Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESAssociation Between Early Childhood Aggression and Internalizing Behavior for Sibling Pairs
Section snippets
Sibling Influences on Early Childhood Behavior
Developmental research demonstrates that sibling relationships are important in shaping children's outcomes (Dunn, 1983, Dunn, 1992). Recent studies suggest that positive sibling interactions may enhance children's prosocial behaviors, including empathy, conflict management, and cooperation (Dunn, 1983, Dunn, 1992;Dunn and Munn, 1986;Garcia et al., 2000;Widmer and Weiss, 2000). Likewise, strong sibling relationships may protect against the negative impact of adverse family circumstances, such
Sample
This study explores the association between early childhood aggression and internalizing behavior for sibling pairs participating in the Mater-University Study of Pregnancy. Pregnant women attending their first prenatal hospital visit in Brisbane, Australia were recruited into the study during 1981 to 1983. Of the 8,556 women (99%) who agreed to participate in prenatal assessments, 7,661 gave birth to a live, singleton child and completed postnatal interviews 3 to 5 days after giving birth.
RESULTS
Table 2 presents Pearson correlation coefficients between older and younger siblings' scores on the aggression and internalizing indices. All associations are statistically significant, and the size of the correlation coefficients indicates a moderately strong sibling concordance in problem behavior, across sibling types. As shown, the correlation between internalizing behaviors of both siblings does not generally vary as a function of the sex composition: all sibling types have a correlation
DISCUSSION
This investigation confirms and extends prior research regarding sibling resemblance in problem behavior. Whereas most prior research has assessed the effects of negative sibling interactions on childhood aggression or the similarity of sibling delinquency during adolescence, this study examined sibling resemblance in early childhood aggression and internalizing behavior. In addition, most early childhood research has been conducted with male-only or clinical samples, whereas the current study
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Cited by (0)
Supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
The authors acknowledge the assistance of Denise A. Durrington in constructing the dataset and the Mater-University Study of Pregnancy research team members for their ongoing work and support for the study.