What We Lose When We Don’t Have Siblings

By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk

Dr. Pakaluk is the author of “Hannah’s Children.” She is the executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where she is an associate professor of economics.

We have a word for children without parents: orphaned. We have a word for those who lose a spouse: widowed. There is no everyday word in English for growing up without siblings — until now, we’ve rarely needed one.

That is changing. Over the past 50 years, the........

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