Marriage and Family

Article Review

Marriage and Family

The article I read in the Journal of Marriage and Family was about sibling relationships during childhood and during the adolescence years. The article was talking about how the majority of people have lived with at least one sibling and how the amount of people who live in the house with one or more siblings is larger than the amount of people who live in a fatherless home (McHale). The articles purpose was to bring more researchers to review the relationship of siblings when looking at family relationships.

The article tells how when you search sibling relationships more will come up about the relationships of the parents, but not much about relationships between siblings (McHale). They looked at different studies done by others about first born children and also about parent’s relationships depending on the order or the children’s birth. Studies about behavioral genetics and how children act in a household all together were also looked at. They simply combined what they seen in these studies about children and how siblings act with each other to put together a review on why sibling relationship should be of importance when you are researching the relationships of families.

What they found was that siblings have a big effect on each other especially when looking at development. Siblings influence each other’s behavioral patterns and shape and help shape the development of each other through socialization during childhood (McHale). It was found that siblings are especially important during the childhood years because of the way they feed off and hold each other up helping shape and build their character, personality, and behavioral ways. It was also found that during the last two decades there have been advances in methodological sophistication of sibling research (McHale).

I personally liked the article. I feel like the relationships between siblings and how they affect the family is something that is rarely looked at. I...