I got the reaction I expected when I arrived at the baggage carousel in the Boston airport. My mom smiled so hard once she saw me that her cheeks could’ve popped right off her face. My stepdad pulled me in for a hug. And my little sister Sophia, freshly 17 at the time, greeted me with a self-esteem-crushing, unenthusiastic “hi.”
Even if her icy demeanor suggested otherwise, I knew Sophia was just as excited to see me as I was to see her. I’m still in my 20s, and I could see her teenage attitude for what it truly was: a front. That was the blessing and the curse of being almost a decade older than her. I’d been there before.
For most of our childhoods, Sophia and I were never quite on the same page. She was a newborn baby developing motor skills when I was a second grader struggling with multiplication tables. She wanted to scribble in her coloring book and play with dolls when I wanted to log onto Club Penguin and watch “The X-Files.” She wanted to do things that I had already outgrown, and our lack of shared interests made it feel hard to relate to each other. For the longest time, it was as if we were two different species. We were divided by an experience gap that was more of a chasm. Until we weren’t. The older she got, the more that space between us seemed to shrink. And the more I felt grateful it existed at all.
For most of our childhoods, Sophia and I were never quite on the same page. She was a newborn baby developing motor skills when I was a second grader struggling with multiplication tables.
When I excused myself to the bathroom, Sophia tagged along. We piled into the family stall to engage in customary girls’ room gossip. She was in the process of applying to colleges and overwhelmed with the idea of living on her own. Neither of our parents went through the traditional American college experience, so I was the only one she could turn to for guidance.
“Natalia.” Her voice cracked and her eyes grew glassy as she spoke. “I’m scared to leave.”
The icy exterior was gone, and the girl who said a single word upon seeing me for the first time in months was crying to me about preemptively missing her family. I understood what that fear felt like. I told her it would all work out and hugged her against her will. My chin rested on the top of her head while I held her tight for a few seconds.
Despite how adult and detached she pretended to be, she needed her sister at that moment. One old enough to have gone through the milestones she dreaded. We left the bathroom, rejoined the rest of our family, put on our coats and strode through the sliding airport doors into the world. Sophia and I, now at the same pace, walked side by side.
My mom’s choice to have a wider gap between me and my sibling was an unusual one. My parents had me a few months into their marriage. They needed those seven years to recover from a devastating miscarriage, as well as buy their first house, get a family car, earn more money at work and feel stable enough for baby No. 2. It wasn’t so much of a plan as it was a necessity. “We couldn’t really afford to have another kid,” my mom told me. “Everything was very hard. A lot of hard work, a lot of counting every penny.”
Most of the moms she knew had their children back-to-back. The idea was that the siblings would have more in common and grow closer, while parents could get through the difficult stages — like potty training and the “terrible twos” — faster and without feeling like they had to start from scratch years later. It was also supported by medical guidance at the time. A 1999 study in the New England Journal of Medicine identified the ideal age gap between siblings to ensure a healthy baby as 18 to 23 months. When that gap grew to span years, it was largely seen as an abnormality, one that even warranted a new vernacular — siblings born years after the first were sometimes called “caboose babies.” The trend only changed as divorce rates climbed, costs of living increased, more women entered the workforce and greater access to contraceptives resulted in fewer unplanned pregnancies.
The average time between sibling births grew by almost a full year between 1967 and 2017, bringing the new standard gap to about four years apart. “Pretty consistently, you see an increase over time in spacing,” says Christine Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-authored a study on birth spacing in 2020. “For college graduates, it’s about three and a half years. And for other groups of women with less education, it’s approaching four and a half years on average.” The latest research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that one-third of women have a second child within three years of their first, one-third have a second child more than three years after their first, and one-third have just one child.
We were not built-in best friends in the same way that twins or siblings a year or two apart can be.
There are downsides to larger age gaps. I can own up to the fact that I often treated Sophia as some sort of alien creature throughout our childhoods. When she came home from the hospital as a newborn, I thought she was cute and all, but I honestly had no idea what to do with her. She struggled with colic pain as an infant and cried for hours until her face turned bright red, which was a newfound annoyance to a kid who had effectively been an only child for the first seven years of her life. I didn’t have toys or clothes I could easily share with her, nor the bandwidth to constantly entertain her as a preschooler when I was in my angst-filled teenage phase. We were not built-in best friends in the same way that twins or siblings a year or two apart can be.
But some aspects of sisterhood are universal. We came up with dumb parodies of pop songs together, made fun of our parents, created our own dance choreographies and challenged each other to flip contests on the trampoline until our legs gave out. Sure, I accidentally ruined the tooth fairy for her, but one could argue that kind of friction is just as central to the sibling experience as anything else. Research shows that older siblings act as social role models for younger siblings to help them learn what norms, behaviors and values they need to function in society and develop a healthy sense of self. When there’s a difference in age, personality and lived experience, younger siblings develop more empathy.
The space between us allowed room for both my sister and me to be the main characters of our own childhoods, and to become our own people. “You have time to really focus on that one child at a time,” my mom told me. “You have the opportunity to actually spend quality time with one and not stretch yourself too thin.”
The parts of her personality that exist despite me, against all odds of my influence, are what I love most about my sister.
And even into adolescence, larger age gaps boost cognitive development. One study found that larger age gaps are directly correlated with improved test scores for the older sibling. That’s because each kid receives more attention when they’re not being raised simultaneously.
I was the nerdy daughter. I watched impossible amounts of TV, played video games and read books for fun. Sophia, on the other hand, played sports like soccer, painted pictures of birds and helped whenever possible in the kitchen. Her energy was more kinetic, burned off by doing. I never had to compromise my interests or preferred activities for the sake of finding a happy medium, and neither did Sophia, because my younger years were over by the time hers began.
The parts of her personality that exist despite me, against all odds of my influence, are what I love most about my sister. While I was strangely brooding through most of my youngest years, Sophia was saccharine, going as far as directing commercials to promote our mom’s business and bedazzling half-marathon posters to greet our dad at his finish lines. The more we each grew and changed, the more it became clear she appreciated our differences, too. She admired the fact that I always knew exactly who I was and made no apologies for it. Just like an older sister should.
“You have to stay up with me.”
Sophia let me know early on New Year’s Eve this last December that I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. The final part of the final season of “Stranger Things,” the Netflix phenomenon that had captured the attention of much of the nation’s children over the last decade, would air later that evening. Rather than space out the experience over time, my sister insisted that we stay up to marathon all three episodes of 209 minutes together that night. I begrudgingly accepted her challenge. Or at least I acted begrudgingly. We’d grown up watching this series together. We binged the second season together eight years before. At one point, I’d forced it onto her. Now she loved it as if it were her own novel discovery. It felt like a lifetime had elapsed between now and then.
We got comfortable on the couch, swaddling ourselves in blankets in a house where we both once lived but neither did anymore. I hid my emotions when the opening sequence started. I knew she’d think it was “cringe” if she realized how much weight I’d given this moment, us watching a series that had been one of our earliest common grounds together nearly a decade later, the children on screen as grown and different as we were. I helped edit and coach her through her college admissions essay and first breakup, almost like a parent would, yet we had these beautifully average moments in common.
I called my sister in early January, not long after the closing credits faded and the series we grew up on ended, to reflect on our dynamic. I wanted to know whether our age gap had shaped her in any of the same ways that it shaped me. She remained largely curt and close-lipped, in a classically teenage and anti-introspective manner. But she let me know she felt the same way. “The stuff that I’m going through now is stuff that you already went through,” she said. “I kind of like it this way … now I feel like we have stuff to talk about.”
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.