Sibling relationships and mothers’ and fathers’ emotion socialization practices: a within-family perspective

ABSTRACT

This study examined the links between mothers’ and fathers’ emotion socialization practices and social behaviour between siblings. We utilized parent reports from 57 two-parent families with preschool- and toddler-aged siblings to assess parental responses to children's negative emotions, as well as siblings’ engagement in positive involvement, conflict, and avoidance. Findings indicated that fathers’, but not mothers’, supportive and non-supportive emotion socialization strategies with the older sibling accounted for a significant amount of variance in older siblings’ rivalry, aggression, and avoidance. Additionally, older siblings’ rivalry/aggression and avoidance were positively linked to fathers’ non-supportive reactions to both the older and younger siblings’ negative emotions, highlighting the importance of a within-family approach to emotion socialization to elucidate effects across parents and siblings. Further research is needed to disentangle cause and effect relations among siblings’ socio-emotional development and parents’ emotion socialization practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion socialization
• siblings
• fathers
• parents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Haley Yaremych is currently a Post-Baccalaureate Research Fellow in the Social and Behavioural Research Branch of the National Institute for Human Genome Research (NHGRI). She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on methods for communicating health and genetic information to mothers and fathers in order to facilitate health-promoting behaviour toward children. She is particularly interested in family systems theory and quantitative methods for studying the impact of mothers, fathers, and siblings in the context of children's emotional development.

Dr. Brenda Volling is currently a Research Professor at the Center for Human Growth and Development and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the social and emotional development of infants, parent-infant interaction, and the role of family relationships in facilitating children's developmental outcomes. She has conducted extensive research on the role of fathers for infant development and is one of the leading experts on the development of infant-father attachment relationships. She was the recipient of an Independent Scientist Award from NICHD and received a Faculty Recognition Award for outstanding research, teaching and service at the University of Michigan. She recently received the MICHR Distinguished Clinical and Translational Research Mentor Award. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

ORCID

Haley E. Yaremych http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5963-0758

Notes

1 We also ran a second series of multiple regression analyses to determine if the interactions between parental supportive and non-supportive emotion socialization would predict sibling behaviour and to help clarify our unexpected findings regarding paternal supportive reactions, but all interactions were nonsignificant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John E. Fetzer Institute: [Grant Number 1653-17].