Younger sibling overshadowed needing ADVICE

marcyr
Wed, 10 Nov 2004 17:12:31 +0000

Blue, your friend needs to give up the competition with his brother, it won’t accomplish anything and he’ll just make himself crazy. If he really loves playing music, he should continue to do so and ignore the kid prodigy - obviously, being a prodigy hasn’t done anything to turn this kid into a decent human being. People like that deserve to be blown off, period. Ignore the prodigy and enjoy the music for its own sake and for the pleasure he gets in performing it. However, if S2 is only playing in the band because S1 did, and it’s otherwise just another chore for him, he should bail out and find something that HE loves. If he refuses to react when other people compare him with S1, eventually they’ll stop doing that and will learn to look at S2 for who he is, not who is isn’t.

My husband is the oldest of 4 boys, and growing up he was king. Brother 2 is academically brilliant, but always ended up in B1’s shadow because B1 was bright AND a star athlete. My favorite story about them is the time that B2 was on stage at school to receive some kind of award. When the Principal called B1’s name by mistake, B2 just sat there and didn’t move. The Principal turned and looked at him, and called B1’s name again. No response. Finally the Principal said, “OH, B2!”, at which point B2 got up and accepted his award. B2 could have gotten all upset at the mistake, or gone up to accept the award even though the wrong name was called. Instead, he quietly refused to accept the award until the Principal recognized the right brother. S2 needs to learn how to do this too, so that everyone (himself included) recognize the special person that he is and stop comparing him to S1. Everyone has something that makes him/her special, and S2 needs to find out what his “something” is.