I really liked this story. I especially liked how the story says so much without saying it - everything Talia said in her post above, as well as the mother and father's motivation, the fact that they had to be cruel to the child to try to protect him. This was made doubly poignent by the fact that the narrator, as a child herself, did not understand any of this, not until long after the story was gone, and resented the treatment - and the fact that the brother, for all that he had to go through, understood it better.
A darker story, perhaps, than I would have liked to hear today, but a very well-written one.