Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the Internet, can now locate each other and have contact. This chapter explores the new forms of relatedness that have emerged with the growing availability and use of donor gametes. Specifically, I ask: how do donor-conceived youth situate their donor siblings in relation to other important relationships in their lives, such as friends and siblings who also live in their nuclear families? How do they actively construct these new relationships with newfound donor siblings and where do they fit within their families? Based upon in-depth interviews with teens and young adults who live in the United States, the varied understanding of these relationships is explored, including filling voids around identity, resemblances and the wish for “siblings”, the difficulties of forming new relationships and how heteronormative understandings of the bounded-nuclear family have sometimes become more fluid.

Siblings are often overlooked as a source of social influence. Addressing this gap, we review findings from studies spanning the transition to siblinghood through adolescence. We have identified four features of sibling relationships that help explain siblings’ powerful influence on children’s prosocial behavior: sibling relationships are (1) emotionally unfettered; (2) diagonal, especially in the early years; (3) familiar; and (4) long-lasting. Research is framed by several distinct theoretical perspectives, including attachment theory, ethology, family systems theory, and cognitive accounts of theory of mind development. Sibling influences also take many forms that vary in salience across the different aspects of prosocial behavior and distinct developmental periods. Over time, sibling influences show both stability and change, but appear independent from parental influences – although evidence is scarce for some groups. Finally, we discuss future directions, as well as conclusions regarding the nature, motivation, and impact of sibling influences on prosocial behavior.

This chapter traces the history of the Tolstoy family, dating Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s ancestry back to the fourteenth century. It begins with a brief explanation of the Tolstoy family’s complicated genealogy, distinguishing between the titled branch and the untitled Tver and Kutuzov branches. Next there is a brief overview of the Tolstoy family’s most famous scions, ranging from prominent statesmen to flamboyant individuals whose colorful lives consolidated the family reputation for eccentricity. There is also a brief discussion of the distinguished and troubled history of the Volkonsky family, Tolstoy’s maternal ancestors. The chapter then focuses on Tolstoy’s immediate family – his parents, brothers, sister, aunts and, of course, his wife Sofia Andreevna and their children. There is commentary on what they meant to him, both personally and creatively, and on how he drew on them, as well as his more distant forebears, to breathe flesh and blood into the iconic characters of his two great novels.

As Russia went through an age of great reforms during Tolstoy’s adult years, relations between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and extended kin all evolved to match their changing society and its ideals. While Tolstoy was well aware of the debates about the state of the Russian family that raged at mid-century, his critique of the family talked past that of many of his contemporaries to focus on the moral issues closest to his heart. By mid-century many people considered the Russian family to be a backward institution based on patriarchal tyranny. Jurists struggled to rewrite imperial family law, while figures across the political spectrum debated the “Woman Question.” Tolstoy’s views evolved along different lines. He went from idealizing the traditional patriarchal family (through the 1860s), to acknowledging its flaws (1870s), to rejecting the family as an ultimate life goal (1880s onward). His ultimate ideal left no place for sexual love and was based on impersonal service to a higher cause. Ignoring all the quotidian realities of actually belonging to a real family made of real people, Tolstoy infuriated his wife with his abstract talk of living for the soul, while she managed the household and oversaw their large family.

For many years, donor conception treatment was seen as a “solution” to involuntary childlessness, marked by pregnancy. Through awareness-raising by mental health professionals and especially donor-conceived people themselves, it is now increasingly recognized as the start of a family-building process with an ongoing story that unfolds over the family life-span and beyond. This chapter shows how parents’ abilities to adjust their prior beliefs about the meaning of “family” and “genetic relationships” become critical in the shift from “building a family” to “being a family” and onwards. Moreover, they are not alone anymore: various story-tellers in the new family system, including children, grandparents and others, each have their own unfolding understandings to voice and manage, separately and together. Throughout this creative and challenging process, the donor(s) has a presence, regardless of whether all are aware of their involvement. The complexity of disclosure is considered alongside the need for openness itself to be ongoing and interactive if it is to healthily accommodate shifts in understanding and power balances as children grow. Families do not exist in a vacuum, so wider networks and societal developments can also influence the permeability of their boundaries. Finally, the role of professional and peer support is considered.

This chapter explores the integral role that siblings’ multilingual discourse plays across diverse family lives and sites of learning. In discussing key concepts in the field of family studies, young children are viewed as spending as much if not more time with siblings than their parents. This chapter looks at siblings as agentive in shaping the language environment in multilingual families and reflects on research in the area of siblings’ language choices, humour and intimacy as well as sibling rivalry in multilingual discourse. A distinctive feature of sibling relationships is their seriality, and research on the ‘niche’ of each child is looked at in relation to a child’s emerging multilingualism. Siblings’ multilingual discourse is viewed as dynamic and their language practices as in flux as the family grows, moves, or separates. Research on siblings as literacy mediators and studies on their creative multilingualism are examined. This chapter recognises the key role of digital technology in children’s lives and examines siblings’ multilingual discourse in these new digital spaces. New research is shared that investigates how multilingual siblings worked together on an international digital storytelling project.

This chapter chronicles one parent’s journey through discovering that her son had PWS and what that would mean for her family. This chapter describes the patient’s initial diagnosis and the health complications that followed. The writer allows readers a view into her own personal struggles – her fear, her pain, her unwavering devotion to and advocacy for her son’s well-being. The writer gives voice to what it means to be a mother to a child with PWS. She also discusses the impact the medical and behavioral manifestations of the diagnosis has had on her family as a whole. She refers to a “new normal” that defines how they live their lives through the context of the therapies, medical interventions, and behavioral struggles that come with PWS. The chapter helps establish the perspective of those caregivers this book hopes to serve.

In Chapter 5, the author examines the role of intimacy between filhas de criação and their biological family members in criação. Challenging misconceptions about criação, she discusses evidence that some filhas de criação run away from their biological homes and to their informally adoptive homes. While, in some cases, filhas de criação are blocked from seeing their biological family members, in many cases, ongoing relationships with their biological families provide the opportunity for siblings to serve as co-conspirators and co-collaborators in each other’s search for freedom and independence. An unexpected finding is also that contact with biological family members may sometimes compel filhas de criação to extend the time that they provide unpaid and exploitative labor to an adoptive family. This chapter reveals the transgressive role that biological siblings can have in the lives of filhas de criação, while also highlighting the capacity for systems of domination to co-opt these same family ties and bonds to secure its proliferation.

In King Lear and Coriolanus Shakespeare shows how parents who shame their children motivate them to commit violence that ultimately consumes the parent and child. To call this a perversion of parental love is virtually an understatement. Lear shames Goneril and Regan by loving Cordelia more than he loves them – so they bring about the deaths of both Lear and Cordelia. And Gloucester shames Edmund, who has his father’s eyes gouged out – an atrocity committed by American murderers we have seen – since people feel shamed in the eyes of others. Coriolanus shows how a mother’s teaching her son to achieve honor through violence ultimately rebounds on her and the very community she meant him to protect.