Source: Time

By Charlotte Alter

Every night for 20 years, Gino Rodriguez knelt beside his three daughters’ beds and whispered an incantation. As rats the size of footballs skittered along the floor of the basement apartment on the South Side of Chicago, he repeated the same five words into each girl’s ear as she slept: “I can and I will.” The message was always the same, and the audience was always asleep.

“You talk to the subconscious. You don’t talk to the conscious,” Rodriguez says. “That’s the one that really listens.”

The girls slept “hot-dog style,” cocooned in tightly wrapped sheets to keep out the vermin. They occasionally woke up during their father’s nightly pep talks, rolled their eyes and then went back to sleep. But each morning, they did a series of jumping jacks, looked in the mirror and said, “Today is going to be a great day. I can and I will.”

Not all days were great—the family moved from the rat-infested apartment only after a woman was murdered in front of their home. But the three daughters of Puerto Rican parents were kept safe, spending most of their time in school or at the boxing gym where their father refereed. They learned how to block a punch and throw a right hook. They bickered over clothes and went to dance class and dressed up for quinceañeras.

And one by one, they proved their father right: they could and they did. Ivelisse Rodriguez Simon graduated from Harvard Business School and is now a partner at a private-equity firm. Rebecca Rodriguez is the medical director of one of the best family-health clinics in the country. And Gina Rodriguez won a Best Actress Golden Globe for her starring role on Jane the Virgin.

“We lived the idea of the American Dream,” Gina says. “And they made an environment where that was possible.”

This is a story about nine American families with children, like the Rodriguez kids, who all went on to extraordinary success in different fields. The Emanuel brothers conquered medicine, politics and Hollywood. The Wojcicki sisters became scientists, CEOs and tech entrepreneurs. The Simmons brothers are a painter, a rapper and a media mogul; the Antonoffs are now a rock star and a fashion designer. The Srinivasans include a judge, a public-health official and an entrepreneur, and the Gay siblings write books and run companies and design bridges. The Dungey sisters grew into an actor and a television executive. One Lin sibling designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the other has written 12 books.

Each of these families is different in thousands of ways, from their ethnicities to their incomes to their sleepover policies. But we set out to find the ways they are the same.

In selecting candidates to study, we ignored siblings who do the same work in the same industry (like Venus and Serena Williams) and families that come from a great fortune or legacy (like the Trumps or the Kennedys). We looked for families in which all the siblings did well. And we defined success by leadership, service or achievement, not just fame or money alone. Of course, genetics plays a role for every family, but we focused on upbringing and sibling dynamics instead.

Some of the consistencies are fairly predictable. While none of these siblings grew up rich, they were privileged in many other ways. They had involved parents and lots of opportunities, and most saw college as achievable, even inevitable. They weren’t abused or neglected, and none grew up in abject want. They didn’t have an unfair head start, but they were spared some of the most difficult obstacles faced by less fortunate kids.

But other commonalities are more specific, and more telling. Of the nine families, eight had a parent who was an immigrant or an educator, and five had a parent who was both. Many parents were involved in political activism of some kind. Most recall a conflict-heavy family life, but that conflict was rarely between the parents. Many had a strong awareness of mortality as children. And most said they grew up with much more freedom than their friends did.

We talked to mayors and poets and judges and rappers, Jews from Chicago and Indians from Kansas and Haitians from Nebraska. We talked to siblings together and alone, and we talked to parents where we could. Here are six striking qualities they shared.

IMMIGRANT DRIVE

As Gino Rodriguez was boxing with his daughters in Chicago, Saroja Srinivasan, a Hindu who is vegetarian, was mastering the art of the hamburger. She and her husband T.P. Srinivasan settled in Lawrence, Kans., with their three small children in the early 1970s, when T.P. joined the math department at the University of Kansas. Everyone they knew was back in India.

“We made a conscious decision that we are different enough, so we should do everything we can to make [the kids] feel part of their community,” Saroja recalls. That meant cooking hot dogs and pizza as well as dosas and pakoras, watching the Kansas Jayhawks in a living room adorned with Indian devotional art and arranging presents under the family shrine to celebrate “Krishmas,” their version of Christmas.

Just like their neighbors, the three Srinivasan children—Sri, Srija and ­Srinija—played basketball and went shopping and rode dirt bikes. But they didn’t have chores in the same way their friends did. In the Srinivasan household, less was required—but more was expected.
There was no one person responsible for the trash or dishes. “It was more like, ‘Look around. What’s Mom doing? Does she need help?’” recalls Srinija, the youngest. “Put things away. Pay attention.”

Also, nobody got an allowance. Instead, a drawer in the living-room table contained petty cash for anyone to use. “On the one hand, it meant great permissiveness that is way better than an allowance,” says Srinija. “On the other hand, responsibility for every choice.” Her older sister Srija put it this way: “If I took $20, that meant Sri and Srinija couldn’t go to the movies.”

THE SRINIVASAN FAMILY

The three kids, now adults, say they grew up understanding that the family was more important than the individual, a realization made especially poignant by the fact that their parents had left their own families behind to immigrate to the U.S.
For the Srinivasans, that sacrifice paid off. Sri would grow up to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; his name was floated earlier this year as a candidate for the Supreme Court. Srija is the interim deputy chief for the San Mateo County health system, responsible for public-health efforts affecting more than 700,000 Californians. And Srinija is an entrepreneur who was one of the first employees at Yahoo and now sits on the board of Stanford University.

In addition to Puerto Rico and India, the parents of these extraordinary siblings arrived from Israel, Haiti, Poland and China. For their children, the standards were unstated yet fundamental, as invisible and necessary as oxygen.

The Gay siblings, a Haitian-American trio, grew up in Nebraska. Roxane Gay is a best-selling author and New York Times opinion writer, Joel Gay is one of the youngest black CEOs ever to helm a publicly traded company (Energy Recovery), and Michael Gay Jr. is a civil engineer. Their upbringing was stricter than their friends’: the kids weren’t allowed to have sleepovers, they couldn’t go to a friend’s home unless their mother Nicole had met the parents, and one bad grade could lead to the confiscation of beloved toys. None of that was up for discussion. “Parenting is not a democracy,” Nicole says.

THE GAY FAMILY

Awareness of the im­migrant experience, compounded by the fact that the Gays were often the only black family on their block, led to tough rules and high standards. “Success and performance was not a choice. That was an expectation,” Michael Gay Sr. says. “Good grades in school, that was not something to make a big fit about.” No one received a gold star from “General Gay and his attaché, Nicole,” as Joel calls them.

Being from Haiti in particular meant that there was a distinct honor to uphold. “They were very proud of our history, that we were the first black nation in the western hemisphere,” says Roxane. Adds Joel: “The more impoverished the country from whence you come, the more emboldened one’s work ethic is.” He says his parents, and the awareness of their sacrifice, created “an extreme intolerance for underperformance within oneself.”

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