Humans develop empathy in response to the basic need to care and we know that children who grow up with non-TD siblings often take on greater caregiving roles. We also know from other research that siblings influence each other’s development of empathy.

In the Israeli study, researchers measured cognitive empathy by asking children to score statements such as “I can often understand how people feel even before they tell me.”

“The researchers suggest that a child with a non-TD twin needs to develop better skills of understanding because of the difficulties their siblings experience – for example, with communication.”

The children could have said what they thought the researchers wanted to hear, but this is unlikely because they did not score higher than their peers on other measures of empathy, namely “emotional empathy” and “prosociality.” Emotional empathy – feeling others’ emotions rather than just understanding them – was measured by asking children to rate statements like “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel protective toward them.” Prosociality was measured by inviting children to play a computer game that led to a choice about allocating points needed to earn a prize: “Which do you prefer? (1) To earn 20 points for yourself and not donate any points to children in need. (2) To earn 10 points for yourself and donate 10 points to children in need.”

Photo: yan Krukov. Pexels.

Why might a difference exist in cognitive empathy but not in emotional empathy? The researchers suggest that a child with a non-TD twin needs to develop better skills of understanding because of the difficulties their siblings experience – for example, with communication. Meanwhile, greater emotional empathy “might be disadvantageous for the empathizer’s adaptive functioning in a relationship with an individual in distress”.

The study focused on cognitive and emotional empathy toward others in general, not empathy toward children’s non-TD twin in particular.

The study involved 63 twin pairs drawn from a larger study of 778 families with 11-year-old twins. The non-TD twin siblings had a variety of conditions, including language-communication problems (12), cerebral palsy (5), autism spectrum disorder (2), hearing impairment (1), and visual impairment (1).

Whilst most earlier research on children with a non-TD sibling has focused on the negative impacts of having a non-TD sibling, some other studies have also found enhanced empathy, including studies of children with Down Syndrome and of siblings of children with autism. However, results of such research are not entirely consistent due to different methods of measuring and differences in the ages of the children (during childhood or later in adulthood).

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Why might Latina teenagers spend more time with family? We studied data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) between 2003 and 2019, and found that differences in household structure, family structure, youth’s work hours, parents’ education, parents’ work, and geographic region could not fully explain differences in time Latinos’/as’ time spent with family versus with peers.

“Extra time with family, especially for Latina youth, could be due to differences in attitudes and values related to familismo and marianismo.”

Instead, we believe the extra time with family, especially for Latina youth, could be due to differences in attitudes and values related to familismo and marianismo. Familismo attitudes place a high value on family closeness, cohesion, and reciprocity. Marianismo involves the belief that girls should be nurturing and self-sacrificing for family.

Extra time with family, especially for Latina youth, could also be both an asset and a constraint. Several studies show that when familismo is strong, there is likely to be less family conflict, lower adolescent-parent conflict, more tight-knit families, and fewer suicide attempts. Yet, extra time with family could be a constraint on Latino/a youth if familismo values such as spending time together are not shared between parents and children or if time with family is burdensome or overwhelming. Additionally, extra time with family could be detrimental if it entails saying no to opportunities outside the household, such as educational or extracurricular activities, or even going to college away from home.

Other findings from our research

In our analysis of the ATUS from 2003 to 2019, we examined daily family contact patterns –  the total daily minutes spent with both nuclear and extended family – among Latino/a 15- to 18 year-olds. For the sake of comparison, we also included Black and White youth of the same age. Opportunities for family time may depend on who lives in the household, so we focused on youth who had focal family members (e.g., siblings, grandparents) living in their households.

On average, Latino/a youth spent more time with their parents than did Black youth, and more time with siblings than did both White and Black youth. Latino boys spent less time with parents, but more time with siblings, than did White boys.

“It may be time to reconsider what we think of as a “typical” U.S. teenager who distances themselves from family.”

Our analysis yielded some unexpected results: We thought Latino/a youth in immigrant households would spend more time with family than Latino/a youth whose parents were born in the United States, yet we found no such differences. Latino boys in immigrant households did spend more time with siblings but also spent less time with household adult relatives than Latino boys in non-immigrant households. We also thought Latino/a youth might spend more time with extended family than their White and Black counterparts did, but we found few racial/ethnic differences in time with extended families among the three groups.

