Interaction between Young Siblings in the Context of Family Relationships

Abstract

Most babies grow up in families. They thus develop their powers of social understanding and communication within a web of relationships between mother, father, siblings, grandparents, and friends. Within this network, psychologists have turned their attention to the mother-child dyad, and recently to the father-child dyad, but we know very little about the other relationships that a child forms, or about the ways in which these various relationships interact. We are particularly ignorant about the relationship between young siblings, and about how this affects and is affected by the relationship between each child and the parents. If we focus on early relationships between young siblings, there are two groups of questions concerning sibling interaction and the development of the young child that must be distinguished. In the first place we can ask whether, and to what extent, the interaction between siblings influences the course of development of the children. In what ways, for example, are only children different from children with siblings? How far are these differences a product of the "special" relationships with parents? Or of the fact that these children have not experienced a sibling