Being the only child of playwright Henrik Ibsen and his wife Suzannah Thoresen, he struggled all his life to meet his family's high expectations.

Growing up however, Ibsen struggled to find friends who were Norwegian and his age, further complicated by the fact that his family was often deep in penury, and thus he appeared throughout his life to be impersonal to others who did not know him.

He excelled in academics however, aiming to please both his parents and himself, and subsequently came top in his class for every subject including mathematics, which appears to have been a weak point of his.

Though she writes that she personally 'did not altogether like him' at first since he appeared to be 'too serious' and was 'mostly talking to Father', although she reveals that one day she was on the lower veranda of the house when Ibsen on the upper one.

Suddenly he looked down and smiled at her with 'his beautiful eyes', and it appears to be this moment at which Bergliot fell in love with him as she describes, though Ibsen himself does not mention the event himself in any surviving letters or works by him.

Towards the end of his life, Sigurd Ibsen was said to be constantly in a low state of mind (a trait which seems to have been passed on to his daughter Eleonora), and lived 'in his own world',[according to whom?]