7/28/2019 Dunn ..

1/5

Siblings and DevelopmentAuthor(s): Judy Dunn

Reviewed work(s):Source: Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 6-9Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of Association for Psychological ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182114 .

Accessed: 25/11/2011 17:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Inc. andAssociation for Psychological Science are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access to Current Directions in Psychological Science.

htt // j t

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sagehttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=assocpsychscihttp://www.jstor.org/stable/20182114?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/20182114?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=assocpsychscihttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

7/28/2019 Dunn ..

2/5

6 VOLUME 1,NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 992

Siblings and DevelopmentJudy Dunn

The great majority of children?around 80% in the United States andEurope?grow up with siblings. Yetthe developmental impact of the experience of growing up in close?often uncomfortably close?contactwith another child within the familyhas until recently been little studied.The attention of investigators concerned with early developmental influences has been focused insteadchiefly on parents (usually mothers)or family, often characterized interms of structure (e.g., single-parentversus two-parent) or backgroundvariables (e.g., socioeconomic status), or in broad descriptive terms,such as "enmeshed" or "disorganized."

In the last few years, however,studies of siblings within their families have greatly increased in number,1 and have challenged our assumptions concerning two quitedifferent issues in developmentalscience. First, such studies haveraised serious questions about howfamilies influence individual development?and suggested some intriguing answers. Second, they havealso shed light on the developmentof social understanding in youngchildren. Here, research on siblingsobserved at home shows that formalassessments of very young children'sabilities in experimental settingsmay have seriously underestimatedthe nature of young children's socialunderstanding.

Judy Dunn is Professor of HumanDevelopment at the PennsylvaniaState University. Address correspondence to Judy Dunn, Centerfor the Studyof Child and Adolescent Development, College ofHealth and Human Development,Pennsylvania State University,University Park, PA 16802.

As an introduction to the newperspectives on these two developmental issues, consider the following incident, drawn from an observation of a 30-month-old child with

his mother and his 14-month-old sister. Andy was a rather timid and sensitive child, cautious, unconfident,and compliant. His younger sister,Susie, was a striking contrast?assertive, determined, and a handfulfor her mother, who was nevertheless delighted by her boisterousdaughter. In the course of an observation of Andy and his sister, Susie

persistently attempted to grab a forbidden object on a high kitchencounter, despite her mother's repeated prohibitions. Finally, shesucceeded, and Andy overheard his

mother make a warm, affectionatecomment on Susie's action: "Susie,you are a determined little devil!"

Andy, sadly, commented to hismother, "I'm not a determined littledevil!" His mother replied, laughing, "No! What are you? A poor oldboy!"

A NEW PERSPECTIVEN THEDEVELOPMENT FINDIVIDUALDIFFERENCES

This brief incident serves to illustrate some of the key issues emerging from a series of systematic studies of siblings and parents in theUnited States and Britain,2 which

highlight why we need to studywithin-family processes to explainthe development of individual differences. Three features of these processes, evident in the exchange between Andy and his mother, areimportant here: the difference between siblings inpersonality, the difference in their relationships with

their parents, and their responses toexchanges between their siblingsand parents.

Differences Between SiblingsThe striking differences between

siblings growing up within the samefamily?differences in personality,adjustment, and psychopathology?have now been documented in avery wide range of studies,3'4 andthese differences present a majorchallenge to investigators studyingfamily influence. Why should twochildren who share 50% of their segregating genes and the same familybackground turn out to be so different? After all, the family factors assumed to be key in development(e.g., parental mental health, marital

quality, social class background) areapparently shared by siblings.This question of why siblings areso different is not just a matter ofinterest to fond parents puzzled bytheir children's differences. It turnsout to be key to understanding thedevelopment of individual differences more generally. Extensivestudies by behavior geneticists havenow shown that the sources of environmental influence that make individuals different from one another

work within rather than betweenfamilies.3 To understand the salientenvironmental influences on individual development, we have to beable to explain what makes two children within the same family differentfrom one another. The message fromthis research is not that family influence is unimportant, but that weneed to document those experiencesthat are specific to each child withina family, and therefore we need tostudy more than one child per family, with a new perspective on whatare the salient influences within thefamily.What could the significant processes within the family be?differences in parent-child relationships, differences within the siblingrelationship itself, differences in

Published by Cambridge University Press

7/28/2019 Dunn ..

