I think juggling both work and childcare (especially with health concern) is very difficult.

Stupid capitalism.

Yeah, my mom stayed at home when I was young, but for several years ran a daycare out of our house for money. But she went back to school when I was in high school so I imagine my brother who is 6 years younger had a very different experience. It's weird to think about how even though we grew up in the same family we had different experiences.

There's an 8 year gap between me and Skippy. We had VERY different experiences.

There's just three years between me and my sister. Our mother worked part-time when we were little, but then stopped when I was in kindergarten and my sister was in fourth grade. We had a babysitter/nanny who'd take care of us while my mom was at work when we were tiny, but I only have vague memories of her -- once I was old enough for full-day nursery school, I went to that, and since my mom was only working part-time, she was usually home when I was home.

I was one of 4 and my mom was at home. She hadn't worked since WWII. Dad didn't do kids. He really just didn't know how to communicate with non-adults. He did take care of us when my mom had health issues, but we had a family friend who stayed with us to help. We were Mary's kids and he loved us as extensions of her, but we didn't really interact much until we were adults.

I managed to have 2, but 4 of my nephews, and my niece were only children. My brother made up for it by having children with 3 different moms. He had the last 2 with a women who had 4 already.

There's an 8 year gap between me and Skippy. We had VERY different experiences.

I study gene-environment interaction, so I teach about differences in sibling experience in class. The differences can be large, especially if there is a big age gap. Promotions, job losses, divorce, parental medical problems can all shift the world.

In class I use my own mother as an example. She was 13 years younger than her siblings, and the age difference straddled crucial differences in the lives of her family and the world they lived in.

My mother's sibs were born to an impoverished Swedish couple, struggling to survive in a strange and confusing new country, in a language they did not understand. The sibs learned English as quickly as they could when they started school. They were embarrassed by the stench of foreignness that they carried with them and did everything they could to hide it. Their father struggled to find work as the country descended into the Great Depression, and economic worries were constant.

My mother was born to a prosperous Swedish-American couple, living in a nice house in a middle class neighborhood. That house was dominated by two American-born teenagers who taught her English in the crib. HER father was a respected union carpenter in a union town who always had plenty of work in the mobilization for WWII and the economic boom that followed. She lived in a world of baseball and hot dogs and optimism, and she felt free to love everything Swedish because she never had to worry that she was not American enough fit in.

I tell the class that my mother and her sibs had the same genetic parents but very different phenotypic parents, and very different environments created by those parents. These kinds of difference can set kids off on very different life trajectories.

That's fascinating, Rick. I think now, my kids are a little like that -- my oldest was born when his father and I were still happy, and we were comfortable, financially. My daughter, twelve years younger than him, grew up not knowing any home but her grandfather's, which was rundown and depressing, and a dad who barely worked. My middle guy got to experience both.

That's so interesting, Rick! My mom's family was like that (she was the oldest and her brother was 15 years younger and my grandparents economic situation changed a lot over that time) and I always knew that his growing up experience was very different from hers but I never knew how to express it.

Very interesting, Rick!

Fascinating family history, Rick.

My sister and I are eight years apart and our childhood experiences were so different we might as well have had different parents.