Parenting and Sibling Relations in Predicting the Development of Personality Traits

The impacts of sibling relationship quality during childhood are largely unexplored in predicting the development of internalising and externalising behaviour problems. Syntheses of research into sibling relations point out the overlapping influential factors that cause variations in sibling relationships during childhood, such as child temperament, family constellation variables and the parent-child relationship, indicating that the construct of sibling relationship quality is derived from the coherence of four trajectories: (a) sibling behaviour and interactions, (b) family emotional climate, (c) parental management and the parent’s interactions with siblings and (d) sibling structural features. Noting that the impacts of childhood sibling relations on the development of personality traits are unexplored directly in the literature, this chapter has critically appraised the fragmented psychological and social patterns of personality traits across developmental, behaviour and sibling literature, highlighting the interrelationships between these trajectories to conclude a tentative theoretical conceptualisation of how parental behaviour and childhood sibling relationships affect child maladjustment outcomes related to predicting developmental personality traits. A further conjecture has been suggested that the quality of parent-child relationships and childhood sibling relationships can be a significant moderator for developmental personality traits, conceptualising risk and resiliency factors for developing callous-unemotional (CU) behaviours in the parent-child-siblings network. Future empirical research is a warranted endeavour to evaluate the tentative conclusions.