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What is social emotional development?

When social emotional development has proceeded well, children develop five key social and relationship skills. These include:

Self-awareness

They recognize their emotions, describe their interests and values, and accurately assess their strengths. They have a well-grounded sense of self-confidence and hope for the future.

Self-management

They manage stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles. They can set and monitor progress toward personal and academic goals and express their emotions appropriately in a wide range of situations.

Social awareness

Their social learning enables them to take the perspective of and empathize with others and recognize and appreciate individual and group similarities and differences. They seek out and appropriately use family, school, and community resources.

Relationship skills

They establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships based on cooperation. They resist inappropriate social pressure; constructively prevent, manage, and resolve interpersonal conflict; and seek and provide help when needed.

Responsible decision-making at school, at home, and in the community

In making decisions, they consider ethical standards, safety concerns, appropriate social norms, respect for others, and the likely consequences of various courses of action. They apply these decision-making skills in academic and social situations and are motivated to contribute to the well-being of their schools and communities.

Adapted from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

The social emotional development journey: baby steps

The first steps of social emotional development are gaze, attachment, attention and gestures.

1. Gaze

Even before birth, babies react to projections of faces through the abdomen into the womb. They will gaze into the eyes of their mother and father within days of being born. At 4-5 months, babies will stop smiling and frown if their carer stops smiling or smiles at the wrong time relative to the activity they are both engaged in. The foundations of relationship skills are being laid.

Photo: Shutterstock.

2. Attachment

Attachment is a cornerstone of early social emotional development. The strong emotional bonds that form between infants and caregivers over the first year of life are referred to as attachments, which are based on children’s experience with their caregivers. The originator of the idea of attachment, John Bowlby (1958), observed in the 1950s that infants go through a period between about 6 and 30 months when they require the care and proximity of one or two key people, known as “attachment figures”. Emotional learning starts within these intensely emotional relationships. Patterns of everyday love and care set up the infant’s expectations of how particular caregivers will respond to them. Bowlby called these “internal working models”.

3. Joint attention

This is the ability to home in on another person’s point of view while they are describing or pointing at something, such as a toy or book. It starts around the age of one. The baby learns gradually to switch attention between the carer and the object. Babies will also start to look to the carer when they don’t understand a situation, possibly as a bid to get information or just comfort. Joint attention is a foundation for relationship skills.

4. Intentional gestures

At this stage of social emotional development, around the first year, infants start to point at things. Some months later, they start to use head movements, for example, to indicate yes and no. Gestures can be learned through imitation, such as waving and nodding; others are not necessarily what carers are doing, such as lifting the arms.

Social emotional development: preschoolers’ social learning of others’ perspectives

The next key stage in the social emotional development journey is the emergence of an understanding of others’ perspectives.

The “false belief” test is one measure of this understanding. The child is presented with the story of Maxi, who returns home from shopping with his mother, and, before going out to play, puts his chocolate away. While he is outside, his mother moves the chocolate. When Maxi gets hungry and returns for his chocolate, where will he look for it and/or were will he think it is? A five-year-old will know immediately that Maxi will look for it where he left it, but a three-year-old will incorrectly claim that Maxi will look for it where Maxi’s mother put it.

Another test that a three-year-old is unlikely to pass involves showing something to them that looks like a stone and which they identify as a stone. But once they touch it, they discover it is a sponge. Three-year-olds will then claim they knew it was a sponge all along and that another child would think it is a sponge too.

As children develop, they reach higher levels of social learning.

Photo: Shutterstock.

For example, the “faux pas” test is a measure of a child’s reaction to a situation in which a child says he does not like a picture and then realises he is standing next to the child who drew it. Social learning involves recognising the embarrassment and the feelings of the budding artist.

Six stages of social learning in childhood

Two researchers, Henry Wellman and David Liu (2004), developed a five-stage test of social understanding up to five to six years of age.