3/5

CURRENTDIRECTIONS INPSYCHOLOGICAL CIENCE 7

peer relationships outside the fam- Iily, or chance experiences that affectone sibling and not another? Ina series of studies, the relation of each ofthese to children's developmentaloutcomes isbeing explored. A number of different samples have beenstudied in the United States and inEngland, including nationally representative samples, and major longitudinal studies have included adoptive and biological samples(enabling us to explore where genetic similarities and differences enter the picture). A wide variety of

methods has been employed, including naturalistic observations ofthe families and interviews with allfamily members. The results of thisbody of research are discussed in arecent book;2 here some illustrativepoints will be summarized briefly.Differences Between Siblings'RelationshipsWith Their Parents

It is clear that there are major differences in the affection, attention,and discipline that many siblings experience with their parents?

whether the information on thesedifferences comes from parents,children, or observers. The differences inwarmth and pride thatwereevident in the behavior of Andy'smother toward her two children arevery common. The extent of suchdifferences and the domains inwhich they are most marked havenow been documented in a range ofdiffering samples of families, as havethe variables related to the degree ofparental differentiation (e.g., the developmental stages of the childrenand the mother's personality, educational background, and IQ). An important lesson from both the observational work and the experimentalstudies is that children are extremelysensitive to such differences.Sensitivityof Children to TheirSiblings' Interaction WithTheir Parents

From a remarkably early age,children monitor and react to their

parents' interaction with their sib- Ilings. The example of Andy and Susie is typical: Andy monitors and responds to his mother's exchangewith his sister, promptly, and with aself-comparison. A recent studyshowed that 20% of the conversational turns by secondborn childreninone sample were attempts to jointhe conversation between other people.5 The salient verbal environmentfor children is not solely the speechaddressed to them, but includesconversations between parents andsibling.

Two lines of evidence from recentdevelopmental work confirm the salience for young children of emotional exchanges between otherpeople: laboratory studies of children witnessing exchanges betweenothers and naturalistic studies ofchildren in their families. A wealthof studies have now documentedthat children from the end of theirfirst year are interested in the behavior of other family members, and es

pecially in their emotional exchanges. Ina series of studies, ZahnWaxler and her colleagues havedocumented the development ofchildren's responses to emotionaldisplays between others, and the effects of witnessing such exchangeson play and aggressive behavior.6,7Naturalistic observations of siblingsat home have shown that childrenrarely ignore disputes between others, but act promptly to support orpunish one of the antagonists, andthat the behavior of both firstbornand secondborn children is profoundly affected by their mothers'interactions with the other sibling.8

How important are these experiences of differential treatment, developmentally? The first investigations show differential experiencesare linked to a range of outcomemeasures: In terms of adjustment,for example, children who receiveless maternal affection and attentionthan their siblings are likely to bemore worried, anxious, or depressed

I than other children in general. And

there is now an accumulation of evidence that differential parental be

havior is linked to the quality of therelationship between siblings, withmore hostility and conflict found infamilies with greater differential parental treatment, an associationfound for preschool children, for siblings inmiddle childhood, for chil

dren with disabled siblings, and forchildren following divorce.1

Other Sources ofDifferential Experience

Among the other possible sourcesof differential experience, there isgrowing evidence that differences inchildren's experiences within thesibling relationship itself can also berelated to adjustment. If instead offocusing on siblings as a dyad, weask how similarly or differently thetwo siblings behave toward eachother, we find there can be markeddifferences between the two in theaffection or control they show.

Whether the information comesfrom maternal interview, children'sown accounts, or observations, theemerging picture is that in only onethird of sibling pairs do the two children show very similar degrees of affection toward one another. For hostile behavior there is morereciprocity, but within a pair, therelative differences in negative behavior are correlated with later perceived self-competence, and withconduct problems and anxious ordepressed behavior. For example,one study found that the more negative a younger sibling is toward theolder, relative to the older's negativebehavior, the higher the self-esteemof the younger 3 years later.2 Ofcourse, these initial findings must betreated with caution until they arereplicated, and no causal inferencescan be made from such correlational

data.In summary, the focus on siblings

and their differential experienceswithin the family has changed and

I clarified our picture of what are the

Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society

7/28/2019 Dunn ..

