Sibling Identity and Relationships: Sisters and Brothers (Relationships and Resources)

Sibling Identity and Relationships

What does it mean to be a sister or a brother, and are such relationships born or made? What do children and young people see as the defining features of their sibling relationships, and how does this relate to social context? Sibling Identity and Relationships explores the special place that siblings occupy in the lives of children and young people and provides new insights into sibling identity and relationships. Drawing on social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives, it discusses who constitutes a sibling, emotional connections and separations, conflict and aggression and how siblings construct and conduct their relationship out of the home, at school and in local communities. Sibling Identity and Relationships explores the ways that siblings are important for children’s and young people’s social and emotional sense of self in relation to others, throwing light on broader debates about social and psychic divisions in wider society. This book will appeal to academics and students of childhood studies and social work as well as health and social care professionals. Rosalind Edwards is Professor in Social Policy and Director of the Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group, London South Bank University, UK. Lucy Hadfield is currently Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at The Open University, UK. Helen Lucey is Lecturer in Social Psychology at The Open University, UK. Melanie Mauthner is Lecturer in Social Policy in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University, UK.

Relationships and Resources Series editors: Janet Holland and Rosalind Edwards London South Bank University

A key contemporary political and intellectual issue is the link between the relationships that people have and the resources to which they have access. When people share a sense of identity, hold similar values, trust each other and reciprocally do things for each other, this has an impact on the social, political and economic cohesion of the society in which they live. So, are changes in contemporary society leading to deterioration in the link between relationships and resources, or new and innovative forms of linking, or merely the reproduction of enduring inequalities? Consideration of relationships and resources raises key theoretical and empirical issues around change and continuity over time as well as time use, the consequences of globalisation and individualisation for intimate and broader social relations, and location and space in terms of communities and neighbourhoods. The books in this series are concerned with elaborating these issues and will form a body of work that will contribute to academic and political debate. Other titles include: Moving On Bren Neale and Jennifer Flowerdew Marginalized Mothers Val Gillies

Sibling Identity and Relationships

Sisters and brothers

Rosalind Edwards, Lucy Hadfield, Helen Lucey and Melanie Mauthner

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Rosalind Edwards, Lucy Hadfield, Helen Lucey and Melanie Mauthner

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0–415–33929–4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–33930–8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–44880–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–33929–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–33930–8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–44880–9 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Introduction: understanding sibling relationships

2

Who is a sister and a brother? Biological and social ties

20

Siblings in the self: sameness, difference and changing identifications

38

4

Everyday practices: talk, activity, care and power

59

5

Dealing with conflict and aggression

77

6

Siblings in local communities

102

7

Conclusion: diversity and difference in sibling identity and relationships

118

Notes Bibliography Index

124 125 133

3

1

Boxes, Illustrations and Table

Boxes 2.1 5.1

The circle map method Faber’s and Mazlish’s (1988) levels of conflict

27 88

Illustrations 2.1 2.2 2.3

Sam’s circle map Spike’s circle map Melody’s circle map

29 32 34

Table 2.1

Elgar’s and Head’s types of sibling relationships

23

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding the ‘Sibling practices: children’s understandings’ project as part of the Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group’s programme of work, and to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for funding the ‘Sibling relationships in middle childhood: children’s views’ project. Both of these research projects gave us time and resources to interview children and young people about their relationships with their sisters and brothers. Their accounts form the basis of the book, and we are indebted to our interviewees and their families for making us welcome in their homes and enthusiastically engaging with the research process. All the names used in the book are pseudonyms, often chosen by the children and young people themselves. Jane Williams and Anosua Mitra provided us with crucial administrative support. Charlotte Ashton, Rachel Atkinson, Margaret Lopex, Amanda Nicholas and Helen Worger also helped with transcription of the interviews. Olivia Thompson Edwards (age 9) was cultural consultant to the projects. We have also benefited from constructive discussion of our work with many of our colleagues, including: Suki Ali, Simon Blake, Jenny Frank, Jane Franklin, Val Gillies, Tina Grigoriou, Clem Henricson, Janet Holland, Ginny Morrow, Ute Navidi, Bren Neale, Alison Pike, Emma Renold and Rachel Thomson. We wish that we had taken account of all their valuable comments!

