We love the simple things in life!

Q: There is a prevailing idea that divorce is really bad for children, but you talk about ways family conflict can actually be good for siblings’ relationships.

A: This is one of the things that drove me to write the book. My parents were divorced, and my mother was divorced twice. Each time we came through it, my brothers and my relationships seemed to be annealed in some way. They were strengthened. If you begin with relatively strong sibling bonds, divorce is like any other any crisis in that the people involved tend to pull together. When your parents, who are the anchors you’re counting on the most, are falling down on the job, siblings look to each other and find way to pull together, because the last thing you can afford to see fractured at that point is the unit among yourselves.

Paradoxically, siblings also tend to pull together in situations in which any of the kids are battered, particularly if there is one target child. Parental abuse tends to rupture the ties between parent and child, so kids who survive terrible situations like that often end up much closer to their siblings. Older children especially tend to side with the abused younger sibling over the abusive parent.

— Jeffrey Kluger