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Having two or more siblings has been linked to mental health issues while growing up
A fascinating new study has found that having two or more siblings may be linked to poorer mental health in American teenagers.
Brothers and sisters: cant live with them, cant live without them. Whilst their incessant stealing of hand-me-downs and blame games with parents might drive you up the wall, a new study has now found that teenagers have poorer mental health when they have more siblings in both the US and China.
Teens with more siblings have worse mental health, new study finds
A new study by researchers from Ohio State University has found that teenagers from larger families with more siblings have worse mental health than those teens with fewer brothers and sisters.
The team analyzed data from 9,100 eighth graders from across the United States, taken as part of the Early Childhood Longitude study, with an average age of 14 they then asked a series of questions about their mental health and coping mechanisms.
Whilst details of the pattern vary depending on things like age and the spacing of sibling ages, they found that US teenagers had the best mental health when they had either none or just one sibling.
There was also no significant difference if a sibling was of half or full-blood relation, and having siblings closely spaced in age tended to have the worst impacts on well-being.
Lead author Douglas B. Downey explained, via Science Daily, that these results are likely due to resource dilution on the side of parents or caregivers:
If you think of parental resources like a pie, one child means that they get all the pie — all the attention and resources of the parents. But when you add more siblings, each child gets fewer resources and attention from the parents, and that may have an impact on their mental health.”
Whilst the study didn’t include data on the quality of sibling relationships as a factor, Downey said that What we found is that when you add all the evidence up, the effect of siblings on mental health is more on the negative side than the positive side.”
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The same results were found in Chinese teens too
Not only did this research include an analysis of almost 10,000 American children, but the team also looked at the data from another 9,400 eighth graders from China.
Here, Chinese kids had on average .7 fewer siblings than their American counterparts; with around 34% of the population being only children this in large part due to the infamous One Child policy, which only ended in 2016.
Yet the researchers found the same results as with the US side of the study: Children with more siblings had poorer mental health as teenagers than those with fewer siblings.
In fact, teenagers with no siblings at all (thats one-third of the entire population) were found to have the best mental health across the board in China, suggesting that the same issues impact kids around the world, no matter where they are born or raised.
This combination of results is not easily explained [and] we still have more to learn about the impact of siblings,” Downey explained.
“This is particularly important now as the U.S. and other countries have lower fertility rates. Understanding the consequences of growing up with fewer or no brothers and sisters is an increasingly important social issue.”
If you are affected by any issues raised in the article or would like someone to speak to, please call the Samaritans for free on 116 123. You can also email them at [email protected] or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch in the UK. In the US, please visit Samaritans USA for more information.
You can also contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text 741741 to get in touch with the Crisis Text Line. Americans can now call or text 988 to reach out and speak to a counselor.
