The relationship between siblings is deeply important not only because of its impact on the level of social development but also on the level of cognitive development. Relationships between siblings and dealing with parents It is very important that we bear in mind that the study of relationships between siblings cannot be carried out in isolation; that is, the quality of the type of interaction established by siblings is closely related to the quality of the relationship that parents maintain with their children.
Index
- Sibling relationship
- Peer relationships and cognitive development
- Peer interaction in educational contexts
Relationship between siblings.
In fact, Bryant and Crockenberg, In a study in which they observed triads (mothers and two children), they found that the effect of the behavior of the mother about the social interaction of her children depended, in large part, on how the mother treated each of her children in relation to the other
On the other hand, we will refer to the hypothesis of hostility due to parental favoritism, which postulates that siblings can develop hostile relationships if one of them perceives that he is treated worse than the other. Regarding the first hypothesis, Ritvo points out that older siblings can act as excellent substitutes for their parents when they are incapable of carrying out the functions of feeding and protection, nor of assuming the characteristic responsibilities of care paternal.
It seems that some research points to the existence of an inverse relationship between the quality of parent-child interaction and the quality of sibling interaction. In a study of Bryant and Crockenberg, carried out in a laboratory situation, they found that the mother's indifference towards her daughters correlated with a greater number of prosocial behaviors by the older sister. Equally Dunn and Kendrick indicated that the mother's depression and / or fatigue after the birth of her second child causes a positive relationship between the siblings when the child reaches the age of fourteen months. These results may make us think that school-age siblings support and teach each other more frequently in those families where the parents act with a certain unconcern towards the children.
However, the existence of other studies that indicate the opposite makes us think that the quality of relationships between siblings It also depends on other factors (gender, age range, jealousy, temperament, etc.) and not exclusively on the treatment they receive from their fathers. In fact, the hypothesis of hostility due to parental favoritism points in that direction. Hetherington She found that when one of the brothers is treated with less warmth and affection and with greater irritability and number of punishments than the On the other, there is a greater probability that the interaction between said siblings is aggressive, avoidant and with a greater number of behaviors of rivalry. Therefore, we see that the relationship that parents establish with each of their children influences but does not determine the type of interaction that the siblings maintain.
Dunn argues that there are many more factors that affect the type of relationship established by the siblings and that the individual differences of children, sex and age are variables to take into account account. On whether siblings can substitute for parents Bryant began to work on the premise that parents generally do not talk to their school-age children about emotions unless they decide to have an open-heart talk with they. In these circumstances, younger siblings may show a tendency to seek out older siblings when resolve conflicts because they perceive their parents as "emotionally unavailable" to discuss issues affective. Bryant analyzed the verbalizations that parents or Older brothers showed when they spoke with their children / young siblings and classified them in the following stages: Positive direct action strategies: situation in which the father, mother or brother older tries to instruct his son or little brother in how to solve the problem posed ("if you have to solve these kinds of problems, the best thing you can do is learn to multiply"). Negative direct action strategies: are those responses from parents or siblings mainly focused on the child's negative behavior, that is, on what she should not do. ("Don't study rivers by heart if you don't know how to locate them on the map").
Positive expressive responses: a situation in which the mother, father or older brother focuses on the child's feelings and accepts them. ("I fully realize how bad you must feel right now"). Negative expressive responses: reject, question and invalidate the child's feelings. ("don't feel like that; I don't know why you get angry for not knowing how to solve this problem "). Positive cognitive responses: they involve an attempt to change the child's thinking by giving a positive interpretation of the problem to be solved. ("I've always helped you solve your homework, right?"). Negative cognitive responses: a situation in which they focus on a negative interpretation of the event or justify why they do not respond to the child's needs. ("You always think the teacher is crazy"). The analysis of the results of this study indicates that the fathers and mothers who were chosen (instead of older siblings) as confidants and as people to ask for help when solving problems, they showed a greater number of strategies, both positive and negative. This seems to indicate that older siblings may lack the richness and complexity that parents have to examine experiences that children find emotionally stressful.
