Siblings and the Development of Social Understanding in Early Childhood

Abstract

Studying children with their siblings—with whom they share a daily life of great intimacy and emotional importance—is illuminating for those interested in development in two different ways. First, it gives us a new perspective on the development of social understanding—the understanding of others’ feelings and intentions, and of the social rules and roles of the world in which they grow up. The growth of such understanding is of central significance in human development, yet we are surprisingly ignorant of its early stages. Second, studying siblings enables us to explore the question of how far different family relationships influence a child’s development. In this chapter I will to consider both these issues, drawing on material from three longitudinal studies of siblings and their mothers that we have conducted in Cambridge, with working-class and middle-class English families. I will focus in particular on two studies, in which we followed families from a point when their second children were in their second year—a period of astonishingly rapid advance in understanding others (Dunn, 1988; Dunn & Munn, 1985, 1986a, 1986b).