A question for those with AS that have younger siblings...

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Do you ever feel like you're not a good or good enough older sibling?I wonder about this ALL THE TIME.


-SpaceCase

My sister is a year younger than me but has a normal life. A 6 figure
computer programming job. Two kids and married for 15 years. But
they just visited me last week. They love me. Sure they do not
understand me but they like me anyway. I'm so happy because
after her living away for 18 years she is now moving close to home:)

I never really worried about that when we were growing up. I think I did ok as a big sister. It's interesting though, now that we're both a bit older (she's 24 and I'm 29), my sister (NT) seems to have taken on the role of big sister even though she's younger. Maybe that's because my aspie traits were mild enough to be overlooked when I was a kid, but now that I'm an adult it's more obvious that I'm behind in some areas - needing some guideance, needing someone to watch out for me a bit...

My Sister has her Life and I have mine. We stay out of eachother's buisness the best that we can. She used to try the role of the Big Sister, until I've told her to stop abusing me, four years ago. She's been pretty good about treating me like a Peer, instead of a Child, since that moment. I can take care of myself. I'm strong and Independent. I might still live with my Parents, but that means nothing to me. It only means that I'm not the greatest Saver in the World. I guess it means something to my Sister, but I'll never understand why. Sometimes I do feel that I'm a "Younger Brother" to her, when I examine my Die-Cast Buses, or admire my Austin Powers-Like Appearance, because I feel more Male than Female. And if a Family Member ends up with an Accent, it's usually the youngest one from what I've observed in my Community. I also make a Hobby out of Burping. At least I know that my Kid Sister loves me a lot, even though she doesn't seem to show it.

Yeah all the time... so "same here".

I think I'm a good older sister...I've done the best I can. But, I don't think my younger sister appreciates it much, and like some other people have said, she tends to see me as the younger one. Her having about 5 inches on me doesn't help either...

God I feel like this all the time too, it gives me such a complex. And trying to be a better sister is just plain exhausting and I don't know how to go about it.

I am 23 and my brother is almost 19. He is extremely sociable with a job and lots of friends and I spend my time mostly in my room. Despite the fact that I "know" more then he does about "things" (intellectual things, I mean) I still feel more and more that he is the "older" one in regards to day-to-day life experiences. I am the one who has still has angry panic attacks when losing things, but he has grown out of his childish mannerisms. He is confident and increasingly sure of himself, and I am not. It is a difficult situation to adjust to.

I stay out of my sister's business. She stays out of mine. We have not had a very good relationship in our younger years, mainly because I was very immature (as we tend to be as kids), and violent. Now that that phase has passed we are starting to get over whatever animosity exists between us, but I doubt we will ever be close.

I can relate to what the last poster said. I feel that even though I'm the one doing tertiary education, and I know I'm above average in the intelligence department, she is more mature than me in other ways. This is even despite the fact that my sister is a very immature person (she dropped out of school two years ago and has not saved up one dollar since, she is not very intelligent and seems to take pride in her stupidity, she is in with a 'bad crowd', and she smokes, binge drinks, etc). The situation is strange because I think we have feelings of superiority and inferiority towards each other.

While I generally feel like I'm "not good enough" in every conceivable way, I don't feel like I have a responsibility to be "good sister" to my younger brother because he seems to feel that it's his responsibility to make my life a living hell. I guess I’ll be joining the chorus of "despite being slightly better academically, they think he's more 'mature'". He's worked in the past but just decided he's done working forever and they support him with that.

Yeah my mum always treated my younger brother differently to me he is the golden child to her and whilst painful I have had to accept that.

I feel similar to Enigmatic_Oddity and jimservo. My sister always experienced things before I did, despite her being about three years younger. The only thing I was more advanced in than her was academic type stuff, something she wasn't interested in anyway. She drank, partied, had regular... ahem... "intimate relationships" and seemed to inhabit a much different world than I did. So I've always felt like she was the older sister somehow, and not me.

I don't know what to say or think about my sister right now. See, I'm 21 and my sister is 18. When we were kids I don't think I was the big sister i should've been. We always hated each other. When I went away to college and started coming back home once in a while, we started opening up and talking more and more. I don't think what we have now could've ever happened back then. I don't know. I'm trying to make up for it, which probably won't give back what happened between the two of us. But, at least we can start right now and keep what we have now.


My sister and I are totally two different people. She doesn't have AS or anything like that. She's a 'normal' kid with lots of friends. And she's a very strong-willed child and I look up to her more than anything. See, I think that she has always seemed like the older sister that I should've been to her. I look up to her to know the ways of society and how to act. Growing up, I always wanted to be just like her, to be able to do the things that she could do.

While I am about 3 years older than my sister, it always seemed that she had the more 'normal' social life. I had my share of silent crushes but she was the sibling with more attention from the opposite sex. I have my suspicions that she is slightly AS but not to the same degree as me. She was able to pass as NT more than I could.

I can recall when she was in elementary school and I in seventh grade, she was getting felt up at the lunchroom table! Well, being the older one, I wouldn't have any of that...so I made up a story about getting my first french kiss from a boy. The older child had all the firsts! That's the way I thought it had to be.

I guess I am now - I am 28 and my younger brother is 26. But I am quite sure that I wasn't always too pleasant back when I was a kid. My younger brother used to be extremely sociable and extremely talkative when he was young. Drove me mad. So I think I may have been unreasonably cold towards him a lot when I was a kid.

Somehow relationships between us got a lot better when he was fifteen or so. He quitened down a bit, and I got out of pubertal grumpiness.