Siblings - friends or foes?

Alison Pike, Tina Kretschmer, Judith F. Dunn

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Alison Pike, Tina Kretschmer and Judith F. Dunn on what the research says about achieving a harmonious household.

The vast majority of us have at least one brother or sister, yet sibling relationships have received scant attention in the UK. While many parents claim to have a second child as a ‘companion’ for their first child, the reality is that many brothers and sisters spend much of their time locked in conflict. At the extreme, it is in fact the case that children are more likely to become the victims of abuse by a sibling than by any other family member. On the flip side, many brothers and sisters are, at least at times, the best of friends. 

This article describes a study designed to uncover features of families as well as individual children that foster warm, intimate relationships between siblings versus hostile, conflict-ridden brother–sister interactions.

For most of us, our relationships with brothers and sisters are the longest lasting of our lives. Siblings come before friendships or romantic relationships, and usually outlive our parents. The theme of sibling rivalry might be the most prevalent in biblical and epic writings, and also in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex.

However, although rivalry is one salient characteristic of most sibling relationships, there are many others. Sibling relationships are usually characterised by both positive and negative interactions, and provide a safe training ground for interactions outside the home. Conflicts, quarrels and aggression are more prevalent among some sibling pairs; others are high in intimacy, emotional and social support; yet others involve an ambivalent combination of the two (Brody, 1998; Dunn, 2002).

Whatever the relationship, it is often highly charged; exchanges between siblings are marked by both greater warmth and greater conflict than exchanges with either parents or friends (Dunn et al., 1996).

Siblings also spend a considerable amount of time with each other, more so than with their parents (Larson & Richards, 1994), and know each other well. The intimate knowledge that siblings have of one another as well as the emotional intensity of the relationship means that siblings have the potential to significantly impact on one another’s development and well-being.

Until about three decades ago, the importance of siblings in terms of individual children’s psychological development was neglected by researchers, despite the fact that in both the UK and the US around 80 per cent of children still grow up with at least one brother or sister. Given that some brothers and sisters get on well and others badly, it’s not surprising that psychologists are often asked by our hairdressers/taxi drivers/party guests: ‘My kids fight all the time, what can I do about it?’ or ‘What’s the ideal spacing between children so they get along?’ So for practical as well as theoretical reasons, we, along with other sibling researchers, have focused on what factors predict which brothers and sisters will get along well, and which badly.

Structural factors such as age spacing and gender composition of siblings have been examined in the US by Buhrmester and Furman (1990) and found to affect the quality of relationships between brothers and sisters in childhood and adolescence. Sibling pairs in which children were less than four years apart in age, for example, were more intimate, but also more competitive. In addition, the interactions of same-sex sibling pairs in childhood often involve more aggression and dominance than interactions of opposite-sex sibling pairs, although this does not preclude warmth and closeness. Interestingly, all children in Buhrmester and Furman’s study reported greater intimacy and companionship with sisters than with brothers, regardless of gender composition or age difference. Brothers’ and sisters’ temperaments are also important factors that impact on how well they get along with one another. Brody (1998) summarised that especially active and emotionally intense children experience elevated levels of conflict in relationships with their siblings. Other relationships within the family are also associated with sibling relationship quality. Studies have compared the quality of children’s sibling relationships and patterns of other familial relationships and found impressive overlap. In other words, children and adolescents who report positive relationships with their parents also describe their relationships with their siblings as good (see Brody, 1998, for a review). This pattern fits well into the theoretical concepts of attachment and social learning, according to which children’s social development is largely determined by their relationships to their parents or other primary caregivers.