Growing up with siblings can be tough. There’s the constant fighting, yelling, stealing of each other’s things that people always hear about. But what a lot of people might not know, especially if they’ve never grown up with a sibling, there’s a lot of really great stuff too. When you grow up with someone and live so closely together, you create a bond that few can understand. Yes, you fight and argue, but this just helps to make you a better person, and science can prove it.
The Benefits of Growing Up With Siblings
A study [1] conducted by Laura Padilla-Walker, a professor at Brigham Young University, looked at 395 families with more than one child, at least one of which was an adolescent between 10 and 14 years old. They gathered enormous amounts of data about the relationships within the family and then followed up a year later.
The research found that having a sister, no matter if she was younger or older or how many years apart, helped adolescents deal with harmful internalizing behaviors (such as fearfulness and hesitance to stand up for oneself- more on this later!). The study also noted that, while fighting between siblings can have negative outcomes later in life, it offers an opportunity for children to learn how to make up and to regain control of their emotions, according to Padilla-Walker.
“Even after you account for parents’ influence, siblings do matter in unique ways,” said Padilla-Walker, who teaches in BYU’s School of Family Life. “They give kids something that parents don’t.”
Growing Up With A Sister Makes You Less Lonely, More Confident, and More
Growing up with siblings can teach us a lot of things, not just about the world around us but also about ourselves. When going through adolescence, many children feel like they are alone and they don’t see the value in themselves. Padilla-Walker’s study confirmed that growing up with a sister can help prevent negative internalizing behaviors.
Internalizing behaviors are behaviors that result from negativity that is directed inwards [2]. These behaviors can stem from feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful [1].
These feelings can manifest themselves in behaviors like eating too much or too little, feeling depressed, abusing substances, and self-harm [3]. Internalizing behaviors can lead to serious issues like drug addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia or obesity in adulthood if not dealt with properly.
But, as Padilla-Walker explains in her study, the presence of a sister can help with these issues and not have them manifest in such negative ways. It can allow the child to cope with these issues and resolve them positively.
Growing Up With A Sister Teaches You Communication and Conflict Resolution
It’s no surprise that siblings fight. Living in such close quarters with other people can lead to tensions flaring and high emotions, but that’s just something that happens in life. Growing up with siblings helps us deal with these issues by teaching us how to respond appropriately. When we don’t, it’s an example of negative externalizing behavior [4]. Lashing out, yelling, breaking rules are all examples of externalizing behaviors.
The squabbles give children a chance to learn how to make up and to regain control of their emotions, skills that come in handy down the road, according to Padilla-Walker. Like internalizing behaviors, in adulthood externalizing behaviors can have serious consequences. General delinquency can develop into law-breaking, bullying into more serious altercations, and so on. Externalizing behaviors tend to get more attention because they affect other people, not just the person in question. Sibling relationships help to mitigate these behaviors by teaching the proper way to interact at an early age.
Don’t give all the credit to sisters, though. Padilla-Walker’s study showed that having a sibling, whether a brother or sister, promoted good deeds, like helping people around the neighborhood or standing up for other children. In fact, loving siblings fostered charitable attitudes more than loving parents did. The relationship between sibling affection and good deeds was twice as strong as that between parenting and good deeds [1].
It’s not that hard to believe when we take a step back. Growing up with siblings can change our lives in ways we never would have thought. Don’t believe it? Imagine your life without them, it looks a lot different, doesn’t it?
