L12 - Family Structure and Sibling Relationships Flashcards
What are the 2 types of sibling interaction?
- Reciprocal: mutual - play and conflict: even power balance
- Complementary: hierarchical and caretaking: power imbalance
What are 4 major characteristics?
- Strong positive and negative, often ambivalent affect
- Wide individual differences in relationship quality
- Sharing a common history
- Non-shared env - diff treatment by parents
What are transitions to siblinghood?
- Highly variable reactions
- Developmental setbacks
- Greater maturity
What are there ecological transitions?
- Direct change in the individual’s role e.g only child to only sibling
- A change to ecological setting e.g parent-child relationship change
What is a systems view of sibling arrival?
- Microsystem: parent-child relationship
- Mesosystem: connections between immediate and wider family and less time in child care
- Exosystem: parental leave, support from community
Where do we see evidence for systems view of sibling arrival? (Types of evidence)
- Post-birth designs: could be biased due to memory
- Longitudinal studies
- Quasi-experimental studies
- Natural experiments
What did Voling find for sibling arrival?
- Changes in children’s affective state, more distress for some children but all and short lived
- Less responsive and less affectionate to parents
- No consistent sex differences
- Younger children may have reported more problems
- No clear evidence regarding behaviour and adjustment difficulties
Why is there variability in difference in behaviour with sibling arrival?
- Timing of transition e.g development level before transition
- Cumulative/simultaneous events at time of transition e.g childcare
- Amplification/accentuation: how are predispositions accenrtuated during times of stress
- Goodness of fit: between child behaviour and context
What was the issue with the longitudinal studies conducted by voling?
- Lack of large, ethnically diverse samples from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds
- Few longitudinal studies
- Nearly all studies in ‘nuclear families’ and 30-40 years ago
What are the three types of reports mother and father give?
- Positive engagement:
- Antagonistic behaviour
- Avoidance
- Child’s temperament causes parenting stress, causing parental self-efficacy leading to punitive parenting
What were the three classifications of children:
- Positively Engaged: 50%
- Escalating Antagonism: 42%
- Early-onset Antagonism: 8%
What happens to the older sibling overall when second baby comes?
- Children’s responses to siblinghood are mixed, and negative responses seemingly short lived
- Patterns of children’s early interactions with their infant sibling also heterogeneous and related to child, parent and family factor
How are sibling relationships a training ground for learning about the social world?
- Play and humour
- Talking about feelings and perspectives
- Overcoming disagreements and conflict
- Reasoning about moral issues
Is there a sibling effect on theory mind?
- Having child aged siblings gives the best advantage
- Pretend play associated with theory of mind
- Humorous play is related to positive relationships and emotional understanding
- Mental state languages related to social understanding
- Conflict management where children talk about inner states and perspectives linked to social understanding skills
Describe conflict in sibling relationships:
- Conflict is very common
- Over a third of children experience aggression
- Sibling antagonism is associated with poorer mental health in later childhood and adolescents
