My brother is four years younger to me . the following difference is noted in his bones and mine
Answers
Explanation:
As the daughter of an unloving and often cruel mother and an only child for the first nine years of my life, I had two major fantasies. The first involved a hospital mix-up on the day I was born and it included my “real” mother ringing the doorbell and coming to reclaim me. The second was of a wise, protective, loving older sister—think Jo in Little Women—who would be my best friend, tell me I wasn’t to blame for how our mother treated me, and would even run away with me if need be, just like Hansel and Gretel but with two girls.
My fantasies notwithstanding, the truth is that sibling relationships are complicated under the best of circumstances, even in loving families, and when you add an unloving mother into the mix, there are many variations on the theme, most decidedly not pretty. The one that’s closest to my fantasy is the bond that’s called “the Hansel and Gretel pair.” As in the fairytale, in light of maternal or paternal neglect or cruelty, siblings can become mutual caretakers. Note the italics, because while this is one response to a difficult childhoodsituation, it’s neither automatic nor common. When a mother is unloving to or hypercritical of one child but not another, patterns of relationship emerge that vaguely resemble patterns in relatively healthy families but that differ in kind because they are cruel, deliberate, and conscious.
Despite the mythology of all mothers treating and caring for each child equally, favoritism occurs in almost every family, as a large body of research and an acronym PDT (Parental Differential Treatment) attest. Because mothering isn’t biologically driven in our species but learned behavior, personality and other factors shape a woman’s ability to mother a specific child, which can result in differential treatment. “Goodness of fit” makes one child easier to raise than another. Imagine a relatively introverted mother who needs quiet with a highly expressive, rambunctious child, and then imagine her with a quiet child who is much more like her. Which of the two will she feel closest to? Who will frustrate her less? External factors such as the mother’s age and emotional maturity, the economic status of the family, the amount of stress the mother is under, and the stability of the marriage also shape how and why children are treated differentially. In a loving family, differential treatment can even be motivated by good intentions, such as a mother’s perception that one child needs more support and attention than another.