There’s a comforting assumption a lot of people carry about siblings: that whatever distance creeps in during your twenties and thirties eventually closes, that time and shared history pull you back together as you both get older. New research from Pew Research Center suggests that assumption has the shape wrong. Sibling closeness doesn’t rise steadily with age. It dips hardest right in the middle of adulthood, during the exact years when careers, kids, and geography tend to pull people the furthest apart from the people who knew them first.
The Midlife Dip, By the Numbers
Pew’s research, based on a survey of 6,871 U.S. adults conducted in June 2025, found that 54% of U.S. adults with siblings say they’re extremely or very close to at least one of them overall, a figure Pew breaks down further into 24% who say extremely close and 30% who say very close. But that headline number hides a clear U-shaped pattern once you break it out by age. Among adults 18 to 29, 59% report feeling close to a sibling. That number drops to just 50% among adults ages 30 to 64, before climbing back up to 62% among adults 65 and older, the highest of any age group measured. In other words, the people least likely to feel close to their siblings aren’t young adults still figuring out their independence, or older adults with decades of accumulated distance. They’re the people in the thick of midlife.
Why the Middle Years Hit Hardest
Pew’s data also breaks down how often people actually lean on a sibling for emotional support, and the same pattern holds, though with an important wrinkle. Adults 18 to 29 are the most likely to say they’d turn to a sibling for support, at 39%, a figure that declines to 38% among adults 30 to 49 and 35% among adults 50 to 64, before ticking back up to 39% among adults 65 and older. But when Pew asked a related, slightly different question, how many people say they actually receive emotional support from a sibling rather than simply say they’d turn to one, the pattern doesn’t rebound at all. That figure runs 31% for adults 18 to 29, 26% for adults 30 to 49, 20% for adults 50 to 64, and just 17% for adults 65 and older, a steady decline with no late-life recovery. Willingness to lean on a sibling comes back in older age. Actually receiving that support in practice apparently does not, at least not at the same rate, which suggests the midlife dip in closeness leaves a mark even after the relationship itself warms back up.
What Happens on the Other Side
The rebound in closeness after 65 isn’t just a Pew finding in isolation. A study published in The Journals of Gerontology examined contact patterns among 491 U.S. adults with an average age of 59, and identified four distinct patterns of sibling contact, finding that adults with the highest levels of contact reported meaningfully greater life satisfaction than those with lower contact. That research suggests the midlife dip isn’t a permanent state. As careers wind down, kids grow up, and the day-to-day demands of midlife loosen their grip, siblings often move back toward the center of people’s social worlds, and the people who make that reconnection tend to be happier for it. The same study also found the relationship between contact and well-being wasn’t uniformly positive. Adults who had frequent contact with a sibling but also recalled a parent favoring that sibling growing up reported lower self-rated health, a reminder that quantity of contact and quality of the underlying relationship aren’t always the same thing, and that old family dynamics can resurface even in a reconnection that looks healthy from the outside.
What This Means If You’re in the Slump Right Now
If you’re in your late thirties or forties and feel like you’ve drifted from a sibling you used to be close to, the data suggests you’re not the exception. You’re squarely in the demographic where that drift is most common, and it’s not necessarily a sign that the relationship is broken beyond repair. It’s a predictable byproduct of the years when everyone involved has the least bandwidth to invest in it.
What the research doesn’t say is that midlife siblings are doomed to stay distant. The 65-and-older numbers, and the life-satisfaction findings tied to high-contact siblings, both point the same direction: closeness that fades in the busiest years of adulthood has a real chance of returning once those pressures ease. The gap between the 35% of midlife adults who’d turn to a sibling and the 20% who actually report receiving that support also points to something practical: a fair number of people in this age range may want more closeness with a sibling than they’re currently getting, simply for lack of time rather than lack of will. For anyone waiting for that shift to happen on its own, the more useful move might be smaller and more deliberate than waiting. A regular phone call, a standing text thread, or even just remembering to ask how a sibling’s kids are doing costs very little and, according to the research on contact and well-being, tends to pay off.
