The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success

Is there a secret sauce behind those rare families that boast multiple highly successful children? Award-winning New York Times journalist weaves story with science in pursuit of answers.

At a time when our offspring’s achievement resembles a competitive sport, parents feel a staggering sense of responsibility to raise children with certain traits--grit, for instance--our society currently values. When we encounter the rare family whose progeny seem to be achieving at high levels, we may wonder: Is there anything reliable or replicable about how those parents have inspired their children?

Acclaimed New York Times investigative journalist Susan Dominus profiles six families with several exceptionally accomplished children in order to tease apart the various factors that might have led to their success, including inherited tendencies. She starts with the iconic Brontë sisters, whose remarkable literary success inspired endless speculation about the reason for so much talent under one roof. Dominus, herself the mother of twin teenagers, then moves to the present moment, relating the fascinating trajectories of families from diverse cultural, racial and socio-economic backgrounds, including young parents from China who fled the one-child policy to open a Chinese restaurant in Appalachia and sent four children to elite colleges and careers that give back in technology and medicine; the Groff family, whose claim to fame is not just an award-winning novelist but an Olympic athlete and a notable entrepreneur; and the Holifields, raised in the Jim Crow South and boasting two powerful attorneys, both Harvard law school graduates, and a cardiologist, all three influential, in their own ways, in civil rights. Woven into these and other inspiring stories is an account of centuries of scientific research into the question of nature vs. nurture in predicting outcomes.

Elegantly written and extensively researched, Good, Better, Best doesn’t promise a check-list of how-tos; its unique strength lies in probing the nuances of parenting and in the honesty of its participants in also discussing the challenges of family ambition, and even the challenges of success itself.