3-028 - Getting Along With Siblings: Sibling Other-Orientedness as a Context for Socio-Emotional Development in Early Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Early sibling relationships are characterized by a high degree of familiarity, affording children with heightened opportunities for social interaction. As such, they represent unique contexts for fostering children’s early social and emotional development. The proposed symposium will bring together four studies investigating other-oriented behaviours in the sibling context during early childhood. Each study included a sample of multiple children per family, with sibling other-orientedness operationalized diversely across studies.

The symposium will first examine the individual-, sibling-, and parent- correlates of other-oriented behaviours during sibling interactions. Specifically, in the first study, extensive naturalistic observations of sibling dyads indicated birth order and developmental differences in siblings’ prosocial responses to one another. The second study demonstrated that children’s sharing during sibling interactions is associated with their own conscience development, their siblings’ sharing behaviours, and their parents’ management of sibling conflict. These presentations will speak to the potential factors underlying other-oriented behaviour in the sibling relationship.

The latter part of the symposium will investigate the predictive validity of other-oriented behaviour in the sibling relationship for children’s socio-emotional development. Specifically, the third study demonstrated that laterborn children have stronger cooperative abilities than firstborn children; for middle born children, this advantage depends on the prosociality of their siblings. The final study showed a protective effect of older sibling mentalization for children at risk for emotion regulation difficulties.

In sum, the proposed symposium will further demonstrate the utility of evaluating the quality of sibling relations in early childhood to delineate processes related to social and emotional development.

Sub Unit

• Family Context & Processes

Chairs

• Heather Prime, University of Toronto

• Michelle Rodrigues, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• “Can I Have a Bite of Your Apple?”: Children’s Prosocial Responsiveness to Their Siblings in Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Nasim Tavassoli, Concordia University; Holly Recchia, Concordia University

• Sharing Behaviors and Early Prosocial Development: A Focus on Siblings and Families - Presenting Author: Emma Beyers-Carlson, University of Michigan; Lauren B Rosenberg, University of Michigan; Brenda Volling, University of Michigan

• Birth Order and Sibling Prosociality as Predictors of Children’s Cooperative Abilities - Presenting Author: Heather Prime, University of Toronto; Andre Plamondon, Département des fondements et pratiques en éducation, Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada; Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto

• Sibling Mentalization as a Protective Factor for Children's Internalizing Problems - Presenting Author: Michelle Rodrigues, University of Toronto; Noam Binnoon-Erez, University of Toronto; Heather Prime, University of Toronto; Michal Perlman, University of Toronto; Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto