Chronic diseases, addictions, mental disorders… Many children find it difficult to mobilize their parents’ attention. To the point that their siblings sometimes feel neglected, even transparent.
“My parents raised the moon and the sun,” says 23-year-old Noemi. A young woman who grew up with an Asperger’s brother had a difficult childhood with her older brother. An extroverted little girl, she often had to “suppress” her excitement to avoid triggering her brother’s crises. “My parents asked me to be discreet,” he recalls. Later, the twenty-year-old has the feeling of being “invisible”. “I got love, but they paid much more attention to him than to me, because he often went to the cafe and did a lot of treatments,” she says.
At that time, Noemi still did not know that she was a “glass child”. A term that can be translated as “transparent child”, popularized by Alicia Maple in a TED Talk dated 2010. In the latter, the counselor recounts his traumatic youth alongside his two brothers, one autistic who suffers repeated abuse and the other born without an immune system. “They call us glass children…
Source: Le Figaro
