Sibling Relationship Psychology

Out of all the relationships throughout our lives whether it's a friendship, parent/child relationship or a romantic relationship one of the most unique and powerful bonds we may have is the relationships with our siblings. Our siblings are usually the ones that we share our life journey's with from a young age all the way across to our adult years and during that journey you experience the ups and downs, family woes, jealousy and hostility towards each other, competitiveness, joint responsibilities and most of all the joys of being part of a family unit.

Jeffrey Kluger a science writer and author of the book The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal about Us speaks in this video about not only the common characteristics and behaviours of individual siblings in a given family but he also talks about how parental influences effect how siblings develop and interact to gain attention by cultivating their individual roles within the family household. A particularly interesting segment of the talk is where he speaks about parents and sibling favouritism, he briefly speaks about how opposite gender resemblance is a common factor when parents have a favourite child whether the parents know this or not; for instance the hard headed father may favour the no nonsense daughter because he see's a little of himself within her or the soft speaking mother may favour the quietly spoken son because of their similarities. Kluger describes it as a sense of reproductive narcissism from the parent to their favourite. This is a very profound talk from a very good speaker who cites some of the studies based on the topic of sibling bonds, it  generally is a topic which would likely relate to most people, a great talk and very interesting overall.