1. Grasping that people may want different things (diverse desires).
2. Understanding that different people may have and act on different beliefs about the same thing when it is not known whether these beliefs are true or false (diverse beliefs).
3. Appreciating that a lack of visual access results in not knowing something (knowledge access).
4. False belief understanding, as described above.
5. Grasping that the emotions that someone experiences may be different from what they display (hidden emotion).

More recently, a sixth stage has been added: understanding sarcasm, which is reported to emerge when a child is six to nine years old.

Emotional learning: the development of empathy

Empathy is the emotional reaction to another’s feelings. Reacting emotionally to another’s distress starts very early, before babies are one year old.

Researchers have observed four stages in the emotional learning of empathy:

1. Global empathic distress. A baby cries when another baby cries.
2. Egocentric empathic distress (11-12 months). As in the first stage, but the babies do something to soothe themselves, like seek refuge with their father.
3. Quasi-egocentric empathic distress (12-14 months). The toddler will attempt to soothe the distress of the other child.
4. Veridical empathy (two years). Toddlers will bring distressed children something to comfort them, like their own teddy bear.

Other research has shown that babies as young as 8-10 months show facial and vocal responses to the distress of another.

Parents who actively encourage emotional learning in their children, helping them see the perspectives of others, have children with more empathic skills. Children who are not just told the rules, but who are made aware of the consequences for others of their own actions, tend to have greater empathy and a feeling of responsibility for the feelings of others.

Relationship skills: prosociality or being nice to others

A key area of current research is the emergence of prosocial behaviour in children: that is, when one person acts for the benefit of another.

Toddlers around the age of 14 and 18 months typically love to help their parents with housework and picking up dropped objects, often so enthusiastically that it becomes very difficult to get any housework done at all. This may, however, not be prosocial, but just a desire to be involved in the activity.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Two-year-olds will stop playing to help someone, even if that person does not realise they need help – for example, if they have dropped something unknowingly.

Parents’ encouragement of helping in the home is associated with greater social understanding in children later. Giving a 20-month-old a reward for prosocial behaviour actually decreases the helping behaviour, whereas praise strongly encourages it. These things happen irrespective of a child’s temperament.

Nine influences on social emotional development in children

Social emotional development in childhood is a gradual process of social learning and emotional learning through activity and talking about the activity.

Culture

Children’s rate of social learning varies significantly, as does the age at which they are able to pass the false belief test. Australian and Canadian children understand false belief, on average, a little before British or American children. Austrian and Japanese children lag further behind. In some communities, children will pass the test only at the aged of eight, for example, Samoan children, Junin Quechaun children in Peru, Mofu children in Cameroon, or the Tola and Tainae children of Papua New Guinea.

Interestingly, authoritarian parenting reduces performance in the false belief test in European Americans, but not in Korean-American families where they a positively related.

Siblings

Interaction with siblings helps social learning and relationship skills. Children with siblings progress some months ahead of children without siblings, though the varied results from research suggests that more than just the fact of having siblings is involved. The quality of the interaction may be important. For example, a child with older siblings may be more exposed to discussions about what others know and don’t know. Also, the impact of siblings is less on a child with already advanced language abilities. One theory is that siblings help generate greater self-awareness through more frequent references to “me” and “mine”.

Play

Pretend play involves making plans and assigning roles, and this may develop social learning and relationship skills. It may also be a factor in the sibling effect.

Peers

Popular children tend to be better at the false belief test and children who have been rejected by peers tend to do worse on the faux pas test. It is unclear which way cause and effect are working here. Lack of friendship and a low level of social learning could contribute to each other.

Child characteristics

A shy and socially fearful temperament is associated with more advanced social understanding in preschool, though the evidence is not entirely consistent.

Blindness and deafness

An inability to see or hear delays social learning, though this is not the case for deaf children with deaf parents who communicate well with them, suggesting that language is important for social learning.

Parent-child interaction

The way that parents interact with their children and use language influences the children’s social development. Responsive conversations, with organised give and take, contribute to social understanding. So do conversations about thinking, desires, emotions and intentions.

