Siblings & identity

The Sorting Words

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

A woman came to see me about burnout and said early on that she was not there about her sister.

A few sessions in, she added something. “I’ve just stopped going to things.” Things turned out to mean birthdays, and one in particular, belonging to a six-year-old nephew whose party she had now missed twice.

What she eventually described was a kitchen table, an aunt visiting, and her mother saying — not unkindly, in the voice mothers use to introduce children to people who already know them — she’s the smart one; her sister’s the pretty one.

She was nine. She remembers the table. She was doing homework at it, which proved the sentence, and her sister was doing nothing at all, which also proved it.

And she remembers feeling something she now calls relief. The sorting had gone her way. She had been handed the one that lasts.

What a two-word label actually does

Nobody in that kitchen thought anything had happened. That is the first thing to understand about sorting words: they are almost never cruel, and they are frequently affectionate. A mother introducing her daughters. A father setting up a race between two boys so the family can watch.

What both have done, without meaning to build anything, is construct an instrument. Two children, one measure, one outcome — and a number at the end that is about both of them, because a race does not measure a runner. It measures the distance between two runners.

A parent hands a child a ruler without saying what it is for. The child spends the next thirty years measuring.

The checking

The clearest sign that a label landed is not resentment. It is surveillance.

The woman above could not say when it started. Every report card. Every time somebody laughed at something her sister said. Every new photograph. She was checking whether the sentence was still true — which meant that her sister’s ordinary life had become, permanently, information about her own standing.

That is what comparative identity does. It converts a sibling from a person into a measurement. And it does not stop when the parents stop saying it, because by then the child has taken over the job.

Why the favorable label is not the safe one

Families tend to worry about the child who got the worse word, and there is good reason to. But the child who got the better one is not free, and often ends up further from repair.

• The label is conditional and everybody knows it. Smart is not a description, it is a position, and positions can be lost. The child begins to protect it — by avoiding what they might fail at, by hiding the effort, by not asking for help.
• It forbids the other traits. If your sister is the pretty one, then whatever you are, it is not that. Children obey these boundaries with startling loyalty, sometimes for life.
• It makes the sibling’s good news costly. Not because the child is selfish. Because they were told, once, at a table, that the two of them were on the same scale.
• It comes with guilt that has nowhere to go. The relief a nine-year-old feels at winning the sort is not a thing she can ever say out loud, and it stays in the relationship anyway.

What the parents were actually doing

In almost every case I have worked with, the parent was trying to see the child. Naming what is distinctive about each of your children feels like the opposite of neglect — and the alternative, treating them as interchangeable, is its own injury.

The error is not in noticing. It is in noticing comparatively, and out loud, in a sentence with both names in it.

You are quick with numbers is a description. You’re the smart one is a rank — and a rank always implies the rest of the table.

Undoing it, at any age

The good news is that sorting words are unusually responsive to being named, including decades later, including by the child rather than the parent.

• Say the sentence out loud to someone. Most people have never repeated it. Said aloud at forty, it stops being a fact about the family and becomes a thing somebody once said in a kitchen.
• Separate the trait from the rank. Keep the true part — you may well be quick, or warm, or funny. Discard the comparative half, which was never information about you.
• Ask what you were forbidden. The trait assigned to your sibling is usually the one you have never let yourself try to have. It is generally still available.
• Stop checking. Not by deciding to stop caring, which does not work, but by noticing each time you are gathering evidence — and asking whose scale you are still standing on.

Neither parent in either scene was cruel. Both handed a child an instrument. The work of adulthood is finding out you are allowed to put it down.