“Children in the same family are more similar than children taken at random from the population,” Plomin says, “but not much more.”  In fact, in terms of personality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time.

My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always…

It’s not just you.  Compared with elderly parents and adult children in five other industrialized nations, Americans are twice as likely to have “disharmonious” relationships, a new multinational study has found. And we’re correspondingly less likely to have “amicable” relationships marked by strong affection and relatively free of conflict.

“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world…What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”

“Parents…had a very hard time thinking about their own teen children as sexually desiring subjects…At the same time…parents view their teens’ peers as highly sexual, even sexually predatory.”

Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.