How The Rise of Small Families Set Many of Us Up for Gender Miscommunication

Author and his male-dominated family in Maine - Summer 2013

My maternal grandmother, Frances, married a well-educated widower with a teenage daughter in 1937. He was the most eligible man she’d ever seen in that mill town. They then had two girls of their own together. As a blended family, Frances raised three daughters and no sons. She lived in an estrogen-dominant household (the opposite of what is going on in my home). When her two biological daughters were teens, my mom remembers her saying to them at one point, “You girls wouldn’t be so boy crazy if you had grown up with brothers.” My grandmother certainly had experience with brothers. She had five!

It turns out that my grandmother was on to something. Something huge in the cultural background of the 20th century. Something we just don’t discuss: a lack of gender diversity in the modern home matters.

My grandmother was a member of the Greatest Generation (b. 1901-1927). These are the long since deceased elders who lived through the Spanish Flu, Two World Wars, and the Depression. That experiential mix made them pretty conservative about many things, especially money. But this was also one of the last American generations in which you had a high likelihood of growing up in a large residential family. 

When interviewing older Americans, more than half of my respondents described very large natal families on either their mother's or father’s side. Having five, six, or even eight siblings was much more common in their age cohort (my grandmother’s) than it would be after WWII.

Looking at the decade when my grandmother was born (the 1900s), you’ll see in Figure 1 that households with 5+ kids at home were 35% of American households!  

Wow. Just think of how many chores you could assign them! Luxurious! You could even assign one older child to ferry you cocktails all evening.  

Then, the % of large families started falling off a cliff as war, the Spanish flu, and the Depression reduced American homes' fertility rates. My mother’s home must have seemed like a library to her mother compared to the bustling, overfull house the latter grew up in across town.  

Figure 1 –  # of Kids at Home Over Time¹

So, what changes when the number of children in a home plummets like this? 

Many things change, but I want to focus on the most overlooked fact in modern social science and popular commentary - the odds of growing up without siblings of the opposite sex grow a lot.  

Let’s use some high school probability math to see what happened in America without our realizing it. 

As you reduce the average number of children in a family, the odds grow exponentially that any given child will grow up without a cross-sex sibling – without access to platonic, behavioral learnings about the opposite sex from an age peer. 

• 5 children = 93.750% - high chance of having a cross-sex sibling 

• 4 children = 87.5% 

• 3 children = 75% 

• 2 children = 50% 

• 1 child = 0% - zero chance of having a cross-sex sibling 

With the average lifetime number of children born to women today being roughly two,² we can see what this yields today’s kids in terms of the most fundamental learning labs regarding gender identity and gendered behavior.

Here’s what I found in my survey sample of older Americans: 

• 32% of older women grew up with no brothers. 

• 37% of older men grew up with no sisters. 

One out of three older Americans with a sibling did not grow up with a cross-sex sibling.³

Fewer births also equal lower odds of having ANY siblings at all (18% of older Americans’ kids are only children), not just lower odds of a cross-sex sibling.⁴ 

This pushes the burden of mixed-gender socialization training beyond the home into our neighborhoods but primarily into our schools. Have we done well with this, do you think? 

The Tamil Case for Sisters Still Haunts Me 

I was regularly interrogated about my family in Tamil Nadu, India, in the late 1990s. My favorite questions from total strangers?

"So…How many brothers? How many sisters?" 

Notice the emphasis on the amount, not the presence, of either sibling type. Surely, Mr. James has sisters.  

Nope.

Large families were still common in India then (and now), so this is not a silly assumption. 

When I told these polite Tamil strangers I had no sisters, most suddenly looked sad. Tamil brother-sister relationships are very intense due to the likelihood of the sister producing children who could marry her brothers' kids. This is called cross-cousin marriage in cultural anthropology, and the practice, though in sharp decline, is not unique to southern India.  

Not having a sister was rare when I lived in India, so everyone was confused about me, the guy with one male sibling. So sad. Ever since that time, I have been bothered by their collective look of pity. Was I a freak in America, too? Everywhere I looked in my American social world, I saw homes with only children, two brothers, two sisters, or three brothers. It seemed common for American men to have grown up with no sisters (and vice versa).  This was before I had sat down to do the probability math above.

