When you see siblings who rarely talk—who’ve grown distant, maybe even estranged—it’s easy to assume something dramatic must’ve happened. A big falling out. An inheritance dispute. A betrayal. But more often than not, the distance didn’t start in adulthood. It started much earlier. I’ve come to believe that the roots of sibling estrangement are often found in childhood. In how the family communicated. In what was encouraged—or ignored. In the subtle roles everyone was given and expected to maintain.
