ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the literature on adjustment and relationship quality for siblings in families raising a child with a disability or chronic illness. Medical students receive very little training about children with disabilities and so may struggle as physicians to provide accurate information when asked by expectant parents how disability affects sibling relationships. One problem is that early studies lacked a clear and consistent definition of disability. Mental illness is also much more likely to disrupt family relationships and evoke distress in siblings. For example, siblings of individuals with severe mental illness are more likely to experience depressive episodes than are siblings of individuals with intellectual disabilities or siblings in families described as normative. Important gaps in the research field include exploring how disability affects other sibling relationships in families that have a child with a disability and two or more typically developing children and using multi-informant approaches that, where possible, include the perspective of the child with a disability.
