This article explores how parental emotional availability shapes sibling bonds. It highlights the development of secure attachments and individual identities within healthy families, contrasting this with the effects of parental unavailability on sibling relationships.
Repeating a toxic pattern or rigidly doing the opposite can be equally destructive.In a healthy family, a mother and father are available and competent, so that each child is able to develop a secure and separate sense of self. Children who are clear about their ownand allowed to go off and explore the world and return to the parent/s as a safe haven develop a sense of themselves as separate at the same time that they feel love andis based on each child feeling securely separate.
Writer Jamaica Kincaid’s recounting of her experience of her youngest brother’s death from AIDS at the age of 33 is a good example of the way in which the relationship to siblings is connected to the tie with the parents. In this case, Kincaid was the oldest child. She had three brothers—between nine and 13 years younger.
When she returned, Kincaid was confronted with the change in her mother as well as a new reality—a family of which she had not been a part. To add insult to injury, she was given responsibility for taking care of her brothers—the usurpers. She experienced her brothers as aliens—males, born of a different father and, in her mind, the cause of the change in her mother.
Sibling Relationships Parental Availability Emotional Development Family Dynamics Secure Attachment
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