Sibling Bonds May Wax and Wane: Here's How To Safeguard Them

After her mother died in 2016, Patty Pavia of Philadelphia, who is in her late 50s, drifted away from her brother and sister. “When we did talk, it was mostly logistical, like settling the estate, sorting photos, arranging the headstone. I assumed the distance was just part of the grieving process, but the quiet lingered. We didn’t argue or have a falling out. We just faded into our separate lives.”

She expected that, when her father passed in 2020, they might grow further apart. Instead, the opposite occurred. Coming together to plan the memorial service and going through his belongings, “we rediscovered our bond,” she says. “I was flabbergasted by how quickly we reconnected, once we gave ourselves the space and time to do it.”

Siblings. It can be a complicated relationship at any time in life, but as people age — and especially as parents pass away — that relationship can shift in unexpected ways.

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You can become close friends. Or communicate less and less, until you barely know each other.

“The sibling dynamic is so powerful,” says Avidan Milevsky, author of Sibling Issues in Therapy. “It can be the longest relationship we have — if you’re lucky you could have an 80- or 90-year relationship.” Milevsky is also a research scientist and senior lecturer at Ariel University in Israel.

Sibling bonds: connection, separation, reconnection

One typical trajectory, he says, is that siblings are close as children, less so after leaving home and starting their own families, and then reconnect more strongly in their 50s or 60s as children leave or work life slows down.

But there are many variations on this theme. Some siblings talk or see each other regularly, others largely limit their get-togethers to holidays and big family events, such as weddings. Then there are those who rarely communicate, either because they have little in common or hold grudges that stem from childhood. Then there is active estrangement.

In the past, social science research on close relationships focused more on parents, spouses and even peers over siblings, but that has changed over the past few decades.

The research is mixed,” on whether siblings tend to become closer or more distant as they age,” says Katherine J. Conger, a professor emerita in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California at Davis, who has long studied siblings. “On average, it appears that most sibling relationships become a little warmer or more positive, but I think you can qualify that by saying that applies to siblings who have stayed in touch and who maybe have some similar life interests and goals, or live close to each other, so that they have easier ways to maintain contact.”

Siblings as friends

Geoffrey L. Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and co-author of Adult Sibling Relationships, says his research found that about 15% to 20% consider their siblings close friends.

More often, he says, there’s “ambivalence and ambiguity. It's great if you feel only unbridled affection. But guess what? It's normal to feel ambivalent. They may still treat me like a kid and or I may still act like I'm 12 when I'm with them and they want me to act like a 55-year-old. So, you know, it works both ways. We're not only the victims of behavior, we're the active participants.”

It's not surprising that sibling ties are very different from any others in life. Which child was — or perceived to be — the reliable one, the favored one, the smart one, imprints itself on the relationship.

“Some of the research shows that if siblings do maintain contact and have some open discussions, they can start to resolve some of the conflicts that they had growing up and start to get an adult perspective on what was happening in the household,” Conger says.

When the last parent dies

One of the biggest changes to sibling relationships in later years can occur when a parent — especially the last surviving parent — dies. Sometimes parents were the glue that held the family together, so brothers and sisters don’t have separate adult relationships with each other. Often the parental home was where everyone met up. Once that no longer exists — and especially if people live far apart — they may feel that it's not worth the effort or the cost to get together.

That’s why it’s a good idea for adult brothers and sisters to make a habit of getting together in person or by video, even when their parents are still living, Milevsky says. Sometimes, in families with less healthy dynamics, he adds, a parent might feel excluded and resentful, but that’s more reason to do it.

“I see this in therapy sometimes, that siblings who are in their 40s, let's say, get together for coffee,” he says. “They do it without telling mom, because mom is going to get offended that she didn't get invited as opposed to realizing what a wonderful thing this is.”

Forging new bonds

For others, the death of a parent re-establishes a relationship.

Christina Steinorth-Powell, 60, a psychotherapist in Nashville, Tenn., was very close with her only brother — four years younger than her — growing up. In his late 30s he married someone Steinorth-Powell calls “difficult,” who made it less pleasant to get together. Although they then lived close by in Los Angeles, they started seeing less of each other.

When she moved to Texas and then Tennessee, they were both involved in their own lives — Steinorth-Powell was dealing with a very ill husband — and communication ceased.

“I went through my greatest sadness when it initially started to happen,” she says. “I thought I'd always leave the door open, but when somebody doesn't show up, you eventually close your door.”

She assumed the door was firmly shut, especially after the death of their father did little to bridge the distance. But 16 months later, in 2022, she tried to call her mother —they spoke daily — but got no answer.

Steinorth-Powell called her brother who lived near their mother; he told her she had had a serious stroke and was in the hospital.

She immediately flew to Los Angeles; her mother passed away after 10 days, and she stayed to help plan the funeral and sort through the estate. And she and her brother — who was then divorced — reconnected.

Working through the hurt

“We've never talked about the estrangement,” she says. “It’s almost like her hospital stay, her passing and working through the estate gave us something that we could work toward together without ever having to address our differences. We were so grief-stricken that I don't think either one of us wanted to hurt any more than we were hurting.”

And she knows it greatly comforted her mother in her last days to see both her children back together and there for her. Now she and her brother are in touch regularly. Two years ago, she attended her brother’s wedding to his second wife.

