What do an Olympic triathlete, a bestselling novelist, and a healthcare entrepreneur have in common — besides a shared family tree? That’s the question New York Times journalist Susan Dominus set out to answer in her new book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. In it, she profiles families that somehow managed to raise not one but multiple high-achieving children. Think of it as a nature-versus-nurture cage match — except the real story, as Dominus discovers, is far more nuanced.
In conversations held everywhere from city apartments to bustling midwestern households, Dominus unearths the subtle alchemy that fuels extraordinary ambition: fierce optimism, flexible parenting, and just the right dose of sibling rivalry. Along the way, she questions what success really costs, and whether parental influence is overrated, underrated — or simply misunderstood. The result is a deeply reported, often funny, and unexpectedly tender look at how greatness takes root at home. We asked her all our burning questions about sibling success, and what parents can (and should) take away from her research.
You profile families with different cultural backgrounds and circumstances. Despite that diversity, what were the common threads — emotional, psychological, or structural — that seemed to foster ambition and success across the board?
I was really struck by the consistency of a fierce optimism — but one that was grounded in the belief that if you kept at it long enough, you could triumph. One civil rights activist and prominent lawyer told me the unspoken family motto in her house was “all things possible.” Another family’s children told me their mother used to say, “With God’s help, all things are possible.” The parents I wrote about were not famous, but many of them had quietly lived extraordinarily brave lives — they had modeled something that took a leap of faith.
You describe the rewards and the burdens of ambition. Were there moments when you questioned whether the success of these kids came at too high a cost?
I’ve certainly thought about it! Sometimes I thought the children in the Groff family — the award-winning novelist Lauren Groff, the Olympic triathlete Sarah True, and the serial health care entrepreneur Adam Groff — drove themselves so hard that they could never relax and enjoy their success, that there was a high anxiety always pushing them towards the next win. But I think they might say that they were naturally anxious and restless — and that doing the work is the thing that helps them cope.
How did your experience as the mother of twins shape your reporting of these stories? Did this book shift the way you parent?
My fraternal twins are so different — one is the social chair in his fraternity at a Big Ten school, the other one’s version of Greek life is studying ancient Greek at a tiny liberal arts school of 400 kids. I read them the same stories every night for years, imposed the same rules, made them the same rewards charts, but you’d never even guess they were brothers, much less twins! And so I was very receptive to the research I came across that suggested that parents’ influence on children’s outcomes — whether they’re “gritty” or extroverted or likely to divorce or love books — is not nearly as powerful as we think it is.
At the same time, we all want to be the best parents we can be, and I was very inspired by Teruko Paulus, who raised three impressive children, including the innovative Broadway director Diane Paulus. Diane danced professionally as a young child, and she said her mother, who always came to every performance, had a way of “watching without desire.” She was supportive and she was present, but not in order to coach or critique. As an inveterate soccer mom who has been known to be a little, let’s say, over-invested on the sidelines, I made a conscious effort to channel Teruko Paulus — or at least aspire to it. I think kids both need to feel supported but also to own their own drive.
For the families you studied, was financial success the primary focus — as opposed to less-economic forms of success, like community impact or fame?
Achieving something extraordinary can entail making financial sacrifice along the way — and I will say that none of the parents I wrote about in the book ever pressured their kids to get real and get a stable job, even if they were struggling financially well into adulthood. I think that’s where that optimism and fearlessness comes into play. Diane Paulus lived with her parents and husband in a small upper West Side apartment for many years of her adult life as she built her career.
Sibling influence and sibling rivalry seem like powerful forces in the book. What did you find to be the most surprising ways that these siblings pushed and challenged each other?
I think that we all overestimate parental effects, and underestimate sibling effects. Only when I spent time really understanding the careers of the siblings in these families did I appreciate how that works even logistically. Because siblings are contemporaries of each other, they often make the personal referrals or give the career advice that their parents are no longer in a position to offer. Siblings can see each other more clearly sometimes, than their parents — they can evaluate what their true strengths are. Young people are also more likely to take good advice from a sibling than a parent. And even unhealthy rivalry can be very motivating — Lauren Groff said that her desire to prove herself to her older brother, who seemed infuriatingly all-knowing, was part of what pushed her for many years.
You weave in lots of scientific research around nature vs. nurture. Did your reporting tilt the scale for you in one direction or another?
I think the field is landing in a new place altogether, one that Dalton Conley explores in his book The Social Genome. Nature and nurture are really more intertwined than in opposition — our nature drives us towards a certain nurture. If you were born an agreeable baby, you’ll more likely elicit pleasantness from your parents and others, which then reinforces your easy-going demeanor. If you were born inclined to love books, you gravitate towards environments that reinforce that, and you become more bookish. Genes can also work at a remove: Maybe your mother is really conscientious, and you are too — she might have been genetically inclined that way, and so those genes might be influencing you, too, even if you didn’t inherit them.
Some of the families you write about rose from extraordinary hardship. What role did adversity play in shaping their drive?
The Murguias, a Mexican America family of nine living in a home of essentially two rooms, struggled financially — but the children had so much respect for how hard their parents worked, they really wanted to honor them and honor the opportunities they’d been given just by virtue of living in Kansas City, Kansas. That was a huge part of their drive. I also think seeing how much adversity your parents have overcome can be extremely motivating — it wasn’t easy for the Holifield siblings to desegregate various environments they entered, but their parents had made so much of their lives, in spite of the profound racism of the Jim Crow south, I’m sure it emboldened their children.
What do you hope readers take away from this book — especially parents, but also anyone thinking about ambition within a family?
I think at the end of the day, what really matters to all of us — for well-being, for happiness — is the strength of our relationships. So parents sometimes have to think about what’s most important — is it the kid getting into the elite school of the parents’ dreams, or is it the closeness of the bond that carries their children through daily life and beyond?
A lot of the families I wrote had values that helped the children believe that they could reach for the moon; at the same time, none of these children ever felt that they had to make a lunar landing — or the equivalent — in order to be loved and valued.
Susan Dominus has worked for the The New York Times since 2007, first as a Metro columnist and then as staff writer with The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize, for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues; in 2024, she won a National Magazine Award for service journalism for her article about menopause. She teaches journalism at Yale University.
