Welcome to this special issue of JFSW on Siblings Across the Life Course. Special issues can be motivated by divergent rationales, such as catching a wave of new, expanding, or interesting research, or an effort to recognize and therefore stimulate research in a neglected, needed, or important area, or a special issue can emerge from the passion and interest of a researcher, or small group of researchers. This special issue is in part all three.
Sibling relationships, for those of us who have them, can last a lifetime. The expansive range of these relationships can rival the best and worst of parental or life partner/spousal relationships, spanning across time and all developmental stages, but can also manifest a scope and swing from the closest strongest possible human bonds to manifesting the most conflictual, consequential, painful, or difficult to heal fractures. Siblings can be our first playmates, decades later our last roommates, and can become a cutoff relationship with a wound that never heals.
While working on this special issue of JFSW about siblings in the winter and spring of 2020, I spent a lot of time socially distancing while thinking about family. I thought about my family who live nearby, but who are frontline medical personnel caring for COVID-19 patients at a temporary hospital and so I could not hug them, could not eat a meal inside with them, nor invite them over to watch a movie. I thought about how family are the origins of so much in our individual lives and in the evolution of the human condition and are antecedent, or prodromal, to all human organizations. Historically, back before we had medical professions, family are who took care of us when we were sick. Family are still our first caretakers in childhood, and family are who takes care of us across our lives until we are very sick and we need to be admitted to a medical facility, and then family take care of us when we come back home. Family are who we grieve with when our caretaking is followed by the death of a member of our family.
I thought about how families are the first organizing framework of human interactions and activities, the original government. I thought about family in this time when our government is struggling to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought about the well more than a hundred fifty thousand and growing members of American families who have died, the family members of the more than two-thirds of a million across the globe who have died. I take a brief conceptual glimpse at that grief and at least in part turn away, it is unbearably painful when fully considered and experienced.
I thought about the families of the Black Americans across this country who have been killed by violent means since the beginnings of this country, most recently at the hands of police. I watch on TV and the internet the siblings of those killed, who were innocent, cooperative, and not threatening in any way, reach for meaning in their deaths, for real change. The pain I felt was drawn to, encouraged by, the cross section of the family of the man who braved the pandemic and marched, marched across America, marched across the globe, marched for social justice for the Black Americans and for Native Peoples of the Americas, marched for all the violent murderous deaths motivated by racism across the last 400 years, marched for those deaths to mean something, to lead to real change, for Black Lives to Matter. I thought and felt family science still has things to say, to teach us, important and powerful things about organizing humans, caring for humans, valuing and loving humans, has important things to say to the institutions of government.
Ultimately, as I turned back to think about this special issue on siblings, I am humbled by what we still can learn about humans from researching family, how research on family is research on the human social condition. Sibling relationships, while receiving far less research attention thus far than parent-child or spousal/partner relationships, I deeply believe has much to teach us, much more than the nature and role of sibling relationships in our lives, but about how we humans interact, how we treat each other, how we feel and react to those dynamics, and how we come together to form human social organizations including but well beyond families.
Included in this special issue are five articles reporting on research and scholarship on siblings across the life course that span a couple of promising areas. Three papers are reviews and syntheses of the current research in a sibling area, reviews which are then interpreted to inform practice. Those reviews, while offering useful knowledge to inform social work practice, also make clear we need more research. Two are articles reporting on quantitative measurement studies of sibling relationships and interactions. Quality measurement is of course foundational to efforts to both advance our knowledge about these life-long important relationships, as well as foundational to informing practice in the processes of assessment and intervention with sibling relationships. They also span across a wide swath of content areas important to social work from cancer, to abuse, aggression, disability, and interpersonal communications.
The first article by Jeffrey Wald, Rachel Voit, Mindy Vanderloo, Michael Tanana, and Brianne Kothari is a review of research on the development of externalizing behaviors, an issue central to all settings where social workers serve youth from mental health, to child welfare, juvenile justice, and school social work practice. Specifically, the role of sibling relationships, interactions, and influences on acting out behaviors and conduct problems, and, how the available research exploring sibling relationships can inform social work practice. While family processes have long been identified in the development and trajectory of externalizing behaviors, parenting has been the primary focus, this review makes it clear siblings have both direct effects on youth, such as role modeling and hostile negative interactions, while also interaction effects within various social environment alongside parents and peers. This informative review, besides making a compelling case for adding sibling relationship assessments to social work practice with acting our youth, also points out the need for more research on siblings physically and sexually abusing siblings. Interestingly, our next article is a review of the research currently available about sibling-sibling abuse.
