I'm the youngest of three.

Best part? Watching your older siblings fail and learning from their mistakes. It's awful, but true.

Worst part? Not being taken seriously or included in "big kid" stuff for many years.

I was the youngest for the first 6 years of my life and I remember my older brother and sister would do that "you wouldn't understand" thing.

My major frustration growing up was people never listening to me, even know no one ever (well in groups of more than 3/4) listens to me, whether it be a family night or at a family gathering. Some is wondering something and I give the answer, no one listens and than about 30 seconds later someone has googled the answer and they are like "that is what it is". Does my voice just blend into the background sound or something? or do they think i will just be wrong?. Recently my family were watching a television program and wondered what the definition of some word was, I said what it meant (I knew from a textbook I had to read that semester) and they don't listen and go on and google it and it meant exactly what I said.

Yes, I know relationships between siblings can be difficult. But surely the great thing about siblings, especially when people grow up, is that there is always someone else in the world to share family experiences with.

I am an only child and that is another group that has all sorts of theories and opinions attached to them, not only middle children. Only children, especially in the 1950's and 1960's, were considered spoiled and selfish. But nobody asks to be born an only child, and there are often good reasons why they are in the predicament they are in.

My parents split up the mother's day before I started school, when my father put me in a home, and then boarding school. I found that where I was domiciled, most people seemed to have siblings. Sisters fought and argued at school, but could tell of holiday treats spent together as well. One girl, younger than myself, spent as much of her morning recess as she could looking out for her younger brother, who stayed in the boys' dormitories. When parents visited us on Saturdays, families grouped together, leaving me on my own without even my own family, unless my father came to see me.

That is the most desolate feeling anyone can face, child or not. To be entirely on one's own in the world, and it isn't something I'd care to see happen to any child of mine. Which is why I ended up with three children, eventually. I've always thought that at the cutting edge of one's life, at least they would always have each other.

I am sorry about that unfortunate situation you were in. If you don't mind me asking, so your father got custody? over your mother?

You are right about family times. That aunt that we always complain about, the uncle we think is a bit too bogan.

I am sorry about that unfortunate situation you were in. If you don't mind me asking, so your father got custody? over your mother?

You are right about family times. That aunt that we always complain about, the uncle we think is a bit too bogan.

Well, thanks, but I was hardly the only person who was in boarding school. When I went back for a reunion, I learned that because boys and girls were split up at that school, many of the women who were there in the 1950's complained that they and their brothers never really related to each other as much as they could have done.

In my own situation, first my father had my custody, which is why he thought I was better off in a boarding school, which left him free to go to work except in school holidays. Then later on, when I reached primary level, my mother, who had been ill, and, by then, was living with her mother, regained my custody, and my father had weekly access.

I think that the difficult aunt or the awkward uncle might also be examples of how families grow away from each other because of changes in lifestyle and circumstances. I'd imagine that WW2, and similar experiences also had a lot to answer for.

When at the Anzac Day services etc last April, we were told that when the survivors returned from WW1, they had this sort of family dislocation to contend with, as well as war injuries, including post traumatic stress syndrome. The men couldn't always go back to work like they did before they went to war, and often for the rest of their lives they had to nurse physical and medical disabilities. Some who survived the war, died later because of the 1919 Spanish Flu.

We were luckier than most. My grandmother told me that when one of her brothers-in-law returned from Flanders in 1919, his son, who had been born after he left Australia, in March, 1916, wouldn't recognise his dad. He'd call his father, "Man", not Daddy. Also, the RAAF bloke told us that afterwards Australia was a broken nation, having lost a good proportion of its young men. Only to face war again twenty years later.