The critical power of brother-sister bonding in Tamil culture is the expectation of lifetime flows of cash and resources from the brother to his sister and her children. Most major lifecycle rituals for daughters involve the maternal uncle as both a donor and a ritual participant. These events are very important in Tamil families. Accumulating cash to fund a girl’s wedding jewelry is one of the most important rationales for these events. If these rituals (ear-piercings, first menses, engagement ceremonies) flounder (or raise little), it signifies great family dysfunction. Which I saw!  

These flows continue despite modernization and create stronger horizontal family ties than you will see in most Caucasian families in the United States.  

Whenever I reflect on the sad state of American extended family intimacy, especially among older Americans, I always think about our total financial independence from our kin and the lack of reciprocal exchanges that would bond us together over time.  

Gifts matter because they constantly reproduce the value of your closest relationships. And this is also true for gifts of time and money between siblings. Little or no exchange? No obligation to reciprocate? No real relationship. They get a holiday card instead.  

Why Gender Diversity at Home Matters 

My first girlfriend in college was nice enough, but we weren’t on the same page about enough things – like dropping acid (not my thing). But that doesn’t explain why she accused me of “having a lot to learn about women.” Now, to be sure, you could probably toss that accusation unthinkingly at MOST 20-year-old men and be correct. 

I can’t prove it, but I suspect we are churning out more clueless young men every year (and young women) about the opposite sex. 

As an anthropologist attuned to the complexities of gender and kinship and as a man with no sister/stepsister, I want to share what I believe are just some of the social consequences of this bizarre, very common historical twist in modern family life. 

1. A cross-sex sibling living with you as you grow up is a critical training ground in non-sexual (i.e., platonic) peer interactions with the opposite sex. They prove these non-sexual cross-sex relationships are possible (even if the person is physically attractive). Without this training, every ‘hot’ female peer quickly becomes a sexual prospect.

2. Those of us in the 45+ age set did not go to schools that promoted group projects in class, let alone mixed-gender group projects common today. Instead, we experienced school as a never-ending individual competition with same-sex peers. Help was outlawed. The boys ignored the girls in class or flirted with them. 

3. Gen X and Baby Boomer men could sail through school and view female peers entirely as potential sex partners if they wanted to. Or they could ignore them altogether (which is what I mostly did). There was no ritual enforcement of cross-gender collaboration like you would have seen in the 19th century on a family farm or in a family business. Brothers and sisters doing chores together is one critical learning lab for later life. 

4. Gen X and Baby Boomer boys without sisters socialized with female age peers first in high school and college when most of those interactions consisted of gender teasing or mating ramp-up activities (or, in my case, awkward fumbles). You didn't have female buddies if you were a straight guy. Refer to When Harry Met Sally for more details. 

5. Gen X and Baby Boomers who chose professional career paths were thrust into 30/70 or 40/60 female/male office settings. But now there was a twist. For straight men, the mere presence of the opposite sex in these age cohorts tends to trigger an immediate erotic sizing up. It takes milliseconds. If the female is attractive, distraction will forever be in the background. Or, much more importantly, there may be a tendency to ignore the female's presence and insist on using male interactional codes (my big problem at work in the 2000s). 

If you're a man who grew up with a sister, though, here's what you most likely learned from a young age that nearly 40% of men in my age group didn't: 

• Women cry when they're angry AND when they're sad (I still don't get this one, but I learned it at work and accepted it) 

• Women know you're staring at their boobs (sometimes they're flattered, mostly they're creeped out) 

• Women don't generally like swearing and verbal aggression (but they probably won't say anything unless it’s a female-dominated group) 

• Women are masters at masking their discomfort in social interactions and may harbor resentments about someone's behavior for a long time without saying a thing. Whoops.

• Women acting like aggressive men is a situational performance, not necessarily how they wish to behave (or how they behave outside those mixed-gender settings). This performative aggression is not proof they are “one of the guys” you can now verbally abuse/tease at will.  

One rare researcher, Kimberly Updegraff, studied cross-sex sibling relations in depth and has revealed how much girls absorb opposite-sex gender traits in their public, out-of-home behavior. 

“Girls growing up with a brother scored higher in both the surveys and the interviews on measures of assertiveness, showing a markedly greater tendency to try to exert control over their friends and playgroups.”⁵

She found, however, that boys with sisters acted the same in public settings. There was no feminization of the boys’ behavior. 