Parents with more advanced social understanding have children with better social learning. Parents who talk to their children more about others’ feelings have children who do better on the false belief test. Authoritarian parenting, characterised by shouting and physical punishment, is associated with less social learning.

Earlier attachment

Children who have enjoyed secure attachment in their first year will tend to do better in the false belief test when they are five.

Mind mindedness

If a parent describes their child as someone with a mind, rather than just a physical being – so-called “mind mindedness” – and use psychological terms to describe their children, the children are likely to pass the false belief test at an earlier age. Hearing psychological terms used to explain and elaborate social events improves children’s social understanding. A mediating factor here is the higher language skills of these children.

Social emotional development: the role of language

Language has been shown to play a very important role in the whole process of social emotional development in the early years. Advanced language skills are linked to better performance on the false belief test, for example.

Purposefully teaching children the meaning of mental-state words, such as know, think, wonder, and figure out, has a positive impact on understanding of emotion at age three and performance in the false belief test at age four.

The benefits of strong social emotional development: good relationship skills

Does a child who does better in the false belief test or the faux pas test have better relationship skills and a better social life with friends? The answer is yes. Such a child is likely to have better relationship skills, engage less in conflict, use more sophisticated arguments in response to others’ perspectives and interests, have better close friendships, and be less likely either to bully or be bullied. Greater social understanding and relationship skills are not linked to premeditated proactive use of aggression, but they are linked to the more unthinking reactive form.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Some of these associations are small – for example, only 4% of the variance in peer popularity could be linked to difference in performance on the faux pas test.

Advanced social emotional learning: morality

Jean Piaget

In The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932/1965), Jean Piaget discussed children’s understanding of the rules of the game and their judgement of bad behaviours. He proposed that morality emerges as children develop relationship skills with peers.

Piaget observed how children play with marbles:

• At three years, children tend to be unaware of any rules.
• Between three and six years, children are inconsistent about rules and their application.
• From the age of seven, children understand the rules.
• From the age of nine, children start to understand that rules are not simply handed down from on high, but are agreed by mutual consent.
• From the age of 11, children master the rules completely and police them.

These are only approximate ages for the children Piaget interviewed. He thought that what is important in moral development are relationships of cooperation among equals. These are best suited for understanding others and working out a solution that is good for all. In contrast, within relationships of constraint, children have difficulty understanding others’ perspectives, so these relationships are not well suited for moral development.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg took another approach. He maintained that the key to morality is not behaviour itself but the reasons that a person has for behaving that way. For example, not paying taxes could be a selfish means of cheating the state, or an unselfish stand against the way the state uses the money.

Kohlberg posed painful moral dilemmas, often choices about who should be allowed to die in a situation with two possibilities. He then observed how people respond to them.

He described six stages or world views.

1. Might is right. Rules must be followed, and disobedience should be punished.
2. Do to others what you would want them to do to you.
3. Do to others as if they were yourself, with the perspective extending to family and friends only.
4. Communities need accepted rules to prevent breakdown, and these should be broken only in the most extreme cases.
5. Rules should be defined by fundamental human rights. The question should always be asked: are current rules and laws moral?
6. Everyone affected by a rule should have a say in how that rule is put in place and implemented.

Kohlberg observed that most adults reach stage 3 or 4, and few reach 5 or beyond. He believed that moral development occurs as people encounter situations where the current rules break down and they are faced with new moral dilemmas.

Objections raised to Kohlberg’s theory include:

• People are not always consistently in one stage at a time.
• Some cultures place more emphasis than others on social solidarity, harmony relationships and deep affection for others. This affects how rules are applied.
• The stages are not necessarily hierarchical. There are very good people who help others in their communities and yet are at stages 3 and 4.

Morality versus social conventions

Not all rules are the same, and children learn this early. Some rules are social conventions – calling a teacher “Mr” or “Mrs”, wearing a school uniform, how to hold a knife and fork. But other rules are moral, including those relating to protecting others from harm, such as not stealing or not fighting. Children as young as three years understand the difference between these types of rules.

