041: Siblings: Why do they fight, and what can we do about it?

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Transcript Jen     [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners will recall that this is the second episode in a two part series, which was prompted by a listener emailing me to say that she and her partner don’t want to have another child, but they’re worried about the impacts of not having siblings on their daughter. We looked at that topic last week, but I didn’t think it was fair to the other 80 percent of the families in the country, assuming all of them are listening who have more than one child. So today’s episode is for all of you. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my guest, Susan McHale, Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Ptudies and professor of Demography – among other things – at Penn State University. Research in her lab focuses on family systems, dynamics including youths and parents, family roles, relationships and daily activities, and how these are linked to family members’ psychological and physical health and development. Her lines of research includes sibling relationships, family, gender dynamics, and the sociocultural context of family dynamics. And since we’ve already done episodes related to those second two topics, I’m especially interested to learn about how all of these come together and are intertwined with the idea of siblings. Welcome Professor McHale. Dr. McHale:    [01:47] Glad to be here. Jen:   [01:48] All right, so I wonder if we could kind of start at the end in a way with the developmental outcomes of signaling relationships and then work our way back to the beginning because there’s way more research on the developmental outcomes than I could have imagined. I wonder if you could summarize some of the state of the current research on several different things and we can kind of work our way down a little list that I have here. I’m the first one being risky behavior like adolescent sex. I had no idea that siblings was related to that. Dr. McHale:  [02:17] Right. Most of the research has been on sibling resemblance and of course siblings are genetically related; it’s not just a social process and some work has been trying to disentangle the role of shared genetics and shared environments in sibling similarity and all kinds of risky behavior from substance use to adolescent sex. I don’t think there’s quite a definitive answer. Usually behaviors are complex and so multiply determined so there’s likely to be some genetic load and some socialization between siblings as well as growing up in the same family that all come together in helping to explain sibling resemblance. In our research, we’ve tried to study the processes through which siblings become more alike or more different from one another by actually asking siblings whether they try to be like one another or whether they try to de-identify or work to be different from their siblings, try to be different because they don’t want to be the same kind of person that their sibling is and what we see is that in sibling relationships that are warm and positive, siblings are more likely to say that they try to be like one another and so on the one hand a positive sibling relationship has good outcomes because siblings can be sources of support, affection and so forth. On the other hand, if you have a sibling who’s really into risky behavior, a warm and close sibling relationship isn’t always a good thing. Jen:   [03:56] And so you see the warm relationship leading the, I assume usually the younger child to model the older child’s behavior? Dr. McHale:    [04:04] Correct. So constructs like partners in crime, older siblings being gatekeepers to availability of substances or relationship partners. These are all ways that siblings can influence one another. Jen:     [04:20] Is that linked to the idea of gender development as well, and I’m just wondering if maybe there’s a younger boy who has an older girl sibling. Do you see that the boy is kind of more socialized to be around women and are there influences that the older girl has on that younger boy? Dr. McHale:  [04:38] Yes. Oftentimes our sample sizes are too small to study the four siblings constellations, brother, brother, sister, sister, and so forth. Older sister, younger brother, younger sister, older brother. But we have some emerging information. I’m one of the dyads that has some longstanding findings that warmth and affection can lead to problems is the brother, brother dyad. So an older brother who’s close and warm with a younger brother can lead that child into, or they can mutually influence one another, sort of playing off one another, getting into trouble, deceiving parents, doing things behind their parents’ backs and so forth. So, so the older brother really can be something of a risk factor. On the other hand, some of our studies have found that older sisters are are protective. This is a study of Mexican origin families that kids who have had both boys and girls who had older sisters were protected in their acculturation into U.S. society in terms of engaging in risky behavior. Dr. McHale: [05:49] One of the other, I think pretty interesting findings has to do with mixed-sex dyads, so brother, sister, sister, brother, where we found that in terms of romantic competence, being able to relate to the other sex possibly not surprisingly growing up with a sibling of the other sex and all that that