Chapter 1

Introduction Understanding sibling relationships

Introduction In Crow Lake, Mary Lawson’s fictional account of a group of four siblings growing up in a remote community by a Canadian lake, the protagonist reflects on the emotional legacy of her once inseparable and now distant bond with her older brother: It should have been impossible to leave Matt behind. This crisis I was going through, not to mention the ache which I seemed to have carried around with me for most of my life – of course they were to do with him. How could it be otherwise? Everything I now was, I owed to him. All the years of watching him, learning from him, coming to share his passion – how could I not be affected by the way things had turned out? (2002: 243) The book evokes a subtle portrait of the intense emotions aroused by sibling relationships including the ambivalence at their heart. What is a sister or a brother – are such relationships born or made? What are the possibilities and practices of love and care alongside hate, rivalry and indifference between sisters and brothers? In this book we explore these sorts of questions in relation to children’s and young people’s sibling relationships. We review a range of literature and perspectives in the field, and present evidence from new research about their own understandings of their everyday interactions with their sisters and brothers. We write about sibling relationships with a broad rather than fixed definition of such ties. Nor does biology or law alone define who counts as a sibling. Furthermore, we do not assume that ‘good’ relationships are charged with positive emotions, nor that there is a set of easily identifiable practices and principles, which, if adhered to, will result in ‘healthy’ sibling relationships. Listening to children and young people talk about life with their sisters and brothers suggests that these relationships, whether biological or social, are more significant for some than others. Some will feel

2

Introduction

close to their sisters and brothers. Others with fairly bland ties or little significant emotional resonance between them feel greater connection and attachment towards friends or other kin than to their siblings. Some may have a fairly fraught relationship, characterised by conflict, but this does not necessarily represent a destructive situation in need of intervention from parents or experts. At the heart of relationships between siblings – of whatever quality – lie issues of identity and relationality. Lateral ties with sisters and brothers form part of many children’s lives from their early years, as much as vertical bonds to their parents. Their siblings form an important part of who they are, their relationship to other people and their sense of their place in the social world. Identity and relationships mutually constitute each other. Our sense of self is relational; formed and shaped by our interactions with other people. It is constructed and experienced through cultural, social and symbolic connections that bind us to others in both positive and negative ways. These connections involve an interdependent sense of the self. That is, they constitute elements of our own dependence on others and independence from them, as well as conceptions of these others’ reliance on or autonomy from us. These complex interdependencies invoke a sense of self, a subjectivity, that is contradictory, fragmented, non-rational and to some extent hidden from view. Identity and relationality as key aspects of sibling ties include social meanings constituted in the kinds of discourses and practices that relationships are formed through, as well as more internally embedded emotional and psychic dynamics. Later in this chapter we say more about how we conceptualise these ideas, in terms of drawing on social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives in understanding children’s and young people’s sibling relationships. We also describe the sisters and brothers whom we spoke to and outline the two studies of siblings that inform this book. First, however, we consider why sibling ties deserve this kind of sociological and psychodynamic attention: why they have been neglected in these perspectives, as opposed to being given the attention they receive in other disciplines and substantive fields such as psychology; and why relationships with sisters and brothers are important in a changing social landscape.

Why siblings? Many children belong to a sibling group, and ties with sisters and brothers are likely to be the longest-standing ones that we have (Sanders 2004). Despite their social and emotional significance, though, there is an uneven interest shown in the topic by researchers. Psychologists and anthropologists have studied siblings far more than sociologists or psychoanalysts. Reasons for this partial interest range across psychologists’ attention to child development

Introduction

3

and anthropologists’ focus on kin networks in cultures other than western post-industrialised societies. In the psychological field in particular, sibling relationships have been studied from a problem-focused perspective. Psychologists have mainly concentrated on sibling group composition, namely birth order, age gap and gender make-up. They correlate these factors with outcomes for children relating to intelligence, personality type, educational achievement and career/occupational success, eating disorders and incest (e.g. Carr Steelman et al. 2002; Cawson et al. 2000; Laviola 1992). Relational patterns between parents, and between parents and their children, are also said to shape interactions between sisters and brothers and to account for differences between siblings growing up (e.g. Stocker and Dunn 1994). Identity and relationality in children’s sibling relationships are left aside, and the absence of children’s own voices and perspectives in this work is striking. Nearly all this sort of work takes a ‘top down’ expert view (Edwards et al. 2005). In the family therapy field, sibling relationships are often seen as a subsystem, part of the group dynamics within the family system. The family is conceived as a system of ‘feedback’ transaction loops, with all the parts interrelating in a circular manner to produce a functioning that is irreducible to its individual components (e.g. Epstein and Bishop 1981). When families fail to adapt to changing circumstances or members operate in ways that are detrimental to the family system, they are seen as dysfunctional. Thus a conflictual relationship between siblings is evidence of a dysfunction in the family system as a whole and needs to be treated as such. In addition to using a mechanistic language devoid of feeling or personhood, this orientation poses the family as a whole, and relationships within it, as circular cause and effect. A family systems approach holds out the promise of an unproblematic, smoothly functioning independent system, while often leaving the nature of the social and psychic relationships within it, and the place of the family in their wider social environment, unaddressed (Morgan 1985). Advice books for parents often highlight one aspect of sibling relationships as of especial interest – sibling rivalry. Numerous self-help books address envy and aggression between sisters and brothers, and how to deal with them (e.g. Borden 2003; Faber and Mazlish 1988; Goldenthal 1999; Hart 2001; McEwan 1996; Spungin and Richardson 2002; Wolf 2003; Woolfson 2002). As with the psychological and family systems approaches, this literature emphasises problems. Both social context and children’s own perspectives on what constitute strengths and difficulties are left aside. The relative neglect in sociological and psychoanalytic work of children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers lies partly in an overriding preoccupation with parent–child relationships, and the way that much research about family life is led by a policy agenda that is shaped in particular ways (Mauthner 2005; Mitchell 2003). The family policy