4/5

8 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 992

salient family influences on individual development. In an importantsense children are, itappears, familymembers from early in their secondyear; they are interested in, responsive to, and influenced by the relationships between their siblings andparents?and this insight brings us tothe second developmental arena in

which sibling studies have providedillumination, the development of so

cial understanding.

A NEW PERSPECTIVEN THEDEVELOPMENT FSOCIALUNDERSTANDING

Recall the comments made byAndy in the incident with his sisterand mother. Andy, in the emotionalcircumstances of the family exchange, made a self-evaluative comment following his mother's warmremark praising his sister. Yet he wasonly two and a half. This is startlingly early for a child to be evaluating himself. At this age, accordingto the received view of the development of self-reflective powers, basedon experimental studies, he shouldnot be able to evaluate himself inthis way, or be sensitive to socialcomparison. Could we be misrepresenting children's sociocognitiveabilities by studying them only outside the family? Here, observationalstudies of siblings at home haveproved most illuminating.8A focus on children's disputes,jokes, and cooperative play withtheir siblings has shown that from 18

months on children understand howto hurt, comfort, and exacerbatetheir siblings' pain; they understand

what is allowed or disapproved intheir family world; they differentiatebetween transgressions of differentsorts, and anticipate the response ofadults to their own and to other people's misdeeds; they comment onand ask about the causes of others'actions and feelings. Analyses of thisgrowing understanding of emotions,

of others' goals, and of social rules Ihave shown that the foundations forthe moral virtues of caring, consideration, and kindness are well laidby 3 years, but so too children haveby this age a sophisticated grasp ofhow to use social rules for their ownends. The drive to understand othersand the social world is, I have argued,8 closely linked to the nature ofa child's relationships within thefamily over this period: the emotional power of attachment to parents, of rivalry between siblings, andof the conflict between growing independence and socialization pressure. For a young child whose owngoals and interests are often at odds

with?and frustrated by?others inthe family, it is clearly adaptive tobegin to understand those other familymembers and the social rules ofthe shared family world. The studyof siblings has highlightedwhy it isimportant that social understandingshould be high on the developmental agenda.The subtlety of social understanding that children show in the familycontext?in contrast to their limited

capabilities when faced with moreabstract or formal tasks?has considerably changed our view of children's abilities, and why theychange. And in addition to delineating the pattern of normative growth

of social understanding, sibling studies are beginning to clarify in detailthe causes of individual differencesin social understanding. These differences are striking: Children varygreatly in their ability to understandthe causes and consequences ofemotions and to understand whatother people are thinking and howthis influences their behavior. In therecent burst of productive experi

mental research on children's understanding of "other minds," there hasbeen little consideration of individual differences: How far such differences are related to verbal intelligence, to the quality of children'srelationships, or to other family exI periences has not been examined I

empirically. The study of childrenwith their siblings has enabled us totest predictions concerning the significance of family relationships, parental expressiveness, and children'scognitive ability in accounting fordifferences in social understanding.9The results highlight the importance?and the independent contribution to the variance?of a numberof factors. For example, differencesin family discourse about the socialworld are important: Children whogrew up in families inwhich feelingsand causality were discussed performed better than other children onassessments of social understanding14 months later. But the quality ofchildren's relationships with theirsiblings is also key: Children whohad experienced frequent cooperative exchanges with their siblings,for example, were more successfulthan other children on tasks assessing their grasp of the connections

between another person's belief andsubsequent behavior. Also?mostnotably?differences in children'ssocial understanding are related tothe quality of the relationships between their siblings and their mothers. Children who grew up in families in which they witnessed theirmothers being highly attentive, responsive, or controlling to their siblings scored particularly high on social cognition assessments 1 yearlater.

Thus, the work on social understanding links with the first theme?the processes involved in family influence on individual differences.Examining within-family differentialexperiences of siblings will enlargeour understanding of the salient processes of family influences on personality and adjustment. Similarly, itis clear that studying children in thecomplex network of sibling and parental relationships within the familycan greatly enhance our knowledgeabout their understanding of the social world. It is within the dailydrama of family life that children'ssocial intelligence is revealed and

Published by Cambridge University Press

7/28/2019 Dunn ..