“Maybe the death of the last parent sometimes takes some pressure off,” she says. “You can kind of just be who you are, not who your parents expect you to be.”

When relationships do fade, it’s often not from conflict, but inertia, says Mark Henick, a Canadian mental health advocate. “Picking up the phone — even just to share a memory or a joke — can keep those ties from slipping away.”

That’s what Pavia and her siblings did — they became intentional about weekly check-ins, shared photo albums and an annual siblings’ dinner to honor their parents.

“It wasn’t anything huge — just small, consistent reminders that we still had each other,” she says.

Permanent estrangement

For some, however, the end of the relationship after a parent dies comes not with a whimper, but a bang.

“I lecture a lot on this topic and people always come up to me after the lecture and say, ‘You know, I haven't spoken to my brother in 30 years, since dad passed away.’ It was a major explosion,” Milevsky says.

Too often that happens, he says, because tensions that have long existed below the surface between siblings have never been addressed, and the death of parents brings things to a head. Or there are angry disputes about the estate and inheritance, although often that reflects lifelong friction.

As Conger says, after a parent dies, siblings can take all their frustrations with each other “and focus it on mom’s teapot.”

Sometimes it’s not clear what the problem is, but a parent’s death ignites the anger. One man, who asked to be identified only by his initials, L.P., because he wants to keep his story private, said that he and his older brother and their wives were close for years and visited each other frequently, even when one moved to another state. Decades earlier, their other brother had died in an accident.

Although the relationship, from his brother’s side, seemed a little cooler over later years, he attributed that to stress about finances and other concerns.

But once their mother became incapacitated, his brother seemed to get angrier and angrier. “We had no idea what was going on, but it was the beginning of the end,” says L.P.

When their mother died, things fell apart. Despite L.P.’s numerous attempts to reconcile and offers to go to therapy together, he never even found out what caused his brother’s fury — his brother would only reply, “You know what it is.” They haven’t been in contact for 17 years.

“There is still sadness about the estrangement but there isn’t anything else I can do,” he says.

Generational impact

Too often sibling estrangement has ripple effects. L.P. not only lost a brother, his brother’s son, a nephew with whom he had been very close, chose his father’s side. And his daughter lost a cousin.

It’s a knock-on effect that diminishes an important social network.

“If I'm on good terms with my brother, my kids are going to be more likely to be on good terms with his kids,” says Greif, the author of the book on sibling relationships. “That widens the spectrum of the way families can come together and love each other and support each other.”

While much research has shown the importance of social networks on physical and mental health, siblings alone can play an important role.

A major longitudinal study, one of the first to look at the quality of sibling relationships across developmental phases, found that a close bond with a sibling at age 23 predicted lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms at age 41.

For Faith McKinney, 58, of Indianapolis, seeing her mother’s estrangement from her only sibling, her sister, who lived less than a mile away, strengthened her determination to maintain ties with her younger brother.

“When we were young adults, we made a choice that we were never going to do that,” McKinney says. “We are very intentional about remaining close and considerate of each other’s feelings.”

Milevsky says he works with siblings in therapy to heal their wounds, preferably jointly, but also individually if both won’t participate. “Ideally, if they both come in, you could work together, but often I work with just one of them to try to enhance the relationship in the way they can,” he says.

Sometimes reconciliation just isn’t possible, or even desirable, if a sibling creates family chaos or makes you miserable. As with all relationships, everyone has to calculate the costs and benefits.

And that often means accepting your siblings for what they can give and trying to overlook what they can’t.

“Losing our parents reminded us that we’re now the family historians, the memory keepers,” Steinorth-Powell says. “And that shared responsibility brought us closer in a way we hadn’t expected.”

How to strengthen sibling bonds

Start early. Parents can help strengthen the sibling bond to set the foundation for lasting lifelong relationships. One important way, says Katherine J. Conger, a professor emerita at the University of California at Davis, is to help children learn how to resolve their conflicts themselves rather than parents stepping in each time. There are a number of resources available for parents to learn how to do this; Conger points to one online program called More Fun with Brothers and Sisters, created by Laurie Kramer, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois.

Don’t let the connection fade from apathy. Set up weekly or monthly phone or video calls. If you live far away from each other, consider establishing a pot of money everyone contributes to for family or sibling get-togethers. That way no one is unfairly burdened with flight or hotel costs, which may cause friction.

Manage your expectations. It’s great if your brother or sister is your best friend, but don’t be disappointed if that’s not the case. Siblings fulfill a different role than friends and it may be necessary to rethink how you look at the relationship for it to work.

Analyze the relationship. If there’s ongoing tension, consider why you want to address it and the best way to do it. With siblings, there are often layers of issues that can stem back to early childhood. In some cases, airing grievances kindly and honestly may seem best, but not always, says Geoffrey L. Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of Adult Sibling Relationships. What is the purpose and what are the possible outcomes? Will it enhance the relationship or create more rifts?

Get help. If there are difficulties with a sibling that need to be resolved to continue or deepen the relationship — and it’s too painful to work out together — consider family therapy. If that’s not possible, it may be helpful to talk about the issues on your own with a therapist.

Know the limits. In some cases, as can happen with mental illness, alcohol or drug addiction or severe personality clashes, it is necessary to keep the relationship distant. Or cut it off.

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.

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