A later study by William Ickes suggests that boys need an older sister to adopt female gender traits like in-depth, empathetic conversation.  

“The males in the study who had older sisters scored significantly higher than those with younger sisters in terms of how much and how openly they talked during the sessions with the females…younger brothers with older sisters were an instant hit with the women they were paired with…It seemed that they had learned what a woman thinks and what her expectations are.”⁶

The odds today of a boy having a sister are only 1 in 3. It takes a decent-sized brood of kids to ensure an older sister for the boys (and vice versa).

My list above are all traits of females that boys can best learn from sisters as they grow up. I had to learn all of this, I swear to God, at the office in the 2000s…in my thirties. My young adult socialization was severely andro-centric. Sitting near women in a college class doesn’t teach a guy much about women. Shockingly, visits to a girlfriend’s dorm room don’t add up to much interaction with her female roommates either. Shocking. I had no idea how horny most 15–25-year-old women were because I didn’t grow up with a sister at home drooling over the latest boy band, etc. And I had no idea they mask their erotic attraction well under the guise of flirtation. If I were the most raped sex, I, too, would not display my horniness 24/7. Makes perfect sense to me.

Why are cross-sex siblings so crucial for boys?

Boys gifted with this experience will see the 'backstage' behavior of girls and hear the private thoughts of girls in a relaxed environment. They will then be able to notice the public masking of females in 'front stage' public settings later in life.⁷ And these lucky men, when arriving at the office as adults, are less likely to be fooled by the extensive masking women engage in and more likely to be empathetic to the female perspective (including when confronted with their own bad male behavior). 

Cross-gender empathy is critical to the modern workplace. I struggle to see how we can continue to permit 1/3 of the male population to simply slip into the office as poorly trained individual men putting their foot in their mouths repeatedly. Surely, this is something workplace training could address in very humorous and engaging ways. The problem is bigger than sexual harassment. It’s about basic empathy across gender lines. Leaving individual men (or women) to figure this out independently (like I did) is absurd and the source of needless office stress and miscommunication.

I only discovered the broader female perspective once my old company became 70% female. That's when I really met my fictive sisters. I also found I was a total misfit as a man raised without sisters in an older generation. When the interactional codes switched to female, I had a big, big problem I hadn't fully acknowledged before.

I eventually left that company for other reasons but spared them in the process.

Did you grow up without a cross-sex sibling? Did you struggle to understand your female ‘sisters’ behavior at work like I did? Share your thoughts below, please!

This is an excerpt from my new book - Our Worst Strength - American Individualism and its Hidden Discontents. Available now on Amazon. In this book, I explore the shortcomings of an individualistic society that lets each adult figure their own life out on their own, even when most of us would turn out better with more community intervention, not less.

1. U.S. Census data 1850-2021 (both decennial and American Community Survey data) courtesy of the IPUMS USA online system. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Matthew Sobek, Danika Brockman, Grace Cooper,  Stephanie Richards, and Megan Schouweiler. IPUMS USA: Version 13.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V13.0

2. This number corresponds to the Completed Fertility Rate, or total lifetime births for women aged 40-44. It bottomed out in 2006 at 1.86 which can be attributed mostly to Baby Boomer women who were most of this age group in 2006. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/22/u-s-fertility-rate-explained/

3. But wait. What about the high rate of divorce and re-marriage in the U.S.? Stepsisters and stepbrothers might fill the gap, no? Well, only 16% of today's U.S. children live in such a household, according to recent research. https://www.stepfamily.org/stepfamily-statistics). The numbers are lower for blacks due to the higher baseline fertility rate among African-Americans. African-American men aged 45-74 have an 80% chance of having a sister or stepsister. I don't think white men have had those high odds since well before the Great Depression.Only 14% of my adult survey sample were only children. 

4. Social Awareness Institute - Older Americans National Survey, 2022, n=2093 adults aged 45-74. The U.S. sex ratio today is 105. In other words, there is a 5% extra likelihood of any newborn being male. This aligns with evolutionary understandings of human sex ratios for a more violent and dangerous world than our own.

5. Cited in Jeffrey, Kuger, The Sibling Effect: What the bonds Among brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, Riverhead books, New York:2011, p. 201

6. Ibid.

7. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Press, New York, 1959.