4

Introduction

agenda is driven by a focus on parent–child relationships and family problems (Edwards and Gillies 2004). Education, health and social services and other agencies and professionals generally see parents (especially mothers) as responsible for their children’s character and achievements. Consequently, children’s relationships with their siblings hardly figure in the training of social workers, health visitors, teachers and other professionals in agencies who work with children and families in everyday situations or who intervene in adverse circumstances. Yet such agencies and practitioners often operate with underexplored assumptions about ‘normal’ sibling relationships and their implications. One field in which sibling relationships are seen as important in themselves is where children are removed from their family of origin, with concerns that they should be kept together in care and adoption placements (Mullender 1999b). Generally, a ‘social problem’ framework and a focus on the socialisation and regulation of children by parents have characterised both family policy and family research. There is a normative preoccupation with adult intimate relationships, such as heterosexuality and cohabitation (Smart 2004), and a concomitant lack of common expectations, social regulations or institutions surrounding sibling relationships (Mauthner 2005). Another key reason for focusing on the significance and qualities of children’s and young people’s sibling experiences is the changing social landscape in which they are growing up. Changing family forms mean that a variety of siblings beyond the full biological tie potentially fill the social vista, including through increasing numbers of step-families and ‘families of choice’ (e.g. Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2004; Weeks et al. 2001). Changing household composition and demographic trends mean that sibling relationships are also on the cusp of becoming a sanctioned family relationship. As people live longer, siblings may well be becoming alternative providers of forms of care, welfare and residency, with implications for decisions about housing and welfare support (S.H. Matthews 1987). Indeed, there are demands to legally recognise the inheritance rights of elderly siblings who have lived together in a similar way as for same-sex partnerships (White 2004). Contemporary social life is also said to be characterised by a greater focus on intimacy in personal relationships and shifts away from the obligations of traditional family life to new, negotiated rather than prescribed, forms of association and sociability (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Rose 2004), although some contest this conception of a shift (Jamieson 1998). Within this debate, attention has largely focused on intimacy between adults. Yet, as they grow up, young children often spend more time with their sisters and brothers than with anyone else, and the longevity of these sibling ties makes them distinctive. The sociability and intimacy that are learnt through playing and arguing, joking and bickering, caring and fighting, with siblings form a significant part of the social and psychic relations

Introduction

5

experienced in family life and the wider social world. Thus, at a time when there are debates about ideas and ideals in personal relationships, attention to sibling ties can reveal hidden facets of everyday intimacy that have been little studied. Indeed, given preoccupations about individualisation within intimate relationships, a distinctive feature of sibling relationships is their seriality; that is, the ability to be one among a series of more than one (a sibling group) while at the same time remaining aware of uniqueness (Mitchell 2003). This requires a shift in gaze away from the ascendancy of individualised autonomous rational selves towards interdependent identity and relational practices and meanings. As a result of problem-centred attention in some fields, and neglect of sibling relationships in others, the kinds of knowledge and theories available for understanding sibling ties are partial and limited; shaped by certain sets of ideas that in particular decades have become more influential than others. Nonetheless, we can point to some recent consideration of sibling relationships from sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives that prioritise them and that draw on children’s and young people’s own accounts of their experiences. Sociologists have explored the impact of employment in family businesses on teenage siblings’ identity and sense of belonging to a particular ethnic community (Song 1999), and documented the role that sibling networks play in adults’ emigration from the Caribbean (Chamberlain 1999). Sisters and brothers have also been shown to provide children with a sense of emotional and practical care (Brannen et al. 2000), with children of Pakistani origin placing a particularly positive emphasis on sibling bonds (Morrow 2003). One of us, Melanie Mauthner (2002), has revealed the intricate dynamics of power and care at play in sister relationships. Psychoanalysts have theorised the inherent coexistence of similarity and difference in sibling relationships as an important aspect of the formation of identity in psychic life (e.g. Coles 2003; Mitchell 2003). These studies provide a springboard for our exploration of children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers in this book. In the next section, we set out our intention to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives for understanding sibling ties and their meanings.

