Having a brother or a sister one can talk to is vital since they are people that grow together and live in one house. Relationships between siblings comprise friendships and enemies. Many factors promote friendships and enmity between siblings. Children develop different sibling relationships. Most children in the world have one sibling, and the gap is wider since parents want to have children after some years. The gap between siblings affects the relationship between the siblings. When the sibling gap is six years or more, the younger child is too young to socialize and interact with the older one (Havronet al., 2019). Unlike other siblings, the two children do not share a room which reduces the interactions between the children. When children are almost the same age, they share experiences and grow closer to their siblings.
However, when there are lag gaps in children’s ages, the older sibling develops jealousy, leading to minimal or no interaction and a close relationship between the children. However, although the siblings with a significant age gap develop rivalry at a young age, the older sibling takes care of the younger sibling through feeding them, dressing them, and playing with the youngest sibling (Havronet al., 2019). Therefore, the youngest child sees the older one as a role model, and thus even without a close relationship, the youngest sibling seeks advice from the oldest one (Mikkonen et al., 2020). Also, the children develop more affection for their siblings, and the youngest admires and sees the oldest as their role models.
The older siblings continually prepare the younger siblings for events that may happen in the future, and the parental role allows the parents to be sure their siblings are in safe hands. On the other hand, the youngest sibling also develops disorganized antisocial behaviors due to the lack of agemates to associate with and share daily events (Mikkonen et al., 2020). The age gap between children is a vital issue in families, and therefore parents should adopt the advisable age gap of at least two years for the well-being of the children.
References
Havron, N., Ramus, F., Heude, B., Forhan, A., Cristia, A., & Peyre, H. (2019). The effect of siblings on language development as a function of age difference and sex. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fgpmd
Mikkonen, J., Savolainen, J., Aaltonen, M., & Martikainen, P. (2020). Using age difference and sex similarity to detect evidence of sibling influence on criminal offending. Psychological Medicine, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291720003724