On the other hand, children who choose s their older siblings may have an experience not comparable to that experienced by those children who choose their parents. Communication between siblings One of the topics that has most interested psychologists is to analyze the type of communication that siblings establish from a very early age. In this context, it has been observed that not only adults adapt their speech when addressing infants, but children as young as four years old, when speaking to infants. two, they show "clarifiers" in their speech: short and simple utterances, many repetitions and a large number of names and exclamations that attract the attention of the child more small.
However, it cannot be concluded that the speech of children to babies is the same as the speech of mothers to their babies. The first difference is the context in which this communication occurs. Most of the child's speech to the baby occurs in two types of situations: when the child prohibits, restrains or discourages the baby and when she is trying to direct the child's action in shared play. The second difference refers to the frequency of the questions: when mothers talk to their babies they use many questions; however, this does not happen when children establish verbal communication with their siblings.
This is due to the desire on the part of the mother to know the emotional and physical states of her young son. It could be argued that the speech of children to babies it reflects an imitation of the mother's speech to the baby, rather than adjustments made by the children. However, the research shows results that do not support this thesis: only 3% were total or partial imitations of the mother's comments to the baby.
Thus, children are able to adjust their speech to the baby's level, without imitating the mother's speech. Commentary on the only child Back in the 1920s, a series of studies were carried out whose results indicated that only children were like the others in terms of personality and somewhat advantageous in terms of intelligence. Later it was indicated that only children benefited the most of their attendance at nursery schools since they had the opportunity to learn from their classmates what other children learned with their siblings. Current studies show that only children score higher in two aspects of personality: they have higher achievement motivation and higher self-esteem than children with siblings.
They also get more educational training and get more prestigious jobs. Despite these results, many only children tell psychologists that their problems are due to not have siblings. They probably have this belief because social norms and popular culture consider that normal development requires sibling interaction.
Peer relationships and cognitive development.
There are various theories that approach context in psychology, so Valsiner and Winegar make a distinction between contextual theories and theory. contextualists. At a theoretical level, contextual theories seek to explain the interdependence of subjects and their environment; interdependence that is considered bidirectional and interactive.
However, theories contextualists They aim to determine a series of (social) factors that affect the outcome of a specific process. What are the mechanisms through which children arrive at the construction of shared knowledge when they interact with an adult or a peer? To what extent do group situations facilitate knowledge? The first question is formulated from a contextual theory where the construction of the knowledge as a process that transcends the limits of the individual, embedding its roots in the environment. From this perspective, it is accepted that the social and cognitive they are two dimensions of the same process. The implications theoretical Y methodological of this position are very important: psychology is increasingly separated from natural science and Although the experimental method is not ruled out, other methods such as the observational one acquire an enormous force.
This theoretical position responds to the approach of Vygotsky's Soviet psychology. The second question is formulated from the framework of theories contextualists in which it is accepted that the construction of knowledge is an individual task where it would be necessary to specify the variables that can influence the process in question. Piaget and the theories of information processing would be situated in this contextualist perspective. The first studies of interaction between equals (with a marked Piagetian influence) were planned with a pre-test design, training session, and post-test. These works were more focused on analyzing the effects of the interaction than on the analysis of the process itself. Several reviews have recently appeared that synthesize the theoretical perspectives and problems of the subject in question. These publications coincide in pointing out the existence of three theoretical perspectives: The Piagetian perspective in which we highlight the evolution of Perret-Clermont and his collaborators; the Vygotskyan perspective, whose most representative works are those of Forman and those of Rogoff et al; and perspectives closer to the models that focus their study on the educational implications of peer interaction.
Piagetian perspective
Researchers who have followed the theory of Piaget they focused their studies on the effects that peer interaction has on cognitive development. This is due to the Piagetian idea that socio-cognitive conflict can provoke or induce cognitive development. Therefore, the effectiveness of social interaction resides in the cooperation between children of the same level. The basic premises of these studies are: Cognitive development is associated with a search for information and a growth of logical competences. A dissociation of social and cognitive factors is assumed to study how these factors affect the child's behavior. The task that has been used the most to study socio-cognitive conflict has been conservation.
