A recent study has found that teenagers who come from a big family with many siblings have poorer mental health than those with fewer siblings. The study was conducted in the United States and China.
What surprised Doug Downey, the lead author of this study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University, was the fact that the overall pattern was found in both countries. He conducted the study with Rui Cao, a doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State and the results were published in the Journal of Family Issues.
The study included 9,400 eighth graders from the China Education Panel Study, whereas in the United States of America, the study included over 9,100 American eighth graders from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- Kindergarten Cohort of 1988. The study found that only one-third or 34 per cent Chinese children are single children with no siblings while in the USA, it is just 12.6 per cent.
The researchers asked a variety of different questions to the USA and Chinese participants about their mental health. In China, teenagers with no siblings were observed to have the best mental health. However, in the USA, those with no or one sibling had similar mental health. It also found that in the USA, half and full siblings are linked to poor mental health. Older and closely spaced siblings in age showed the worst impacts on a teenager’s well-being. Siblings born within one year of each other showed poorer mental health.
But why does the number of siblings affect the mental health of these teens? Well, as per Doug Downey, the reason can be resource dilution. He explained this with the analogy of parental resources being a pie. According to him, if there is only one child, that means the child would get all the pie- that is the attention and resources of the parents. But when more siblings are added to the equation, the attention and the resources get divided, which impacts their mental health.
Comments
0 comment