A multi-disciplinary approach In our investigation of children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers, we bring into dialogue social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives. Each of these approaches offers us complementary strengths for discussing identity and relationality, as we elaborate below, in ways that allow us to exceed their respective blind spots and limitations. Merging disciplinary perspectives, rather than maintaining their integrity, runs the risk of blunting specific insights and ignoring incompatibilities

6

Introduction

(McLeod and Yates 2005). As Juliet Mitchell says specifically in relation to psychoanalytic and sociological approaches: It is always difficult to correlate unconscious psychic material with social factors – the social becomes unconscious and then emerges from unconsciousness into accessible preconsciousness only through its utter transformation. (2003: 40) We draw on particular aspects of each perspective to look at a variety of features of sibling ties – who is considered a sibling, sameness and difference, talk and activities, responsibility and conflict, and life in local communities. Our multi-disciplinary stance thus resembles a mirror ball or kaleidoscope effect (Stanley 1985, 1986), using different facets from social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives that catch the light of sibling relationships and reflect them back at us from first this and then that angle, producing a variety of complex patterns composed by the same elements. We treat social constructionism and psychodynamics as theoretical ‘toolboxes’ containing concepts that allow us to accommodate and interweave the social world of constructed meanings and the psychic world of emotions, anxieties and defences, and to bring into play the structural aspects of social life alongside the structures of the mind. This multi-disciplinary framework allows us to explore these different worlds creatively: by speaking more than one conceptual language, by working with differing notions of reality, and by mining tensions between rational/irrational and conscious/unconscious understandings, experiences and motivations. This identified need and desire to work across disciplinary boundaries and to draw on an eclectic (albeit a specific) mix of conceptual tools to understand children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers are, in part, shaped by the range of our own theoretical allegiances, as well as our personal experiences. Topics of study and personal experience often overlap for researchers, perhaps particularly those working in the families field (Ribbens and Edwards 1998) – although not all acknowledge it. Here we make visible traces of both our theoretical and our personal engagement in this area. Ros Edwards’s research on people’s family lives and relationships is underpinned by a grounded approach rooted in the perspectives of people themselves. This occurs in the context of the dominant beliefs about, and policies and practice initiatives addressing, the nature of contemporary family life that provide the focus of her social policy disciplinary background. For Ros, the topic of siblings resonates with her experience as an older sister whose relationship with her ‘little sister’ has gone through shifting phases of closeness and distance. Melanie Mauthner and Lucy Hadfield are also ‘big sisters’, and this could have led to the privileging of a first-born perspective in our analyses, with taken-for-granted assumptions about the

Introduction

7

nature and flows of power, care and conflict, if not for invaluable interventions from Helen Lucey with a youngest sister viewpoint. Equally, Ros’s perspective on sibling relationships is strongly informed by her generational family history. Social aspects of sibling ties, rather than being grounded merely in biological kinship, are evident in generations before and after her. Her grandmother and her sister, in their early teens in the 1910s, acquired a new sister. In the tenement block in which they lived, they and their mother heard the cries of a toddler and went to investigate. The family inhabiting the rooms from which the crying came had ‘done a bunk’; disappeared leaving behind them arrears of unpaid rent and a small girl. In the absence of social services departments and legal requirements of the time, they took in the child, and she lived with them and was referred to as their sister thereafter. She was a member of ‘our family’. Moving down a few generations, Ros’s now adult children have always bridled at any ‘ignorant’ attempts to qualify references to their sisters/brother relationship with prefixes such as half- and foster-. Lucy’s sociological training and practitioner work with children have led her to prioritise children’s and young people’s agency, understandings and experiences within their structural context. Her commitment to childfocused research forms part of the new sociology of childhood and changes in practice and policy surrounding children’s environments and schooling. When Lucy first studied young siblings she was struck by the absence of children’s accounts. Professionalised discourses of ‘normal’ sibling conflict prevail, backed up by the authority of models from developmental and clinical psychology. Yet ‘sibling rivalry’ was an alien notion to her as she observed her younger ‘child genius’ brother’s exploits. Lucy watched as her brother set up his car-wash business (at age 7) and multimillion-pound computer website (age 13), spoke at the ‘Young World Leader of Tomorrow’ conference (age 19), and entered Harvard University (age 21). Instead of rivalry, she feels proud of his successes, whilst she pursued a traditional academic career. Similarly, she wonders how birth order researchers would respond to the ‘disruptions’ of a younger sibling who sets up a second e-business, employs his father and funds his older sister through university. It was not until we began our research that Lucy realised that children’s accounts demonstrate that all sibling experiences are really complex, not just her own! Helen’s route through sociological training to an interest in psychoanalysis has led to a fused psychosocial approach to research. Her experience of having seven older siblings – five brothers and two sisters – led her to ask questions about how siblings negotiate the mess of emotions, of love, hate and indifference, care, protection and neglect, that circulate between them. When Freud talked about the ‘unfathomably deep hostility’ that characterises sibling relationships (Fliess 1956: 8, in Coles 2003: 29), he drew on a seam of cultural lore and myth that narrates western ideas of family and identity.

