Why had Mycroft never met other children before Sherlock did? 

 (Sherlock Meta by ibelieveinmycroft)

Anonymous: Mycroft is supposedly about 7-8 years older than Sherlock. How come he never met other children before Sherlock grew up old enough to meet other children? Surely Mycroft had had experienced "other children"before Sherlock was born? Their parents seem "normal" so they would've introduced their first son to other kids as toddler, surely? Because if both never seen other kids for sometime-even thought "Sherlock is idiot"- then they did have unusual upbringing after all...

Answer: It would be, indeed, very unusual!

Assuming that the house that we saw in His Last Vow was where the boys grew up, their home was was quite rural and remote. This shot, when Sherlock and John leave after drugging everyone, shows what is immediately outside the front doors of the Holmes household:



There is nothing but green fields for miles around. There may be the odd house dotted in the distance, but otherwise that is idyllic, secluded countryside.

It is equally likely that the canonical Holmes grew up in such isolation too, as it does lend a certain slant to this famous line from The Copper Beeches:

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

What little we know of Sherlock’s upbringing - a fondness for board games, pirates and a dog called Redbeard, alongside becoming obsessed with the Carl Powers story in the newspaper - seems to indicate that he was, in many ways, both a very normal and a very odd child all at once. This may be due to his parents attempting to normalise him and give him something more akin to a childhood, after Mycroft.

Seven years older, Mycroft was probably born just after his mother ended her academic career. A mathematician who, although a bit scatty, had a brilliant mind, likely chose to home-school her first born son - a step that would have kept Mycroft alone in that remote country house, nurturing an impossibly brilliant mind with mathematical equations and any book he could lay his hands on. This way, he could easily reach age seven without meeting another soul save for his parents.

Mrs Holmes probably home schooled Sherlock too - Mark Gatiss has said he thinks the Holmes brothers were brought up "like hothouse flowers" - and, after some years, she realised that he was gifted in similar ways to Mycroft. She will have wanted her younger boy to be better adjusted than her elder - so was probably the one to encourage him towards pirates and Operation and bought him the dog. But Mycroft will have held real sway over his younger brother’s forming intellect too, with Sherlock constant attempts to keep up with and surpass Mycroft’s unmatchable genius the foundation for more than a little sibling rivalry.

At some point, when Sherlock was old enough to remember, Mrs Holmes had taken the decision that both her sons needed to meet other children, likely realising, from the strange behaviour of her eldest son with his unwieldy genius that even her enormously intelligent second son could not parallel, that it was a mistake to have kept them so isolated and they should make some friends.

It went badly, of course. The realisation that the rest of the world were mostly unbearably ordinary cannot have been an easy revelation for the brothers, and especially not for Mycroft, who was much older and had been long working on the assumption that his incredible intellect was the norm.

I think this meeting, though, probably gave him a new found appreciation for his little brother, who could almost keep up with Mycroft and, compared to ordinary people was blindingly brilliant. It was this realisation that made Sherlock the single most important person to Mycroft in the world, and his only pressure point.