Growing up with siblings means you are less likely to get divorced later in life, a study shows. Researchers found that having brothers or sisters significantly reduced the chances of your marriage breaking down. For each additional sibling, the probability of divorce declined by up to 11 per cent.Apr 9, 2023
The study used data from the General Social Survey, which involved interviews with about 57,000 adults from across the United States at 28 points between 1972 and 2012.
The results showed that each additional sibling up to about seven provided additional protection from divorce, Downey said. More siblings than that didn’t provide additional protection, although they did not hurt, either.
The good effect of siblings was seen among Americans of all generations studied.
“Siblings help protect against divorce among adults now just as much as they did 50 years ago,” Bobbitt-Zeher said.
The researchers took into account a wide variety of other factors that may have affected the results.
“One argument might be that it isn’t siblings that matter, but some other difference between large families and small families,” Downey said. “It could have been that small families are more likely to have a single parent, or have some other issue that may hurt children in their future marriage relationship.”
So the researchers analyzed a variety of variables of both the respondents they surveyed and their parents that could have played a role in future divorces, including education, socioeconomic status, family structure, race, age at marriage, whether the respondents had children, gender role attitudes and religious affiliation, among others.
“When we added in all of these controls, nothing took away the relationship we saw between siblings and later divorce,” Bobbitt-Zeher said. “None of these other factors explained it away.”
While the study itself can’t explain the protective effect of having siblings, Downey said there are good reasons for the findings.
“Growing up in a family with siblings, you develop a set of skills for negotiating both negative and positive interactions. You have to consider other people’s points of view, learn how to talk through problems. The more siblings you have, the more opportunities you have to practice those skills,” he said.
“That can be a good foundation for adult relationships, including marriage.”
這項研究很有意思。
1）每增加一個sibling, 可以減少2% （maximum 6 siblings)
2) 估計跟從小就鍛練交洗能力有關。
3）這是一項十年前的研究。