The hypothesis from which they start is that when a non-conservative child works with a conservator, she will achieve conservation. Murria found that approximately 80% of non-conservatives ceased to be conservative after working with a conservative equal. Facts and factors have been found in these Piagetian studies that are difficult to explain within Piaget's theoretical framework. One of them is the finding of differences in the performance of the pre-test between children of different social classes. A second inexplicable fact is that the level shown by children in the pre-test can vary depending on the task or the instructions given in the task. These and other problems have led Perret-Clermont to a "second generation of research" in that the unit of analysis is not the child's cognitive behavior but the social interaction itself herself.
In this second phase of the Perret-Clermont studies, social factors are no longer considered independent variables that influence cognitive development, but are seen as intrinsic parts of the process by which children create and give meaning to homework. This author defends that the level shown by children in a certain task depends on "the history of the experimental situation ", that is, children respond to a situation as they are expected to do. Ultimately, her studies defend that both in the laboratory context and in educational contexts, the interaction between equals must be approach it based on the child's perception of the experimental or educational situation in order to understand the role that these elements play in their answers.
The evolution of the works of Perret-Clermont they suppose a distancing from Piagetian assumptions, approaching at the same time the approaches of Vygotsky's psychology. Vygostskian perspective Forman and Cazden conducted a study in which they asked subjects to solve a task over eleven sessions in order to observe the process of cognitive growth, instead of inferring it from the results of the pre-test and the post-test. The children acted individually or in pairs in order to compare, on the one hand, the strategies of both, and on the other, analyze the differences between the way of interacting couples Social interaction was categorized into three levels: Parallel interactions, in which children despite sharing materials and comments on the task, do not share indisputably the thinking that each one has to solve the trouble.
Associative interactions, characterized by the fact that children exchange information to achieve the goal, but They make no attempt to coordinate the social roles that each has to play in solving the problem. trouble. Cooperative interactions, in which both children control each other's work and play coordinated roles in completing the task. The results indicate that the children who worked in pairs showed better results than those who solved the task individually.
At the same time, an evolution was observed in the way of interacting: in the first sessions all the couples showed strategies of parallel or associative interaction, while in the last sessions some couples were already able to work through strategies of cooperation. In her latest work, Forman states that research on peer interaction should focus both on interpsychological processes, such as discourse and intersubjectivity, as in intrapsychological ones, such as the ability to make deductive inferences. It also proposes that discourse or semiotic mediation is the origin of the development of mental functions. and that, therefore, its analysis should occupy a central place in the attempt to explain the mechanisms of social regulation.
Interaction between equals in educational contexts.
Damon distinguishes three types of peer learning: tutoring, cooperation Y collaboration, which are differentiated in turn by the degree to which there are two dimensions of interaction, equality and mutual commitment. Equality refers to the degree of symmetry that is established between the participants in a social situation. However, "mutual commitment" (mutuality) refers to the degree of connection, bidirectionality and depth of the conversations that are established in the participation.
Mentoring relationships: The essence of these relationships is that a child, who can be considered an expert, instructs another who can be considered a novice. One of them has, therefore, a higher level of knowledge and competence than the other: unequal relationship. In sum, tutoring is characterized by non-equality relationships and by presenting a variable mutuality depending on the interpersonal skills of the tutor and the tutor. Cooperative learning: this environment is characterized by the fact that the group is heterogeneous in ability and children can assume different roles.
On rare occasions a mentoring role is observed as the degree of equality is high. In general, the degree of mutuality is low, but it varies depending on whether or not the group divides the responsibility to achieve the final goal; and the existence or lack of competition between groups. Collaboration between equals: in this case, there is a greater degree of mutuality and equality. All children start with the same level of proficiency and work together on the same problem (for the first time) without doing a division of tasks. The relationships that are established are, in general, symmetrical and are characterized by high equality and mutuality.
Damon sums up the threeperspectives saying that each one of them fosters a certain type of cognitive and social growth. Thus, mentoring (low in equality and high in mutuality) can promote the mastery of skills already acquired without perfecting. However, collaboration (high in mutuality and equality) can lead to the generation and discovery of new skills. Finally, cooperative learning (high equality and uncertain mutuality) can have characteristics of both mentoring and collaboration.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Relationship between siblings and between equals, we recommend that you enter our category of Evolutionary Psychology.
