Siblings are children who share the same parents. A sibling could also be regarded as sister or a brother. These children are born and brought up together in the same environment. Siblings are of many types for example there are half sibling, full sibling and half sibling. Researches reveal that siblings do impact on other siblings’ development, behavior and health. This is because they have mutual socialization and mostly, because they come from the same womb.
Some of the factors related to the sibling’s effects are birth order, family size and the sex of the sibling. It is said that the number of the siblings in a family can affect the well being of others. Also it is alleged that birth order may also affect other siblings who are born later. The sex of the siblings is also another factor that is said to impact on the health of other siblings. There are the issues that this research paper will try to address. The paper will dig deeper to understand how siblings would affect the health of others.
Supporting evidence will be provided to validate the arguments. At the end, there is a list of all the references that were used and are properly formatted in accordance with APA’s formatting style. Researchers have found out that sibling’s death may impact negatively on the health of other siblings later. As per the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, siblings who experience the death of their fellow sibling before they have attained thirty six years experience physical heath problems especially at the age of 50’s (Davies 2006)
When siblings are brought up in the same family, a special bond develops between them. These siblings care for one another, pay and support one another. In short, play a very big role in other sibling’s lives and thus the death of one could lead to life time effects on those that are left. Though all siblings are affected, the degree in which they are affected with varies and what contributes to this variation is ones age, sex, gender, past experiences, personality of the kid such as temperament and health status of the sibling.
The nature of the death experienced by the kid also counts, ‘when children have shared many aspects of their lives, the loss of one child leaves a large empty space in the surviving sibling” (Davies 2006; 1). Surveys conducted show that siblings from families where ideas, thought and feelings are shared are not greatly affected by the death of one sibling and thus their health remains as it was prior to the death. It has been noted that the magnitude of the effects of one sibling’s death have on other depends on how they followed one another.
The effect is more on those who immediately follow the deceased and it reduces as you move further away or the smaller the lag gap, the more the effects and the bigger the lag gap, the lesser the effects. It was noted that the effect of the death is much higher on the second born showing that it is on the forth born. According to the mental health professionals, the way parents treat and handle the remaining siblings can determine the amount of the effect that the death of one can have on others.
Using this criterion, these mental health professionals classified the remaining siblings depending on the amount of the effects into three categories. The first is those that are haunted, the bound and lastly the resurrected. The first category occurs in families where blame and guilt are the predominant feelings. Here nobody neither the parents nor the kids wants to talk the about the reason for the death. What results is that the siblings are frequently haunted by unknown fears. They fear that the same thing that led to the death of their fellow sibling would also occur to them (White, 2007).