Taking care of your brothers was never your burden

In our society, since time immemorial, the idea that Older siblings have an obligation to take care of younger ones.. Relatives, neighbors and anyone who finds a pregnant mother with a child by the hand on the street, will go to the little one to blurt out phrases like “now that you are the oldest, you must take care of your little brother…”. All the people around you, even if these creatures are not much older than their siblings (some differ by just over a year), will assign you the task of take care of his little brother.

The burden of “you have to take care of your siblings”

This idea that the big brother should take care of the little ones has become so widespread that many people do not even think about the repercussions of what he is asking of children who are still very young or even still babies. It is simply the custom, they are words that have always been said to older brothers.

If you find yourself in a similar situation and don’t know what to say to a child who just had a little brother, the best option is to say nothing. Let us not forget that the effect of these comments, since they grant him a responsibility for which he is not yet prepared, due to age and maturity, they can come to regret for life on the shoulders of the older brother.

At this point, I would like to clarify that in this article I am not referring to families in which the older sibling is several years apart (6, 7 or more) with respect to the little one. In these circumstances, it is natural that the care of the minor by the elder arises spontaneously.

At this age, children already ask for tasks and responsibilities in the family, although, yes, in these cases, parents must be receptive and attentive to don’t burden older siblings with obligations that do not correspond to them.

Regarding this article, the concrete examples of which I am writing are those in which the age difference between the siblings is very short and the family imposes the task on the eldest to care for the little ones. In these circumstances, this burden does have negative consequences for the future of the elderly.

In this second type of family, the eldest, feeling responsible for the lives of his siblings, ends up putting safety and needs first from these to their own. In this way, from a very young age, he gets used to living in a permanent state of alert, watching that nothing bad happens to others and anticipating possible dangers that may arise. These circumstances, so alien to their real needs, they force you to mature before your time and to act more responsibly than what would correspond to them by age and level of maturity.

These (unconscious) behavior patterns that the child elaborates, in addition, are reinforced by the attitude of their elders to continually praise these displays of maturity (which they interpret as a positive sign of the child’s personality). Faced with these compliments, which the child in need of attention translates as a form of care from his elders, the little one feels valued and loved, which is why he still adds more emphasis to their role as manager/caregiver. In this way, little by little, as the child grows, she is locked into a vicious circle that is difficult to solve.

Although the creature willingly assumes its role, the child always lives subject to a double voltage. On the one hand, he worries that nothing happens to his brothers, on the other, he feels a constant fear of the reaction of their elders if you make any mistakes on your homework.

The consequences of lowering attention can be terrible for his brothers, but also for him. The boy is afraid that anything will happen to the little ones because of his lack of attention, but he is also afraid that if he fails to take care of thempunish him, hit him and what would be even more dramatic for him, stop flattering his maturity, lose confidence in his qualities and, finally, stop loving him.

Despite all of the foregoing, in its most internal forum, the child knows that the situation he lives in is unfair. The little boy intuits that his parents and other adult family members should be the ones to take care of his siblings and that they should not have burdened him with such an overwhelming responsibility.

Although he cannot protest or change the situation, a part of himself, hidden and silenced in his unconscious, knows that his situation is not fair and she is angry. We can appeal to this part in therapy, if he comes as an adult to seek help, to put the reality of what he has experienced on the table and be able to free himself from that gripping role.

As I already mentioned above, a side effect for these types of child caregivers it is that by being attentive to the needs of others, they leave their own aside. We are in the presence of overly mature children who do not live a normal childhood. They don’t play or enjoy time like their other peers of the same age because they always have to take care of their siblings.

Marina’s case

Unfortunately, there are many people who come to my office with experiences similar to the ones I am describing. A paradigmatic scene that perfectly condenses the alertness and anxiety that a girl can experience in the care of her brother was the one that Marina told me in one of her sessions.

With anguish, he remembered a day at the beach in which he had to watch his brother for hours small so she wouldn’t drown (she was 5 and her brother 3). The sea was not particularly rough, but to Marina, a girl, let’s remember, only five years old, it seemed strong and terrifying enough that she couldn’t stop paying attention to her brother for even a minute.

As you can imagine, in this situation, the small Marina did not have time to play with her friends, remove the sand, bathe or run freely, as you should have done. Marina did not live this day with joy, but as a real nightmare. To top it off, the whole time they were on the beach, her mother was entertained chatting with her friends and barely paid attention to Marina or her brother. Delegating the care of the little one to her daughter was her usual tonic.

As an adult, Marina was a mature, sensible woman, very responsible in her work and extremely perfectionist. She had no economic problems and, apparently, she had all the conditions in her life to be calm, but, nevertheless, she was not happy.

The young woman thought that she had no reason to worry, but was not able to relax and rest. The pattern learned from him in childhood was that if he relaxed or got distracted, his brother could have an accident and die. Even, she was still taking care of him in the present and had taken care of a heavy gambling debt that his brother had contracted.

Changing these types of patterns, so integrated into the personality, is very expensive since they were recorded together with a very powerful emotional charge. In Marina’s case, she was responsible for her brother’s life. Even so, understanding the unfairness of that situation and to be able to express injustice and anger What she felt when she saw her mother chatting with her friends while she took care that her brother did not drown, was the beginning of the path to her healing and her liberation.