8

Introduction

Furthermore, as the eldest sibling within a complicated childhood of sibling rivalry and death, Freud treated all siblings as though they were the eldest. In the process he marginalised middle and youngest sibling experiences. Yet for every eldest sibling there must exist a youngest one, even middle ones, so to prioritise the experience of the eldest is to neglect that of most siblings. Helen’s accident of birth leads her to ask, what of the youngest child, who does not suffer the outrage of dethronement by a new baby, but rather is the baby who unwittingly does the deposing? How might it feel to be the object of such rivalrous emotions and envious projections? Does the youngest feel no sibling rivalry of her own? And what of the more tender feelings that younger siblings provoke in older ones, of care and protection? Melanie’s grounding in Women’s Studies and feminist standpoint theory blends post-structuralism and auto/biography to inform her sociological take on sibling cultures. Her interest in siblings is personal, political and intellectual. Being the eldest of three siblings shapes her research questions. An early experience of fieldwork for another study, in a household much like her own, involved interviewing teenage sisters about health while their younger brother played in the background. These siblings’ intimate banter and knowledge of each other seemed very familiar to her. Soon after, Melanie started her doctoral research about sistering. While employed on health projects in the 1990s when AIDS campaigns loomed large, she began to investigate sister relationships as a forum for learning about sexual health. Feminist studies of sexuality and female friendship inspired her in this, as did the biographical turn in the social sciences. The generational element of her mother’s tie with her own sister and girlfriends struck Melanie as crucial for thinking about femininity. The ways that some feminists theorised gender and identity through a post-structural lens offered exciting avenues for analysing sister relationships. She started to dissect distinctive features of sistering in order to represent the rich memories and complex practices that make up its cultural meaning for her, for her mother, and for sisters more generally. These various disciplinary allegiances and personal experiences of sibling relationships, combined with the understandings of the children and young people taking part in our studies, have led us to believe that simply adopting either a social constructionist or a psychodynamic perspective is not enough on its own. The complex intersubjective and relational dynamics of being a sibling are best served by employing concepts from each in a creative way, to shed light on different aspects of the relationship. Sometimes our analysis is more sociologically inflected, and at others more driven by psychodynamic understandings. Throughout, however, we keep in mind key issues of identity and relationality in sibling ties. Both social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives have long histories of research on individuals, groups and social life, and utilise particular concepts in this endeavour. We unpack them, separately, here.

