ABSTRACT
The idea that siblings can play an important role in children’s development has a long history: brothers and sisters appear as significant figures in folk stories and in classical and biblical writing, and they are conspicuous in many biographical and autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence. Even though they figure prominently in our cultural stories and accounts of individual development, they have received scant attention from developmental psychologists until relatively recently. Since about the 1980s, the volume of research on siblings by both developmental psychologists and clinicians has grown rapidly, spanning a wide array of developmental issues. In this chapter I consider some of the chief themes in this work: the nature of sibling relationships and how they change with development, individual differences in sibling relationships, the links between sibling relationships and parent–child and peer relationships, sibling relationships and individual adjustment and outcome, and sibling relationships in special populations.
