What About Me? [Hardcover]

Bryna Siegel (Author), Stuart Silverstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 1994

How do families cope with the stressful aspects of raising a developmentally disabled child? There are over a million mentally impaired children in the United States, and another million children suffering from physical disorders or sensory handicaps. In What About Me?: Growing Up with a Developmentally Disabled Sibling, Dr. Siegel, a highly regarded developmental psychologist, and Dr. Silverstein, a respected pediatrician, compassionately address the issue of living with a neurologically impaired sibling. They offer an incisive guide to the psyche of siblings who must assume difficult tasks and burdens, and approach their subject from a variety of perspectives, including a poignant first-person account by Dr. Silverstein, himself the older brother of an autistic sibling; a fascinating view from Dr. Siegel based on clinical interviews with over 1000 families of different ethnic and social and educational backgrounds and their approaches to handicaps; a compelling review of research on family factors and adjustments of the nonimpaired siblings; an analysis of family coping and defenses patterned on the Adult Children of Alcoholics model; and a helpful chapter for adult siblings on the legal aspects of becoming one's "brother's keeper." The authors also describe an interesting and clinically useful series of prototypical "roles" adopted by siblings in coping with a disabled brother or sister: the Parentified Child, the Withdrawn Child, the Acting-Out Child, and the Superachieving Child. To depict the psychological dynamics within the family, this book features vignettes of everyday situations that have presented problems caused by the inevitable adjustments and conflicts of living with a developmentally disabled child. There is also a helpful appendix of exercises for individuals, discussion groups, and parents of disabled children that explore the experiences of trying to cope with a handicapped child.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] wonderful resource and one that families with disabled children have needed for a long time." -- Edward Ziegler, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Psychology, Yale University --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Bryna Siegel, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist and an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Langly Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California. She is also Director of the Institute's Pervasive Developmental Disorders Clinic that serves young autistic children and their families.

Stuart Silverstein, M.D., is a pediatrician at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1 edition (March 21, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306446502
• ISBN-13: 978-0306446504
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,062,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but repetitive, often obvious, and light on research, January 28, 2009

By 

Mike (NYC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: What About Me? Growing Up with a Developmentally Disabled Sibling (Paperback)

My brother is intellectually disabled, I work with disabled adults and I'm a graduate student in a related field.

Naturally, this book looked interesting given my personal and professional interests. To an extent it is, but I'll be brutally honest -it's bloated, it focuses mostly on the young children that are siblings of persons with disabilities, and it barely mentions adult siblings of persons with disabilities.

There's another problem - this book was pretty obviously taken from several articles or an outline and stretched to book length. The whole thing feels cobbled together - chapters 1-3, 4, 5, 6-9 and 10&11 seem to occupy different universes. It also doesn't do a very good job of telling you how to fix family problems, just how to gripe about them better (which I suppose the therapists say would help, though - and maybe they have a point, though I don't agree).

Other than the 11th chapter on estate planning (which is worth the price of admission) the rest is pretty obvious stuff if you're in the field or have a disabled sibling. I suppose the 10th chapter on how the family system is often dysfunctional and how to fix it is pretty good, too, but I wish that kind of thing had been interspersed throughout the book.

You've probably read most of it elsewehere - authoritative parenting is good, siblings of disabled persons often feel (and are) neglected, and family systems can dramatically impact someone's later life. This is one of the cheaper books that talks about applying the AA model to families of people with disabilities, too. I don't think that's worth buying a book for because I think it's beyond obvious, but if you want it laid out for you, it's here.

What isn't obvious is repeated, a lot, too. There are some really phenomenal points regarding the 4 major problems affecting siblings (which don't appear until chapter 6), but on the whole, it felt like a 25 page journal article stretched to 200 pages. The first 3 chapters are just pointless and 6-9 (on parentified, withdrawn, acting out or superachiving) are repetitive and don't have enough case studies to support or illustrate the concepts and how they develop. I don't think I saw any statistics in the entire book, which is fine, but there's very little qualitative research either, as I've already mentioned. The content's not bad, but it's heavily padded.

If you're not in the field but have to deal with siblings of disabled individuals (or are entering it) or are a parent, you should absolutely read it. I understand that some of these concepts are not obvious to most people, especially the cultural chapter (someone finally noted the HUGE problems Buddhism has with disabilities, though a lot of people who dealt with parents of persons with disabilities know this). The irony here is that the person most likely to read the book (the sibling) is the person who needs to hear what it has to say the least. This book needs to be read by parents and professionals in related fields unfamiliar with the sibling problems.

If you work with people with disabilities or have a disabled sibling, a lot of this will be obvious, though. I'd buy it anyway (preferably off of ebay or something, there's really not $25 worth of info here for practitioners) and skim it, since there's so little written about siblings of the intellectually disabled. That's where I'm kind of torn, I don't think this is a particularly great book, but there's so little out there about this topic (and so much of it sadly, like this book, is loaded with filler) that you may as well read it.

Alternately or additionally, I'd strongly recommend, "Views from Our Shoes". That's a real tour de force of first hand accounts by siblings of the developmentally disabled in their own words. I think I learned more from that slim volume than this one. Heart-wrenching, funny, touching and honest stuff - and lots of teachable moments.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important read for anyone who is a sibling of disabled., January 30, 2006

By 

Reader from Philadelphia (Newtown Square, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What About Me? Growing Up with a Developmentally Disabled Sibling (Paperback)

At my local bookstore, this book literally fell off the shelf at my feet and I knelt down and picked it up. I knew instantly that I had to buy it. I cried when I read it because it reminded me of what it was like being a younger sister of a disabled sibling. Although it brought back a lot of memories and misplaced guilt that I have tried to overcome, the book gives good explanations as to some of the outcomes of growing up in this type of family and the dysfunctions that can occur. I would highly recommend this book and thank the authors for their contribution.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for parents and siblings of children with disabilities, March 3, 2007

By 

Judith Mammay (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What About Me? Growing Up with a Developmentally Disabled Sibling (Paperback)

As a retired special needs teacher, I worked with many families with children with disabilities and was able to observe how siblings interacted. "What About Me?" hits the nail right on the head. Siegel describes several patterns siblings may fall into, including the 'parentified child,' the 'overachieving child,' the 'acting-out child,' and the 'withdrawn child,' among others. She points out characteristics parents can watch for, and ways to help children in each classification to better cope with the stresses of growing up with a sibling with a disability. Adult siblings will gain insights into their 'growing-up years' from reading this book, too.