‘The Family Dynamic' Review: Sibling Opportunities

Wall Street Journal

30-05-2025

President Obama didn't want to go. He was returning home to Chicago in 2012 to deliver a speech at Hyde Park High School, and his schedule was already jammed. I was Chicago's mayor at the time, and leaned into my reputation for being lousy at taking 'no' for an answer. 'Mr. President,' I said, 'I served for a long time as your chief of staff, and I'm allowed one ask—this is it.' Begrudgingly he agreed to participate in 'Becoming a Man,' a program to connect at-risk youth with male mentors, five days a week, for three hours each day during the school year. He was taken in. The program partly inspired his second-term initiative 'My Brother's Keeper.'
'Becoming a Man' came frequently to mind as I was reading Susan Dominus's 'The Family Dynamic.' Ms. Dominus, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, begins with a provocative premise. For all the attention society invests in understanding the role parents play in shaping their child's life, we pay comparatively little attention to the effect of the household as a whole—specifically whether a child with siblings is the firstborn, the youngest or falls somewhere in the middle. Ms. Dominus presents us with a series of family stories (with a passing reference to mine) and explains what the latest research tells us about how human character is shaped by a person's unique family structure.
Much of Ms. Dominus's account confirms truths that ordinary people know instinctively: that children are shaped by the place they occupy in their extended family, that it matters if children are encouraged to try new things and admonished when they fail, that children flourish when they feel secure at home and wither when they don't. And yes, much is determined by birth order. I once complained to my mother that she loved my older brother, Ezekiel, more than me, to which she replied, in what I wasn't sure was a joke, 'No, I hate you all equally.'
What's remarkable is that, in the political circles in which I run—that is, among Democrats—you can't discuss these topics openly and honestly. When, as mayor, I delivered a public-safety speech that touched on fatherhood and male role models, the activist community denounced me. Many on the left also criticized President Obama when he focused on the scourge of paternal absence. Ever since the furious reaction to the Moynihan Report 60 years ago—in which Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Johnson administration, concluded that black poverty was largely a result of family breakdown—many on the progressive left have tried to steer all conversation about disparate outcomes to questions of economic inequality and institutional racism. These realities play a critical role, for sure. But the family, as Ms. Dominus demonstrates, is the fundamental factor.