involves, you know, having your siblings friends around just being used to having members of the other sex in your orbit, that by the time you reach the end of adolescence, kids who have the other sex in their lives by virtue of having a sibling of the other sex tend to feel more competent in the context of heterosexual relationships. So it’s a mixed bag. Like most things, it’s not all good things are related, but there are some good things and some potentially not so good things that come out of the same experiences. Jen:  [06:42] Yeah. And some of the ones that really surprised me were differences in health outcomes among siblings. How does, how can siblings impact your health? Dr. McHale: [06:51] Well, are you thinking about the study of Mexican origin? Jen:      [06:57] Yeah. Dr. McHale: [06:57] And that’s not necessarily about what siblings do, what it’s about being a girl or a boy, and the gender socialization that is involved in this, as I said, was a study of Mexican origin families were the findings showed and Kim Updegraff who’s at Arizona State University was the lead on this study, but the findings showed that when mothers had more traditional gender attitudes, you know, women’s place, whereas in the home, men are the ones in charge, that kind of thing, their daughters were substantially less likely to access healthcare in their young adult years. So this is predicting out over about eight years where early experiences in a highly gendered environment that put men, you know, at the forefront end put women as more subservient were, were linked to how these young women were taking care of themselves a number of years later. Jen:     [07:56] Wow. Uh, that is a very surprising finding. And so you’re, you’re speaking about a study of Mexicans; Mexican siblings, and that leads me to wonder if it’s possible to generalize, I know this is a big generalization, but how do sibling relationships differ across cultures in general? Dr. McHale:   [08:20] They do considerably and we’ve only directly studied sibling relationships in families living in the United States. So the Mexican origin live near the Phoenix area. We have a group of about 200 African American, two-parent families in the Baltimore/Philadelphia area. And then we have a sample of predominantly Anglo families in central Pennsylvania. So these families differ not just by ethnicity, but where in the country that they’re living in rural, urban and so forth. So it’s directly don’t make direct comparisons, but we’re much more interested in how cultural values and practices that we measured directly are linked to sibling relationship quality. And so for example, Mexican origin families have been described as being more gender stereotypical. And so therefore the traditional attitudes of mothers reflect the cultural orientation to discriminate between the roles and practices and daily activities of men versus women, girls versus boys and so girls may be more likely to pick up on these messages in those families leading to the differences in healthcare access. I should also mention that it’s not all good things for the boys and those families either in general, the young men in that sample access healthcare less than the young women, so we could explain the differences between the young women in that those Mexican origin families, by their mothers’ gender attitudes, but all it took for the boys was being a boy and they were less likely to access healthcare, which is, you know, what are sort of a stereotype of men refusing to go to the doctor. Jen:   [10:05] Right. Okay. So it’s not that they’re not accessing it because they’re not sick, it’s that they, they should be accessing it and they’re not. Dr. McHale:   [10:12] Well, they’re just not getting routine physical exams. Jen:  [10:14] Okay. Dr. McHale:   [10:15] Yeah. Jen:    [10:16] Okay. Dr. McHale:  [10:16] But in, in those families, also Mexican origin families are, are known for their families and values as are many minority groups in the U. S., African American families included and our studies of those African and Mexican origin families show that when siblings and their parents have stronger familism values, that is, they see the family as central to their lives and obligations and responsibilities to the family as being highly important, distinguishing between communal oriented or family oriented set of values and a more individualistic me-first, independence, individual achievement-oriented society like traditional mainstream U.S. culture, this orientation to family is linked to more positive sibling relationships. Jen:    [11:10] Okay. And so I guess we’re, we’re skipping ahead a little bit here is planning on winding up to this, but since since we’re there now, let’s go ahead and talk about it. So I’m curious about this kind of love-hate dynamic that seems to go on between siblings and when I put an email out to my listeners and said, you know, do you have any questions about siblings that I should ask my expert next week? I got some responses and it seemed like a lot of them were related to my siblings just can’t get along. One person gave an example of a three year old daughter snatching a toy out of a nine month old son’s hands, not because she wants the thing, but just because he has it and she doesn’t or she doesn’t want the younger child in her space, even when they’re just kind of in the same room. Is the older child looking for our attention because I’m thinking about the ethnographic...