Introduction

9

Social constructionism Social constructionism is a broad church within the social sciences that rests on the key premise that meanings and realities are negotiated and shared between people (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Here, the importance of the social world is paramount, with social history, current cultural and social practices, structures and divisions, and, importantly, the patterning of everyday conversations and social interactions lying at the heart of what it means to be a person and how we make sense of our lived experience, as individuals and as members of groups. Within this perspective, social reality is not a static entity that can somehow be described once and for all; rather it is understood as a continuously shifting and flowing history of relationships. In contrast with essentialist and individualised psychological perspectives on social construction, therefore, sociologists take account of the existence and acting-out of different, multiple versions of social reality for different social groups according to time and culture, depending on the specific circumstances and processes of interaction. Social constructionism pays particular attention to the part that language and discourse play in the construction of reality, and maintains that identity and a sense of self are intimately bound up with systems of meaning. In a post-structural take on social constructionism, people are viewed on the one hand as competent agents who build the social world in communication with each other and create social meaning through interaction, and on the other as subject to the influence of powerful underlying social structures and forces (e.g. Foucault 1981). People interact and build diverse meanings and understandings from specific social and geographical locations, and inhabit unequal and hierarchical categories of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and so on, that are themselves socially constructed. We perceive other people as female or male, from a particular ethnicity, richer or poorer, older or younger, and as like or unlike us, and this has social and cultural significance for us. Some identities, attributes and ways of understanding others, are more powerful and legitimised than others at particular points in time and in particular contexts. Moreover, dominant cultural, political and ‘expert’ professional ‘discourses’, as bodies of knowledge and frameworks for practice, privilege particular ways of defining the social world and repress others (e.g. Woodhead 1997). People are both authors and products of the social world. On a more structural level, then, our own identity is profoundly relational in that it is bound up with others’ identities and shaped by the meanings and ways of understanding them that are available to us. Within this, our identity can also shift about depending on the relational situation and context, with aspects of social and cultural difference or similarity coming to the fore and others muted. Thus identity and relationality, knowledge and conceptions of one’s self and one’s relationship to others and the wider world, arise

10

Introduction

from social processes and interactions within particular, socially structured and unequal, environments. Given this, social constructionists understand the formation, negotiation and maintenance of individual and group identities, and their relationships to each other, through looking at the practices and discourses that make up everyday life in specific contexts. In exploring sibling relationships then, a social constructionist perspective with a post-structuralist inflection starts from the point that the category and meaning of sibling, and specifically the categories and meanings of being an older, a middle or a younger sister or brother, are themselves socially constructed, and that who fills these categories and their meaning is variable rather than given. Children and young people are both subject to predominant discourses and structures of, and creators of the lived social practices of, age, class, ethnicity, gender and so on. These features of social life will shape their understandings and experiences both of who is considered to be a sibling and of being a sibling in a particular family living in a particular place. On a more general level, wider cultural and power relationships will be reflected in, and re-created through, children’s and young people’s specific interactions with their sisters and brothers, and their interaction as a sibling group within the wider world. On a specific level, children and young people will also construct the meaning of being a particular sibling to a particular sister or brother through their everyday interactions with them in the home, school, local neighbourhood and other environments. Sibling relationships are created and maintained through talk, activities, rituals, unwritten conventions and constantly negotiated rules and practices, much like other family bonds and friendships, rather than being ‘natural’ and inevitable occurrences (Morgan 1996; Duck 1991). Children’s and young people’s sense of self is shaped in these complex ways at the same time as these processes shape their understanding of social relationships, through the everyday giving and receipt of care and closeness with their sisters and brothers, playing out of autonomy and interdependence, and coping with domination and subordination, rivalry and conflict in their relationship with their siblings. These flows of closeness and care, and domination and subordination, are institutionalised in wider society, in families and between particular siblings (e.g. Holland et al. 1996). Here, a social constructionist and poststructuralist perspective means that we take account of power but do not automatically assume that particular siblings possess power and are more powerful than other siblings. For example, we do not take for granted that younger siblings are subject to, and powerless in relation to, their older sisters and brothers. In line with a post-structuralist approach to the social construction of power, we treat power as relational, exercised in interaction, rather than held by an individual, and as diffuse and subject to shifts depending on context. Siblings are both inserted into and generators of the relations of power that are in play both inside and outside the home.

