"Family faces are magic mirrors," said Lena Horne's famous daughter, Gail Buckley. "Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future." This is as true of siblings as it is of parents. Anyone who has lost the magic mirror that was a brother or sister will instinctively understand why it's important for child welfare officials to preserve that bond at all costs, especially during the times of crisis that result in foster care or adoption. Fortunately, child welfare services are beginning to acknowledge this fact. Why has it taken so long for this understanding to penetrate? Some speculate that Freud's obsession with sibling rivalry was one of the more unfortunate of his ideas—setting back for decades psychology's understanding of the richness of that relationship. Later studies have since illuminated the deeper and more significant sibling tie that is characterized by attachment rather than rivalry, revealing that in times of crisis it is often siblings who provide safe harbor when parents can't or won't. But there are other factors to consider. While the parent-child bond is of primary importance when it has been forged properly, in most cases children outlast their parents by decades. And now that advances in health and hygiene have greatly extended human life, siblings may actually be the most enduring of all family relationships. _______________________ "The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people—no mere father and mother—as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born." ~Pearl S. Buck | 
