspective-taking, and tolerating frustration in shared environments. The sibling bond carries a quality that friendship does not: it is not voluntary and contingent in the same way. Friendships dissolve when the cost of maintaining them rises too high. The sibling relationship cannot be dissolved — it must be worked through, returned to, and renegotiated across decades. That permanence builds commitment, repair, and long-term loyalty, each of which research associates with psychological health and social trust.

Catholic anthropology and the structure of the self

Personalist philosophy in the Catholic tradition holds that genuine selfhood emerges through the gift of self to others. The self is not formed first and then secondarily affected by relationships; it is discovered and shaped through sustained encounter with other persons. Karol Wojtyła developed this in Love and Responsibility and through the Theology of the Body: the person comes to know and give himself only in relation.[^2] A child who has never been required to give way, to wait, to share, or to forgive in a sustained relational context has not simply missed social practice. That child has been deprived of the primary arena where the moral self takes shape.

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, grounds this in a theological anthropology of the Created, Fallen, and Redeemed person.[^3] In the Created state, persons are constitutively relational — made for communion, not isolation. The Fall disorders desire and introduces the tendency to treat others as instruments rather than ends. Redemption restores the capacity for genuine self-gift. The sibling relationship enacts this arc in miniature, daily: the child who takes without asking, who wins an argument unfairly, who receives more attention during a hard season confronts a neighbor whose reality must be acknowledged and whose good must be weighed alongside one's own. Repeated across years and compelled by the permanence of the bond, these encounters are how virtue is actually acquired — through choice under pressure, with persons one cannot simply leave.

Implications for clinical and pastoral practice

For clinicians working within a Catholic or faith-integrated framework, sibling history forms a significant portion of a client's relational formation. The patterns established in early horizontal relationships — whether conflict ends in rupture or repair, whether love is conditional on performance, whether difference is tolerable — surface regularly in professional partnerships, marriages, and communities of faith.

The relational logic behind a client's present difficulties often has a sibling script underneath it. The same holds in pastoral accompaniment: the person who struggles to forgive, to share authority, or to remain in community when friction rises may be replaying dynamics that were never resolved in childhood. Naming that history is not reductive; it opens a path toward repair that generic social skills training cannot provide.

Pakaluk's argument, and the research Murphy assembles around it, does not prescribe a particular family size. The economic, social, and cultural pressures driving smaller families are real and varied. What it does offer is a developmental account of what children receive from one another — grounded in both empirical findings and a coherent anthropology. The family, in Catholic teaching, is the first school of the human person. What siblings teach there — to negotiate, to repair, to remain, to prefer another's good alongside one's own — travels far into adult life.

References

[^1]: Alyssa Murphy, "The Saving Grace of Siblings: What the 'Only Child' Syndrome Is Costing Our Kids," National Catholic Register, July 2, 2026, reporting on Catherine Ruth Pakaluk's New York Times essay and her book Hannah's Children. [^2]: Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (Ignatius Press, 1993). [^3]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020).