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11

More broadly, some ways of defining and understanding sibling relationships are accorded greater power and legitimacy than others. When we consider how sisters and brothers appear in popular culture, social research and theories about their relationship, in self-help books for parents, in educational, health and welfare practice, we note assumptions about what counts as a ‘normal’, ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ sibling relationship. As we have already noted, sibling rivalry is a constant refrain and, in ‘expert’ bodies of knowledge, a taken-for-granted way of understanding many facets of what goes on between sisters and brothers. Yet this leaves aside more variable social and cultural understandings of behaviours that are constructed as ‘rivalrous’. Nonetheless, conceptions such as rivalry take us from the social construction of sibling relationships towards their psychic construction. Psychodynamics The second strand of our conceptual framework is drawn from a psychodynamic perspective. As a founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) laid down the core conceptual foundations of psychoanalytic thought including the notion of the dynamic unconscious and the centrality of the Oedipus complex in the development of the personality. The assertion that the Oedipal drama, which is played out between parents and their child, is not only universal but also establishes the foundations of all other relationships, has had particular consequences for how sibling relationships are understood within the various strands of psychoanalytic thought. Primarily it has meant that for Freudian, Kleinian and object relations theorists, the parent–child relationship is the most important in creating an emotional environment in which children might grow into psychological health: siblings necessarily come second. Even the majority of those psychoanalytic writers who study sibling relationships more fully assume that parent–child bonds constitute the core relationships for psychic development (Bank and Kahn 1982). When viewed through this lens intense sibling bonds are seen to be a response to inadequate or unsatisfactory parenting, as a substitute for ‘good enough’ mothering, rather than of intrinsic value. On the other hand, where adult parenting is adequate, siblings are considered important in the infant’s process of separation from the parent, as with Donald Winnicott (1951), who uses the concept of ‘transitional spaces and objects’ with regard to siblings’ role in separation. This insistence on the universality and absolute centrality of the Oedipus complex has hindered the theoretical consideration of siblings and other lateral relationships. Siblings in the Oedipal theatre are reduced to bit-part actors, pushed to the ‘periphery of the psyche’ (Coles 2003: 41) and rendered irrelevant in discussions of mental health. Furthermore, sibling attachment is marginalised; rivalry is posited as the norm with sibling experience modelled

12

Introduction

on that of the eldest, and meanings of birth order and status for siblings themselves ignored. More recently, however, some psychodynamic clinicians and writers have challenged the supremacy of the Oedipus complex arguing that it forms only one constellation in the developmental processes that an individual goes through (Coles 2003; Mitchell 2003). Juliet Mitchell challenges the omission of siblings in psychoanalytic theorising. She questions this omission by remarking on the presence of siblings in case histories where their central involvement in patients’ traumatic experiences is ignored or viewed as insignificant: ‘Siblings are everywhere in psychoanalytic accounts – even though they are absent from the theory and the clinical practice’, she writes (Mitchell 2000: xi). When they do appear they are understood as problematic, provoking ‘primal hatred’ and ‘unfathomably deep hostility’ (Coles 2003: 29). Both Coles and Mitchell have gone beyond the legacy of the Oedipus complex to understand more fully the role of siblings in the construction and workings of internal worlds and their analyses demonstrate that sibling relationships are far more psychically varied and rich than an Oedipal perspective allows. Particularly useful for our analysis is the notion of the dynamic unconscious, and the psychodynamic interpretation of anxiety. Both psychodynamic theories and post-structuralism share a commitment to challenging the idea of a rational, knowing subject and instead assume that there are levels of our perception and experience that are both deeply irrational and difficult to access. A psychodynamic version of selfhood or ‘subjectivity’ holds that we are unconsciously defended against experiencing the anxiety that internal conflict brings. Psychic defence mechanisms such as projection and projective identification are developed in early infancy in order to cope with internal conflict and an inevitably disappointing environment. The particular stress on relationality in Kleinian and object-relation psychoanalytic perspectives offers creative paths into thinking through identification and projection in sibling relationships. In developing the concept of the dynamic unconscious Freud proposed that part of our personality resists certain memories, impulses or wishes that cannot be admitted into conscious thought because that part of our personality feels them to be bad or forbidden, or because they simply do not make sense. However, although they are repressed, they remain alive in our unconscious and continually strive for expression. Conscious and unconscious psychological processes form important ideas for thinking about family relationships. The unconscious decentres the idea that we are entirely rational, consciously self-aware beings and challenges the notion that we always know why we think, say and do the things that we do. It introduces the possibility of ambivalence: that we can hold contradictory feelings about others, including siblings. It allows for levels of our perception and experience that are deeply irrational. This is extremely important

