Mothers' Perceptions of the Quality of Childhood Sibling Relationships Affected by Disability

Abstract

The quality of the sibling relationship has an important role in the development of psychosocial skills throughout childhood. While the literature suggests that the significance of sibling relationships is heightened when one sibling has a disability, empirical findings about the quality of these relationships are few and inconsistent. The present study aimed to address this gap, by investigating mothers' perspectives about the impact of disability on the quality of the childhood sibling relationship. Forty-one mothers with a child with disability, and 48 with no children with disability completed an online questionnaire that assessed the amount of perceived warmth/closeness and conflict in their children's sibling relationship. It was found that while there were no differences in reported conflict between the two groups, mothers with a child with disability reported significantly lower warmth/closeness in their children's sibling relationship than mothers without a child with disability. Demographic variables such as number of children, gender grouping, target gender, target age and age order did not moderate this result. Mothers overall reported significantly more warmth/closeness for younger rather than older children, and more conflict when the sibling was younger than the target child as opposed to older than them. Clinical implications for intervention are discussed.

Keywords::

• siblings
• disability
• sibling relationship quality
• mothers
• children

Acknowledgements

None

Financial Support

None

Conflict of Interest

None

Ethical Standards

The research was approved by the university ethics committee and the schools.

Notes

1 Levene's statistic was found to be significant for both target age (p < .000) and sibling age (p = .003). However, when t tests were run, the significance value for equal variances not assumed was still non-significant for target age (p = .446) and significant for sibling age (p = .015) so the ANOVA results were reported.

2 Levene's statistic was found to be significant for the conflict factor (p = .028). However, when a t test was run the significance value for equal variances not assumed was still non-significant (p = .122) so the ANOVA results were reported.