The Path of No Return

Ally and Tammy weren’t especially close sisters. They were four years apart and lived with their abusive mother in a rundown area in South Los Angeles.

But when Ally, the oldest, became a mother at 17, her younger sister paid careful attention. Ally began collecting welfare checks and moved into an apartment with her baby.

Tammy, left as the sole focus of her alcoholic mother’s wrath, viewed her sister’s circumstances with envy. Two years later, at 15, Tammy (the sisters asked that their real names not be used) was pregnant too. She didn’t want the baby, she bluntly admits. But she did want an economic means to escape from her mother.

Her blueprint? “I saw how my sister did it.”

While parents, schools, government and the media get much of the blame for the downward spiral of many U.S. teenagers, too little attention has been paid to the negative influence of siblings on each other.

Although few studies have been done, evidence suggests that an older sibling’s troubles--whether illegitimacy, crime, truancy or drug abuse--can have a big impact on younger brothers and sisters, according to the few researchers who have explored sibling relationships.

“It’s a dynamic that can play out in almost any situation--gang activity, drugs, truancy, pregnancy,” says Juan Granados, a counselor at New Directions for Youth, a Van Nuys organization dedicated to preventing troubles in high-risk youths. “Younger siblings tend to mold to that older sibling.”

In one of the most thorough explorations of teen pregnancy, a recent study in the journal Family Planning Perspectives found that after an older sister has had a baby, younger sisters and brothers exhibit more risk factors for becoming adolescent parents themselves.

When compared to similar youths who do not have a pregnant or parenting older sister, the high-risk younger siblings (whose average age was 13.7 years):

* were younger at the time of their first sexual encounter.

* had higher rates of sexual activity.

* were more accepting of early childbearing and single parenthood.

* were more pessimistic about school and career options.

“It was a little surprising that so many of these girls were sexually active--33% were non-virgins who had a parenting sister versus 17% of the girls with a non-parenting older sister,” says the author of the study, Patricia L. East, of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.

East’s study of 309 younger siblings was undertaken after she began seeing the younger sisters of former clients at the university adolescent health clinic.

“We noticed that our current teen obstetrics patients were often the younger sisters of our former teen obstetrics patients,” says East, a developmental psychologist. But when she looked for scientific articles on siblings and how teen pregnancy could be prevented in the younger sibling, she turned up little.

*

Are siblings who stray simply products of the same poor environment, uninterested parents or inherited traits that predispose them to trouble?

“The problem with sibling relationships is, they are mysterious and complicated,” says clinical psychologist Michael D. Kahn, co-author of “The Sibling Bond” (Erlbaum, 1982). Researchers like East suggest that how an older sibling responds to the environment--good or bad--becomes a template for the younger members of the family.

The theory, East says, “is that older siblings are important role models and socialization agents for other children in the family.”

This may be especially true if the siblings are growing up in difficult circumstances, Kahn says.

“If kids are neglected or abandoned or are in an unhappy home, they may rely on each other more, and are more aware of each others’ raw feelings. If they need each other or cling to each other, then you can expect the bond to be much more important,” he says.

In East’s study, the families of pregnant or parenting teenagers were primarily poor, which may also contribute to how easily the younger siblings were influenced.

In interviewing members of these families, East says she became aware of several ways in which an older sister’s pregnancy might provoke the younger siblings into following the same path. For example, the younger siblings may simply conclude that a teenager having a baby outside of marriage is not a bad thing.

“Once younger siblings see their older sisters pregnant or parenting, they may become more tolerant and accepting of early sexual activity and early parenthood and may even view them as the norm,” East says. “The younger sister may see early pregnancy and childbearing as having less of a stigma.”

The older sister’s pregnancy can also extend the limits on what constitutes acceptable behavior, East says. For example, all the children in a family may assume that their parents will be upset if one of them becomes pregnant. And usually the parents are, indeed, upset. But if the teenager chooses to keep her baby, the attitudes of the grandparents typically soften and they express joy at the new baby.

“This is a situation that may be interpreted by younger sisters as tacit acceptance of early childbearing,” East says. “Just think of how confusing this is and what the younger sister is thinking. She sees her older sister attaining a status associated with femininity, adulthood and attention. I can see how that can be terribly effective.”

The pregnancy may also stand as proof to younger siblings that their parents can’t really control their actions and that nothing really bad will happen if they do err.

The level of involvement of the young siblings in the sister’s life may also influence them. For example, a younger sister might be called on to do a lot of baby-sitting and may even become proficient at “mothering” tasks that make her feel ready for a child of her own.

The attention that is showered on a new mother and her baby can also appear enticing to younger siblings.

“These teens, when they become pregnant, receive so many services, free prenatal visits, job placement, special school guidance,” East says. “The younger sisters witness this and see the older sister getting all kinds of positive attention and think this is a persuasive influence.”

At the same time, the younger siblings may find that they are getting less attention than ever at home, East says. They may even engage in problem behavior to compete for their parents’ attention.

If the older sister remains at home with her baby, that change in family make-up might dramatically shake up the siblings’ lives. For example, the younger siblings, both boys and girls, said that their sister’s pregnancy made life more difficult for them. In some cases, the new grandmother becomes so involved in the infant’s care or gets so caught up in the older child’s troubles that younger siblings feel ignored and frustrated.

*

Maribel, the mother of an 18-year-old gang member, walks the fine line of offering love and care to her oldest child while admonishing the two younger ones to avoid following in his footsteps.

But, she says of Christina, 10, and Joseph, 11: “They are angry all of the time. Sometimes I try to give all my attention to the little ones and they think I give all my attention to the big one.”

Maribel, who requested anonymity for the family, has not asked her older son to leave the house, despite the gang activity that swirls around him, because she continues to try and persuade him to break free of the gang. But she says she is sick with worry that Joseph will join the gang, too.

“It’s hard because we live together. My [older] son is in the same room, the same house, and yet I say to Joseph, ‘Don’t go into his room. Don’t talk to him.’ ”

For his part, Joseph says he will not join a gang. “They get into trouble. They sell drugs.”

With counseling from Granados, the counselor at New Directions for Youth, Joseph is planning life as an actor. “Everyone says I look like Antonio Banderas,” he says with a grin.

According to Kahn, the author, there are certain circumstances and age periods when siblings are more influential.

“For example, if they are two years apart, that is very different than if they are seven years apart,” he says. “The closer in age they are, the more powerful the bond. The bond will also be more powerful with the same gender.”

Families that experience difficult situations with an older child should always consider how the younger kids are influenced, says Joseph Lee Rodgers, a psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who has also studied sibling influence. “How could this not have some kind of effect?” says Rodgers of an older sibling’s pregnancy. “But maybe the effect is positive. I’ve known families where older siblings got involved in drugs and young siblings saw what it did to them and said, ‘I’m not going to mess with that.’ ”

Siblings can react in a variety of ways to such a traumatic event, Rodgers says.

“The more we tell parents that they should have individual strategies for individual children, the better,” he says. “For example, if the parents know that a younger sibling is influenced strongly by an older sibling, then they ought to behave differently [than with] a sibling who tends to stand back and watch.”

East agrees that the message for families should be not to forget about the younger children.

“One thing to make the family aware of is that the younger siblings get overlooked,” she says. “Parents need to look at the very difficult transition that [the younger siblings] are going through and give them an opportunity to talk about it.”