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Family law's intense concentration on marriage and parenthood has left little room for legal attention directed at any other family relationship. The breadth of this exclusion from family law's canon is enormous. Examining the legal treatment of one noncanonical family relationship, whose marginalization in family law is particularly remarkable, can provide a foundation for better understanding the consequences of family law's narrowness. The sibling relationship offers a striking illustration of a crucial, yet legally neglected, family tie. Siblings can give each other support, love, nurturing, and stability. But the law governing children's family relationships focuses almost exclusively on children's ties with their parents rather than children's ties with their siblings, making only modest, scattered, and unsystematic efforts to safeguard sibling relationships when they are in jeopardy. Siblings who have lived together for years are sometimes separated at adoption or parental divorce or death with no right to contact each other, communicate, or visit. Siblings who are separated early on may have no opportunity and no right even to learn of each other's existence. Nonetheless, sibling relationships have received amazingly little attention from courts, legislatures, and scholars. This Essay uses the example of sibling relationships to explore family law's treatment of noncanonical family ties and to consider some of the reform possibilities that emerge when we expand family law's focus beyond marriage and parenthood.

This paper examines the embodied language practices through which siblings in two middle-class Los Angeles families structure their participation while apprenticing younger siblings into routine household chores, self-care and during care-taking activities. Siblings make use of a range of directive forms (including requests as well as imperatives) and participant frameworks drawn from their family, peer group and school cultures. Families build accountable actors and family cultures through the ways they choose to choreograph and monitor routine activity in the household, using both hierarchical or more inclusive frameworks. Data are drawn from the video archive of UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families.

AbstractIt is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family. Using administrative data on children from both Florida and Denmark, the paper examines the effects of having a disabled younger sibling. To address the identification challenge, the paper compares the differential effects for first- and second-born children in three-plus-child families, taking advantage of the fact that birth order influences the amount of time that a child spends in early childhood with their younger siblings, disabled or not. The paper finds evidence that, relative to the first born, the second child in a family is differentially affected when the third child is disabled.

SummarySibling relations are by nature ambivalent with high levels of both altruistic helping and competition. Higher relatedness is often assumed to reduce the occurrence of conflicts between siblings, but evidence of this has been scarce and mixed. Siblings typically compete over resources and parental attention, and parental constellations vary with sibship types. Since full-siblings compete over the same two biological parents, while half-siblings have only one shared biological parent and often a higher number of parents overall, it is hypothesized that conflicts are more common between full- than half-siblings. This study tested this assumption using the British Millennium Cohort Study (n=7527 children at age 11). Conflicts were measured as children's reports of how much siblings picked on and hurt each other. Households with full-siblings only, maternal half-siblings only, and both full- and maternal half-siblings were compared. The results show that children who were living with only their full-siblings were more likely to experience sibling conflicts compared with children living with their maternal half-siblings only. This was the case also after controlling for several potentially confounding variables. The results suggest that differential access to parental resources of available biological and step-parents may explain the higher amount of sibling conflict between full- compared with maternal half-siblings.

This research focuses on how siblings are organized following two types of family transitions: foster care placements and parental divorce. Its goal was to identify the family characteristics associated with intact and split sibling groups. The sample was composed of 294 families. Results indicate that siblings are more likely to be separated when children are older and when they have larger age gap with their siblings; arrangements in which siblings are separated produce greater instability for them.

AbstractAlthough commonly cited as explanations for patterns of sibling similarity and difference, observational learning and sibling deidentification processes have rarely been examined directly. Using a person‐oriented approach, we identified patterns in adolescents' perceptions of sibling influences and connected these patterns to sibling similarities and differences and sibling relationship qualities. Participants included two adolescent‐age siblings (firstborn age M = 16.39, second‐born age M = 13.78) from 171 maritally intact families. Two‐stage cluster analyses revealed three sibling influence profiles: modeling, deidentification, and non‐reference. Analyses revealed differences in the correlations between firstborn and second‐born siblings' personal qualities across the three groups and differences in the sibling relationship qualities of younger siblings who reported modeling vs. those who reported deidentifying from their older siblings. Discussion focuses on refining the study of sibling influence processes.