Authored by Nathan Perkins and Amy Meyers, this second article in the special issue reviews the available literature about sibling-to-sibling abuse, an understudied area of family violence, they offer practice and policy implications informed by that review. Perkins and Meyers assert although the extent of sibling abuse is a well-known problem especially among practitioners, that more research is sorely needed, especially research on the long-term consequences of sibling abuse, research that is needed to inform the development and testing of effective family interventions. A pattern is emerging here. When an examination of the available research on a particular family issue or situation in terms of the role of siblings is undertaken, the conclusion is usually the impact and importance far exceeds the amount of research attention to understand that issue or develop interventions.
The third review article, authored by Christabel Cheung, Chiara Acquati, Everett Smith, Thuli Katerere-Virima, Laura Helbling, and Gail Betz, synthesizes the literature to inform social practice with the siblings of children to young adults diagnosed with cancer. This article is an excellent example of an expanded view of family research and practice, here families facing the healthcare crisis, that emerges from including attention to siblings. Cancer in a child, youth, or young adult is a crisis for a family, and families and the professionals who serve them instinctively focus on the sick child, and on the impact on parents of having a potentially gravely ill child. However, family health crises also impact the siblings, and the various relationships between those siblings and all other family members over time. Cheung and colleagues both make an effective case for adding assessment and when needed psychosocial service delivery to siblings of cancer patients, after diagnosis, during treatment, as well as long term. However, they too lament the lack of research informing such practice and the need for a range of related research, from how siblings are effected by a sibling diagnosis, to the need for more diverse study samples, and leading to evidence-based intervention research. For example, although they set out to do a review across the life course, they only found one article about the impact of cancer on sibling relationships in adulthood and so had to limit the review to children through young adults.
The fourth article in this special issue reports on the adaptation of a child assessment instrument assessing the impact of serious illness for use with siblings authored by Melissa Bellin, Rachel Margolis, Joan Austin, Paul Sacco, Anna Thompson, Jaclyn Bookman, and Kathleen Sawin. This work, adapting and validating an instrument to assess youth coping and functioning when a sibling has spina bifida, seems to be a response to the call by Cheung and colleagues for more research on how children and youth respond when they have seriously ill siblings, and tools to assess and intervene. Bellin and colleagues assert that assessment and services for siblings should be an essential part of family centered care for children and youth. The assertion, that more practice attention is needed on siblings in situations of family stress echoes the calls by the authors of all three articles described above. All these authors have also called for more research into, for example, on how siblings and their family relationships are impacted by family stressors and struggles, and, how social workers can intervene to effectively address those issues.
The fifth and final article in this special issue is also a quantitative measurement study, authored by this special issue guest editor, Michael Woolley and my colleague Geoffrey Greif. Our article reports on our psychometric study of a set of survey items assessing the comfort adults report in terms of communicating about sensitive topics with their siblings and how those communication dynamics are related to how adults think, feel, and behave toward their siblings. Note that all the authors above called for more family research on siblings, all four of those articles were focused on children to young adult siblings; I must point out adult sibling relationships have received even less research. Just as life course developmental research has focused much more on the first 20 years of life than the next 80, the limited sibling research we have is focused more on children and youth. That leaves out most of the life course of these longest in our lives relationships.
Family systems theory taught us decades ago that family members are like the hanging pieces in a mobile, they are all connected, you touch one and they all move. If one gets sick, or is violent to another, all members of that family struggle or suffer. Similarly, the family therapy movement taught us that in practice we should not just focus on the “identified patient”, that when any member of the family is struggling that struggle is situated in the family not in any one member. When children still live at home and soon afterward, these insights reinforce the calls by the contributing authors in this special issue for more attention to siblings going forward in researching situations that cause, and are caused by, psychosocial stress in families. As siblings transition into adulthood, those interconnected family relationships developed across childhood continue to evolve and play a role in the well-being of adults and in their social support networks. In closing, we still have much to learn about sibling relationships, from childhood through adulthood and the end of life, an area of family research that JFSW is delighted to focus some much needed attention on in this special issue.