Some have criticised both Piaget and Kohlberg for mixing up the learning of social conventions and morality. “Domain theory” holds that they are separate processes from the outset, though this idea creates the problem of rules that are somewhere in between, such as lining up and dressing in a way that may offend others.

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A recent social development research project found that not only do older siblings influence their younger siblings’ early social development, but the opposite is also true: younger siblings influence their older siblings’ development.

Traditional family services focus on parents and older siblings to support early childhood development. This study suggests that services should widen their attention to everyone in the family, including younger siblings.

What is empathy?

Empathy is the general capacity to share the feelings of others. ‘Empathic concern’ is defined as feelings of care and concern for others’ well-being. Empathic concern has been found in infants as young as 8-10 months of age. Toddlers aged 14 to 20 months respond to others’ distress with facial and vocal expressions. As their social development continues, they try to help and comfort the person in trouble.

The development of empathy is a central feature of early childhood development. It drives altruistic and prosocial behavior and is associated with less aggression, bullying and disruptive behavior.

Parents and siblings influence empathy

Most research on the topic has focused on how parents influence the social development of empathy in children. Discipline, emotion coaching and socialisation techniques have all been shown to affect the development of empathy. Moreover, warm parent-child relationships are associated with greater empathy.

Much less research has examined how older siblings influence the development of empathy in their younger brothers and sisters. Children who grow up with older siblings are likely to spend more time with them than with their parents. So older siblings would be expected to influence early childhood development, and research has demonstrated that they do so.

Relatively few researchers have examined how younger brothers and sisters may affect their older siblings’ social development. Recent research has found that younger siblings can increase the likelihood of disruptive behavior in older siblings. On a more positive note, other research has shown that a warmer sibling relationship is linked to more empathy and prosocial behavior on the part of both the older and the younger sibling, at the same time protecting them both from adverse environmental factors.

Modern theories of early childhood development emphasise the significance of all relationships for a child’s social development, as well as the reciprocal nature of every relationship. That includes relationships with parents and adults, siblings and peers, both older and younger. This perspective suggests that we shouldn’t ignore the potential impact of younger siblings.

The social development research project in Canada

The recent study looked at 452 sibling pairs in Canada. The sample was diverse, including 42% immigrant families. Empathy in the two siblings was observed directly by exposing them to an unfamiliar adult exhibiting pain and sadness, and then coding their responses from a video record. The siblings were tested in this way twice – once when the younger sibling was 18 months old and again at 36 months old. The older siblings varied in age.

The research found that having a more empathic sibling – whether older or younger – was related to a greater increase in empathy between the two tests, 18 months apart.

The researchers then looked at factors that might shape the influences on early childhood development in different ways. They found two significant things.

• The age gap. A bigger age gap increased the older sibling’s influence on the younger sibling, but made no difference the other way around.
• The gender of the siblings. Having an empathic younger brother had no influence on the development of empathy in an older sister.

How do younger siblings influence empathy in their older brothers or sisters?

Perhaps when younger siblings mimic the caring behavior of their older brother or sister, this reinforces the older sibling’s behavior. Perhaps the experience of an empathic younger sibling is particularly rewarding and fulfilling for the older brother or sister.

The increased influence of an older sibling who is further away in age supports the idea that older siblings can support early childhood development through teaching and modelling of caring and prosocial behavior.

Implications for early childhood development support services

This research on siblings once again emphasises the intensely social nature of early childhood development, as we have set out on the Child and Family Blog in background pieces on cognitive development and on social and emotional development. It challenges the idea that we only need to account for older siblings’ influence on younger siblings.

As such, this study, like many others, suggests that services supporting early childhood development should engage the whole family and consider how all individuals relate to one another within it.

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Many researchers have compared families with many children to families with few, finding a consistent tendency for children with fewer siblings, and siblings further apart in age, to do better. But are we simply seeing a tendency for better-educated and wealthier parents to have fewer children? And does the investment by parents fall with a new addition to the family, or does it just change in nature?

Dr Joseph Workman looked at 2- to 4-year-old children in the same families before and after a younger brother or sister was born, to see what impact adding a sibling would have. He used data from a large study tracking 10,700 American children born in 2001, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B).

