CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SCOPE

INTRODUCTION

Rationale

The majority of individuals around the world have at least one sibling. A sibling-to-sibling

relationship is likely to last longer than any other relationship in one’s lifetime and plays an

integral part in the lives of families (Howe, PhD and Recchia, PhD, 2014). Yet, in

comparison to the abundance of literature on parent-to-child relationships, there is relatively

little attention dedicated to the role of siblings and their impact on one another’s

development. There is no doubt that external factors such as sibling interactions affect

individuals’ identities and behavior towards society and family. According to Feinberg (n.d.),

sibling relationships influence adjustments of the children towards society and family and their

development as individuals. It is in the early period of an individual’s life when they are prone to

be attached to a sibling who constantly interacts and makes contact with them. Grounded in the

early writings of (Bowlby, 1969), the Attachment theory seeks to explain developmental

changes in an infant’s early life. This perspective targets the early bond between infants and

their primary caregivers as a major catalyst towards the infants’ survival. By virtue of their

characteristics and behaviors just like crying and being attached towards their caregiver, infants

promote proximity to their caregivers, beginning in the first days of life, for there is a

chance for that certain caregiver to be a sibling. This citation goes to show one of the finite

possible ways of how siblings play a major role in their fellow sibling’s infancy and early stages

of childhood.

In most industrialised societies, siblings are understood to be individuals with two

parents in common, with half-siblings sharing one parent, step-siblings and/or adoptive

siblings being bound by legal bonds rather than genetics (Cicirelli, 1994). However, in some

non-industrialised societies, the term sibling may be understood in very different ways; for

example the Malo culture includes same-sex cousins, same sex aunts or uncles and same

sex grandparents (Rubenstein, 1983) or the Kenyan Giriama people, for whom siblings include

all children of the tribe or village of the same age (Wenger, 1989).

According to (Dunn 1983), sibling interactions are encompassed by sibling relations.

Due to everyday near-impossibility to not have interactivity amongst each other; the words they

utter, the things they do for one another well as their behavioral patterns when interacting

which may be enough to describe their relationship with one another. A sibling relationship
is

a dynamic one which may change over the course of the lifespan from being playmate,

caretaker, friend, and rival before becoming more egalitarian and an important source of support

and solidarity. Parsons (1943), suggested that kin relationships can be described as groups of

“nested circles”. During childhood siblings are generally to be found in the “inner circle” but this

may change as they age with their life circumstances changing, causing them to move to the

outer circles (White and Riedmann, 1992).

The reason why the researchers have decided to conduct a study on sibling relations;

more specifically, sibling issues and their root causes, manifestations, and interventions is to

uncover the underlying reasons that could be a cause for the said interaction. An individual’s

character development is indeed primarily affected by external forces, but, in this study, the

researchers are to focus on a factor which are the siblings that surround and interact with the

individual almost everyday. The target respondents for this study are individuals that are

currently in the high-school level of education for science has proven that this is one of the

periods in an individual's life when there is a boost of psychological maturity and the target

audience experiences not only physical growth and change, but also emotional, psychological,
social, and mental change and growth.

The main objective for this study is to have a deeper understanding of sibling

relationship. The researchers hope that as the research is to be completed in the future that

their study will provide society a deeper understanding of sibling issues and their root causes,

manifestations, and interventions through a simple yet brief set of explanations. The

researchers do anticipate that when their work is hopefully completed and read by others, the

readers are able to not necessarily prevent any sibling conflicts, rather, to help remind

themselves why sibling conflicts are a must and the beauty of having a sibling.