Do you have younger siblings? Then you know how obnoxious they can sometimes be. They’re always following you, getting your things disordered, and asking a million annoying questions. Bonus, it is from the time you wake up to the time you sleep. What about older siblings? They’re even worse — more often than not, they are a bunch of bullies who always have the perfect put-down to make a little brother or sister feel awful. Well, as it turns out, even if your relationship with your sibling was contentious, that relationship might have protected you from some even worse effects.
Have got to Be Cruel to Be Double-Blind
In a study led by the University of Rochester, Psychology professor Patrick T. Davies, researchers recruited 236 kids with an average age of 12 and a half, along with their parents, to gauge the effects various family relationships had on their psychology in the long run. Specifically, they hoped to see if the children who saw a lot of family conflict could have the adverse effects deflected by a closer relationship with one of their siblings. As it turns out, they can — and the relationship doesn’t have to look like the movies or sticky chewing gums to help the kid grow up to have a happy and healthy mind.
To see how family conflicts played out in their participants’ lives, the researchers had to be a little cruel in their study. With the whole family together, they encouraged parents to discuss a subject they disagreed about. As the argument unfolded, the researchers noted two factors. First of all, how severe did the fight become? That could give them a sense of what life at that particular home might be like, or at least show how the parents modelled disagreements for their kids. Second, they gauged how the child reacted to seeing their parents fight.
After gathering what they could learn from making preteens watch their parents fight, the researchers had other vital data to uncover. They asked the kids’ teachers and other authority figures about what behavioural issues they’d demonstrated, if any. They asked the mothers about the kids’ relationships with any siblings they might have. Finally, they spoke to the kids themselves to get a sense of how they experienced distress at moments of intense family conflict. Soon enough, a correlation between sibling relationships and psychological well-being emerged.
Brother, Can You Please Spare My Mind?
When they checked in on the kids and their families about a year later, the researchers found that those who had witnessed particularly contentious arguments between their parents were more likely to display a more significant distressing response to a conflict, even after a whole 12 months. That was associated with more mental health issues for the kids in subsequent years — just in case you needed any more proof that conflict-filled home life isn’t good for kids.
But remember how the researchers asked the mothers about how their children got along with their siblings? They’re the first to admit that this isn’t the most unbiased way to make the call, but it did lead to an apparent pattern. The adverse effects of combative parents were almost entirely wiped out among the kids who had a strong relationship with their siblings. Incredibly, this did remain true regardless of the kids’ gender, age, and other factors. Even if their relationship was itself broadly defined by competitive rivalry. As long as the two siblings felt a close bond with each other, both were able to weather distressing fights among family members. Guess that means we were actually helping our siblings by hogging the PlayStation all those years.
Sibling rivalries might be good for long-term mental health, but so are less competitive relationships — which make much less noise. In the book “Siblings Without Rivalry”, one can learn how to forge more peaceful relationships between kids or maybe siblings.