He also lifted the lid on the different things in a family that are affected by the addition of a sibling. He looked at resources (Is there enough food? How much do parents read to the child? Do they use outside childcare? Do the parents go out to play with the child?). He looked at the mother’s mental health, the parent-child relationship and the number of children’s books in the house.

Contrary to other studies, he found that the addition of a sibling any time under the age of 5didn’t reduce a child’s cognitive development on average. This was true irrespective of family income, race/ethnicity and practice of religion.

It’s true that adding of a sibling reduced the measured time that parents spent reading stories and the amount of childcare the family used (something considered to be positive for cognitive development). However, the declines in the quality of children’s home experiences were not substantial enough to reduce children’s cognitive development.

Dr Workman asks: Could it be that the addition of a sibling doesn’t actually decrease parents’ investment in each child, but rather changes it from an individual activity to a communal one? If so, then current measures of parental investment that look only at individual contributions may be misleading.

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One in six young US children live in complex sibling relationships, which are associated with heightened aggressive behavior – even if both parents live together.

Young children raised with half-siblings or step-siblings behave more aggressively, even when they themselves are living with both their own parents. That’s a key finding from research that shows that one in six young US preschool children are growing up in complex sibling relationships – far more than we previously knew.

Children who lived with step- or half-siblings at age 4 had considerably higher scores for aggressive behavior when they entered school a year later. Based on reports by their mothers, their scores were about 10 percent higher than those reported for otherwise similar children. This increase occurred regardless of whether children lived with both of their biological parents, a single parent, or one biological parent and a stepparent.

“Only a minority (16 per cent) of children living with half-siblings or step-siblings lived with their mother and a stepfather at age 4. More than half lived with both of their own parents, while a third were living with their unpartnered mother.”

Sibling relationships as a factor in family organization have received relatively little attention from researchers. Most recent studies of complex families have focused instead on how children’s welfare is influenced by relationships between parents or relationships between parents and children.

Among young children, aggressive behavior includes, for example, hitting people, anger, and destruction of property. The heightened levels of aggressive behavior we found at age 5 suggest a lack of school readiness. Aggressive behavior in young children also predicts increased risky behavior during adolescence and lower educational attainment in early adulthood. So researchers need to discover why living with a half-sibling or step-sibling carries this increased risk of aggressive behavior in early childhood.

The majority live with both parents

Among children who experience complex sibling relationships, family circumstances vary. We often think that children who live with a half-sibling or step-sibling would also be living with a stepparent. In reality, the majority (52 percent) are living with both their own parents and with half-siblings born in their parents’ earlier relationships. A minority (16 per cent) of children living with half-siblings or step-siblings reside with their mother and stepfather; about a third (32.7 per cent) live with their unpartnered mother. (Our analysis excluded the small percentage of children who did not live with their biological or adoptive mother.)

Why is aggressive behaviour more frequent?

Why might complex sibling relationships be associated with heightened aggressive behavior, regardless of whether a child is living with a single parent, both parents, or a parent and stepparent? Our study of a nationally representative sample of about 6,500 US children allowed us to rule out possible explanations such as material resources available to the family, background characteristics and current wellbeing of mothers, and mothers’ parenting style. Future research might focus on other possible explanations, including at what point in their lives step- and half-siblings enter children’s households. It might also examine whether material and emotional resources are distributed evenly to each child in a family.

Could parental absence be a factor?

Across family structures, all children living with a step- or half-sibling have one thing in common: at least one child in the household has an absent biological parent, either living elsewhere or no longer alive. Prior work has shown that having an absent parent, and particularly an absent father, is associated with a higher risk of aggressive behavior in younger children. In future research, we will consider how the behavior of children with an absent parent might affect other children in the household whose parents are both present.

During the past 40 years, family organization in the United States has become increasingly complex and varied. Today’s young children frequently experience family as a set of biologically and socially based relationships within and across households. We would encourage further exploration into how and why sibling relationships – and particularly step- and half-sibling relationships – may be uniquely associated with young children’s development and wellbeing.

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