Aiden Sisler and Angela Ittel: Siblings in Adolescence: Emerging Individuals, Lasting Bonds

Abstract

Adolescence is a crucial time of development and change from a child to an emerging adult. Siblings in Adolescence: Emerging Individuals, Lasting Bonds by Aiden Sisler and Angela Ittel looks at this crucial period, but with the intention of evaluating the roles of siblings in adolescence. The book evaluates how siblings shape one another’s identity, roles in society, and emotions. Adolescence is often looked at in terms of how peers or parents can influence the adolescent; however, Sisler and Ittel point out that usually sibling relationships are the longest lasting relationships in one’s life, and therefore would have important influences that need to be researched and examined. There are many different social and psychological ways of looking at adolescence and sibling influences, but Sisler and Ittel succeed in bringing many points of view into the discussion and combine them to get a more rounded analysis of very complex relationships. In chapter 1, ‘‘Theoretical and thematic plurality in sibling research,’’ Sisler and Ittel address the many different lenses used to look at adolescent development and the influences of familial relations, specifically those of siblings. They cover the importance of survival of the fittest for evolutionary psychology, the importance of parent– child interactions for psychodynamic theory, and the importance of differentiation in pushing siblings to be unique. They praise systems theories since these theories can cover the complex nature of the development of adolescents, sibling relationships, and family subsystems, while many other theories cannot cover the complexities that go along with adolescent development. In general, Sisler and Ittel simply review key ways of thinking when analyzing adolescent development. It was a very effective first chapter in the way that it gets the reader open minded and prepared to receive more detailed information regarding adolescents and the importance of their relationships with siblings. After being briefed with different theories, the reader has many tools to process and understand information in later chapters. ‘‘Adolescent siblings and within-family study’’, the second chapter, looks at the benefits of using within-family studies to examine family relationships, and looks at the family system and structure as a whole. Using withinfamily studies allows researchers to see how different children influence their parents and how their parents interact with them, though it is usually viewed as solely the parents who influence the child. Researchers can then see what leads adolescent siblings to differentiate from one another. When looking at the family structure and system, it is evident that both internal relations and outside factors affect each relationship within the family. For example, when coalitions are formed between a favored child and parent, this affects all other relationships within the family and can lead to problematic sibling relationships and overall to a dysfunctional family. Other factors of the family system that can influence siblings and sibling relationships include birth order, number of siblings, family size, and differential treatment of the children. Siblings are commonly used for social comparison, and so when parents show differential treatment among their children, this can impact the self-esteem of the other siblings and may affect the sibling dynamics. This chapter highlights well the importance of familial and sibling relationships in the context of the family system, and how if one aspect of the system is manipulated, it will affect all other aspects as well. & Lesley Waters lcwaters@indiana.edu