5/5

CURRENTDIRECTIONS INPSYCHOLOGICAL CIENCE 9

fostered, and siblings play a centralrole in that drama.

Notes1. F. Boer and J.Dunn, Sibling Relationships: De

velopmental and Clinical Issuer (Erlbaum,Hillsdale, NJ, 1992).2. J.Dunn and R. Plomin, Separate Lives:Why Siblings Are So Different (Basic Books, New

York, 1990).3. R. Plomin and D. Daniels, Why are children in

the same family so different from each other?The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 1-16(1987).

4. S. Scarr and S. Grajek, Similarities and differences among siblings, in Sibling Relationships: Their Nature and Significance Acrossthe Lifespan, M.E. Lamb and B. Sutton-Smith,Eds. (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1982), pp. 357386.

5. J.Dunn and M. Shatz, Becoming a conversationalist despite (or because of) having an oldersibling, Child Development, 60, 399-410(1989).

6. C. Zahn-Waxler and M. Radke-Yarrow, The de

velopment of altruism: Alternative researchstrategies, in The Development of ProsocialBehavior, N. Eisenberg-Berg, Ed. (AcademicPress, New York, 1982), pp. 109-137.

7. E.M. Cummings, Coping with background anger, Child Development, 58, 976-984 (1987).

8. J.Dunn, The Beginnings of Social Understanding(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,1988).

9. J.Dunn, J.Brown, C. Slomkowski, C. Tesla, andL. Youngblade, Young children's understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs: Individual differences and their antecedents,Child Development, 62, 1352-1366 (1991).

Psychosocial Impact of Job Loss onIndividuals and FamiliesRichard H. Price

A large number of studies havebeen undertaken to evaluate the psychosocial impact of involuntary jobloss on unemployed workers andtheir families,1 but until recently thefindings have been mixed and inconclusive. The primary reason isthat it has been difficult to firmly establish that job loss causes psychosocial difficulties. The rival hypothesis, that persons with mental healthproblems are more likely than othersto lose their jobs, is difficult to ruleout unless representative samples ofboth employed and unemployedpersons can be followed over time.

In addition, most studies on theimpact of unemployment have focused on individuals rather than on

families. It is only recently that wehave begun to gather evidence thatthe impact of unemployment can radiate throughout the personal-socialnetwork of the unemployed individ

Richard H. Price is Professor ofPsychology and Research Scientistat the Institute for Social Research,University of Michigan. Addresscorrespondence to Richard H.Price, Institute for Social Research,University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106.

ual to his or her spouse, signficantother, or children. Furthermore,most studies have gathered only alimited amount of information aboutthe nature of the difficulties confronted by the unemployed and theirfamilies, thus limiting the opportunity to understand the processes bywhich job loss has its effects on individuals and their families.

MENTALHEALTH IMPACT

A recent study by Kessler, Turner,and House2 documented the mentalhealth impact of involuntary job lossin a probability sample of currentlyunemployed, previously unemployed, and steadily employed persons drawn from high-unemployment census tracts in southeasternMichigan. These investigators wereable to show that unemployedgroups showed more symptoms ofanxiety and depression than didsteadily employed individuals. Furthermore, unemployed persons inthe sample were three times as likelyas steadily employed persons toshow extreme scores on mentalhealth symptoms.

To strengthen the evidence thatunemployment was causing mentalhealth problems rather than the reverse, Kessler and his colleaguesidentified a subsample of unem

ployed persons who had lost theirjobs as a result of mass layoffs andplant closings. These people wereunlikely to have become unemployed because of mental healthproblems. The results for this subsample were identical to those of thelarger study, suggesting that involun

tary job loss does indeed createmental health problems.

Considerably less research hasbeen done to determine the causalmechanisms responsible for themental health impact of job loss.Among the possible mechanisms forthis impact are the effects of financial strain, marital difficulty andconflict, reduced affiliation in personal and social networks, and financial loss events such as loss of ahouse or of personal property.Kessler and his colleagues3 havereported a series of path analyses indicating that financial strain accounts for the largest proportion ofthe effects of unemployment onmental health and that all other factors play a relatively minor role.These results help us gain insightinto how unemployment can betranslated into mental health symptoms and help explain why reemployment frequently produces anearly complete reversal of the psychological distress associated withjob loss.

Copyright ? 1992 American Psychological Society