A new study from researchers at Penn State University suggests that childhood relationships between siblings may impact their relative educational success later in life.
The paper is published in the journal Child Development.
The study
For about 15 years, the Penn State researchers followed the first- and second-born children of 152 families.
These families were primarily European-Americans living in small cities, towns and rural areas in central Pennsylvania.
Through a series of interviews beginning when the children were around age 10 and concluding in their mid-twenties, the researchers gathered information about the dynamics of their families.
Specifically, they investigated the warmth of the sibling relationships and the amount of time siblings spent together.
They also asked about siblings’ relative relationships with their parents, and whether they felt they were treated equally by parents.
They then compared this information to their level of educational attainment. Specifically, during final interviews around age 26, they were asked about their levels of educational attainment.
The researchers then analyzed this information using binary logistic regression.
This allowed them to see whether childhood relationships between siblings predicted their likelihood of achieving “same attainment,” where both siblings had or had not graduated from college by age 26, or “different attainment,” where one sibling had graduated and another had not.
The findings
They found that siblings who described having warmer relationships and were treated equally by their parents during childhood were more likely to achieve similar levels of education.
Siblings who felt that one child received preferential treatment from their parents over the course of their childhood were less likely to have achieved the same level of education.
These results held up after controlling for siblings’ grade point averages across childhood and adolescence.
The implications
The researchers suggest that these results demonstrate the influence of family dynamics on a child’s educational success.
“While school is obviously important, this study helps show that what goes on inside families can have an impact, as well,” Susan McHale, distinguished professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, said in a statement. “Warmth from siblings may not mean you’re more likely to go to college, but it seems to be a factor in how similarly the two siblings turn out. People don’t tend to think about siblings being important to academic achievement, but our findings highlight the importance of family experiences–beyond what happens at school.”
The study also breaks new ground by demonstrating that familial dynamics beyond parenting can have an effect on a child’s educational success.
While previous research has demonstrated that parenting can affect educational achievement, sibling relationships are an under-researched, but evidently important factor in a child’s educational development.
“Our findings underscore the importance of moving beyond a focus on the parenting of individual children in research on family socialization processes in educational attainment, to consider the role of siblings, including both siblings’ direct effects in their daily exchanges such as sibling warmth and siblings’ indirect effects such as through social comparison processes involving parents’ differential treatment,” said Xiaoran Sun, a Penn State doctoral candidate in human development and family studies. “Parents need to be aware of the influences that siblings can have on one another and monitor their own differential treatment of their children.”
Furthermore, the research demonstrates how sibling relationships can be a positive factor in a child’s development.
Sun said that there has been very little research on the role of sibling experiences in positive development, including academic achievement; prior research on sibling relationships tended to focus on risky behavior.
The research also demonstrates that children are keenly aware of differences in treatment from parents.
“Children are vigilant in noticing how they’re treated relative to their siblings, and parents need to be aware of this and on their guard,” McHale said in a statement. “Many parents treat their children differently and have very good reasons to do so, but children need to be aware of parents’ reasons, and parents have to have conversations with their children to explain those reasons. If kids perceive their treatment as fair or justified, even if it’s different from their siblings’, then there’s not the same negative effect.”
What’s next?
The team is currently researching other aspects of sibling relationships.
“We have been testing whether and how early sibling experiences predict siblings’ couple relationship experiences, such as their attitudes toward marriage and orientations to intimacy,” said Sun. “We also need to examine whether findings in this study replicate in other ethnic groups.”
