Sometimes I worry that as Tyler gets older he’ll miss having a sibling. Then again when I think about the squabbles, the “make him stop looking at me”, the sibling rivalry— well, maybe being an only child’s not such a bad thing.
If you have more than one child, you probably get your fill of sibling spats, perhaps a daily dose even. Now a new report says that these sibling spats are inevitable. The study was conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University. I found some of the conclusions drawn by the researchers a bit odd. Here are a few highlights from the study:
(1) Fathers who reported being “less in love” in their marriage, tended to have kids who were closer to their siblings.
(2) The study found that sisters generally felt a lot closer to their siblings than brothers did.
(3) The good news is that relationships between brothers and sisters tend to get closer in later adolescence.
(4) Parents should use sibling conflicts to help their children learn conflict resolution skills.
(5) Discord seemed to peak between siblings when the first-born was 13 and the second-born was about 10-years old.
(6) If a mother reported warm relations with her children, the siblings were also more likely to report warm relations with each other.
(7) When fathers reported positive feelings about their marriage and towards their wife, the siblings were not as close to each other.
I found numbers (1) and (7) were the oddest of the findings. But according to the researchers, when there is a problem in the marriage, the kids often turn to one another for support. I don’t totally buy that. I believe that sometimes when parents are constantly fighting to the point that the kids are aware of it or if the parents are going through a divorce, the kids may become closer. The study didn’t specify that this was the case. You can be out of love with your spouse and still keep up appearances to the point where your kids would not know it. Look at all of the happy marriages out there where the siblings get along. How do you explain that?
I love reading research studies but I tend to take a lot of it with a grain of salt. There never seems to be a large enough representative sample to account for some of the findings.
See also:
How To Deal With Sibling Rivalry