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Associating our adult failures with a lack of parental love in childhood is a habit that almost most of us have. Few people think of blaming them … their brothers and sisters.
A new study by researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Warwick and Bristol, as well as University College London, found that those who were humiliated by their siblings as teenagers were twice as likely to suffer from clinical depression than those who had no such experience*.
The authors of the study note that psychologists (both academic and clinical) and organizations for the protection of children most often ignore the significance of the mentioned factor, considering it to be good-natured banter between relatives, which obviously does not cause any harm to the psyche. In the course of their research, they carefully distinguished between such banter and really serious cases of harassment – physical abuse, deliberate ignorance and verbal abuse of study participants by their brothers and sisters. At the same time, scientists chose only those examples in which the insults were of a recurring nature – they were applied to adolescents on average several times a week.
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- What is bulling?
One of the important features of the study is that psychologists have observed the life of adolescents for many years. Potential participants were selected back in the 90s, and in 2003-2004, these 7000 teenagers aged 12 received questionnaires in the mail asking them if they had experienced any form of harassment from their siblings. . Then, when they turned 18, they filled out another questionnaire about their relationship to themselves and the world.
Of the 3452 participants, 1810 reported no harassment from their immediate family as teenagers. After 6 years, the researchers assessed the mental state of the boys and girls in this group, and determined that 6,4% of them are in a state of clinical depression, another 9,3% feel anxiety, and 7,6% at such a young age already (Self-harm is one of the symptoms of clinical depression.) The remaining 786 young adults who were bullied as teenagers by older (or, less often, younger) siblings were significantly more likely to experience clinical depression at the time of filling of the second questionnaire, 12,3% were in this state, another 16% were prone to anxiety and 14% had self-harmed during the previous year.
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- Bullying: talk, find out, act
Most often, the victims of these disorders were girls. Bullying was found to be more common in large families where three or more children were raised together. The aggressors were usually older brothers. The average age of a child at which they began to systematically bully him was 8 years.
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- Bullying: get out of the role of “victim”
The authors of the study note the neglect of parents as an important factor predisposing a child to the formation of a negative attitude towards the world. “Social learning, as well as learning how to build relationships with peers, starts at home, and when children are bullied, it can have serious long-term consequences, like those we found in our study,” says one of the co-authors of the work, Dieter Wolke (D. Wolke), professor of psychology at the University of Warwick. “It is important to note that parents are always able to set clear rules about what is acceptable in conflicts between children and what is not, and they should consistently intervene in children’s relationships when they observe cases of constant harassment of one by another.”
* L. Bowes et al. «Sibling Bullying and Risk of Depression, Anxiety, and Self-Harm: A Prospective Cohort Study». Pediatrics, 2014.