APPENDIX A — The Glass Child

A note for every parent raising more than one kind of child.

No one should have to walk this road alone. That includes the sibling.

I want to tell you about a Mother’s Day. I was driving to pick up my daughter, Sandra, for our Mother’s Day date, listening to the Audible version of Sam Horn’s Talking on Eggshells. She was telling the story of a sibling of a child with special needs — a girl who had learned to disappear so her family could function. I had to pull my attention back to the road, because I was on my way to pick up my own daughter. My own quiet, capable, never-any-trouble daughter.

That story was Sandra. I hadn’t heard the term “Glass Child” before that day — Sam Horn never used it, she just told the story — but I recognized my daughter in it instantly. Afterward, I went looking. I combed through the research until I found the word that people who study this have given it: Glass Child. (You can read more about where that term originated, and the research behind it, in my book, Finally an IEP for Me.)

Glass Child Syndrome isn’t a medical diagnosis, but it names something real: a sibling whose needs become transparent inside a family organized around a brother or sister’s greater needs. You can see right through them. Not because they don’t matter. Because the family’s attention passes through them on its way to someone else.

From the outside, Glass Children often look like the easy ones — the good ones, the ones you never worry about. Underneath, research on siblings of children with disabilities has found something different: a quiet, persistent ache to be noticed for who they are, not for what they do for everyone else.

My daughter was a Glass Child. She stepped into our family and, within a year, had taken on jobs nobody assigned her — keeper of the peace, translator, the calm center when things around her weren’t calm. When her brother struggled, she excelled. When the household bent toward his crisis of the day, she made sure she never added to it. Nobody asked her to do this. She chose it, the way Glass Children always do — out of love.

Here’s the part I didn’t say out loud for a long time: I was a Glass Child too. I learned early that being good was the price of being noticed, and that being easy was the cost of not being worried about. I didn’t know I was disappearing. It took me decades, and someone else’s story, to finally recognize my own.

If this is landing somewhere close to home, I want to say two things clearly.

First: this is not a verdict on you as a parent. You didn’t choose the diagnosis, the meetings, the crises, the paperwork. You did the best you could with the hours and the energy you had, and most of the time, that was extraordinary. This isn’t about guilt. It’s about awareness — because once you see it, you can do something about it.

Second: the sibling relationship, once it’s seen and supported, can be one of the best things that ever happens to a child. Many adult siblings describe deep empathy, early maturity, and a sense of purpose that grew directly out of these years. My daughter works in a school today, sitting beside the students who are falling behind, because she knows exactly what it means to need a champion. The difficulty didn’t just cost her something. It also shaped her into someone I deeply admire.

A Few Things You Can Start This Week

• Protect thirty minutes a week that belongs only to your other child. No phone, no appointments, no sibling.

• Ask better questions than “how was school.” Try: “What was hard this week?” or “Is there something you’ve been wanting to talk about?”

• Say the quiet part out loud: “I see how much you do for this family. You don’t have to earn your place here.”

• Give them permission to feel complicated things about their sibling. Resentment and love can live in the same sentence.

• Let them meet other siblings who understand without needing it explained.

• Consider a family therapist who understands disability dynamics — for the whole family, including this child.

If there’s a Glass Child in your home, here’s something I’d ask you to say to them, in your own words, this week:

You are not invisible. I see you. And I’m asking, gently: what do you need from me — not for your sibling, but for you?

That question might be the one they’ve been waiting years to hear.

For more on supporting the siblings in your home — including Sam Horn’s Talking on Eggshells, the Sibling Leadership Network, Sibshops, and a therapist finder — visit the Finding Your Voice section of this page.

With gratitude and a Ray of Hope,

Doreen G. Fulton