Introduction

13

if we are to make sense of the contradictory and conflicting feelings and behaviours that often occur within and between even the most harmonious of sibling groups. The central concept of anxiety is closely connected to the unconscious. Psychoanalytic models take anxiety and intra-psychic conflict to be a constant feature of psychological life from early infancy and, furthermore, as essential to personality development (Freud 1936; Klein 1952b). In this framework we are understood as evolving psychic mechanisms of defence from earliest infancy in order to manage internal aggressive forces as well as external circumstances, which provoke great anxiety. Central to our repertoire of psychic defences to cope with this unconscious anxiety are splitting and projection. Both make it possible to maintain one kind of attitude and feeling at a time, leaving whatever feels contradictory out of our conscious mind and projecting it onto someone else. This understanding of anxiety differs fundamentally from traditional sociological and psychological conceptions that rest on the premise that anxiety always relates to a conscious process or state and so can be identified, measured and subject to rational intervention. For example, self-help publications on how to minimise siblings’ rivalry and conflict and to foster warm relations between them give practical advice to parents, such as being mindful to treat children equally and not set up favourites. Although such intervention is good counsel and may have positive effects on sibling relationships, it does not address the possibility that deeply held, though less consciously accessible, feelings of love, hate and ambivalence may create emotional obstacles to building sibling relationships based on respect. Indeed, as Mitchell tells us (2003: 10): ‘The sibling is par excellence someone who threatens the subject’s uniqueness. The ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself is experienced at the same time as the trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one’s place.’ Projection can be described as the unconscious process through which unwanted feelings such as hate, envy and anger which belong to us but which we cannot acknowledge as our own, are then felt to be inside someone else; at first the mother, father and siblings (Frosh et al. 2002). They come to ‘stand for’ parts of our inner self, albeit at an unconscious level. This defensive organisation has implications for adult and social relations too: aggressive and harmful feelings can be attributed to particular political, social or racial groups, as well as individuals, things, spaces and places (Aitken 1998). These ‘bad’ objects are then demonised. The concept of projective identification taken up by psychoanalysts concerned with group rather than individual processes (Bion 1961) is pertinent to the development of selfhood within sibling groups. It highlights the relationship between the person who is projecting unwanted elements and the object – person, group, place, idea – that these feelings and thoughts become located in. When groups or individuals become the container for the consistent projections of

14

Introduction

others, they must, eventually, become clogged-up with all the material that those others continually push into them. The object of the projections not only comes to be seen by the subject as containing the projected elements of the self, but is also unconsciously manoeuvred into having and even enacting the feelings, states and characteristics that have been projected (Klein 1952a and 1952b). Within sibling groups, one sibling may become a sponge for feelings or attributes disavowed by other family members. One sibling may be described as bright, patient or naughty in contrast with another seen as slow, intolerant or well behaved. Consequently, each person is related to as if one or other of these characteristics formed a core part of their identity. The sibling to whom these behaviours are attributed also sees themselves in this fashion and lives out this projection. In the language of post-structuralism she or he takes up and occupies particular identity positions in the family. In Melanie Klein’s relational framework, anxieties and fears are closely connected to the difficulties of being simultaneously an individual and a social animal (Bion 1961), and the struggle between good and bad feelings that lies at the centre of psychic life. Conflicts and tensions are set up between opposing desires and needs: the desire for individuality and autonomy versus the desire to be part of a group, to belong to a ‘good’ community, the desire for connection versus fear and contempt of dependency (Froggett 2002). These constitute key issues when considering the construction of selfhood within sibling relationships and, indeed, relationships beyond the world of the family, in peer groups, local neighbourhoods, institutions and wider society. Reconciling these opposing wishes is not easy. For some writers this can only be achieved by recognising others as different from the self with their own, separate existence. This can be notoriously difficult for some sisters and brothers: recognising the other can be muddled by projection and projective identification. Some siblings have difficulty in recognising and accepting similarity in one another, others may struggle to hold on to their difference from each other. These intricate dynamics in sibling relationships are worthy of study not least because of their long neglect even if this leaves us with a tension. How do we focus on siblings’ experiences without looking at children’s relationships with parents? Prioritising young voices inevitably silences other standpoints – not least those of parents, cousins, grandparents. We fully appreciate the impact of parenting and parent–child relationships on individuals, sibling relationships and family dynamics. Yet as researchers we opt to privilege young voices. We know how difficult it is to hear younger marginalised voices, whilst also listening to parents’, who are often imbued with an authority carried through claims to rationality, authenticity and, most important of all, legitimacy. Psychoanalysts writing about siblings often base their work on material gathered in clinical contexts with clients, who are in crisis. This produces

Introduction

15

interesting case studies but presents problems for our analysis of the children who took part in our studies, many of whom enjoyed creative and respectful relationships with their siblings. How can these theorisations illuminate sisters’ and brothers’ everyday thoughts, feelings and practices? Together, social constructionism and psychodynamic approaches offer several concepts for us to examine meanings and practices of sibling relationships. These include social structures, power and caring discourses and practices, attachment, identification, anxiety and projection. These two perspectives allow us simultaneously to examine a range of factors from social, cultural and individual differences to group behaviours among sets of siblings, in diverse social contexts, especially linked to class, gender, race/ethnicity and rural/ urban locations. Our multi-disciplinary framework allows us to reveal how issues of identity and relationality are present in and shaped through children’s and young people’s relationships and experiences with their sisters and brothers within and across a number of social and psychic, cultural and material, sites.

Our studies and their samples We focus on children and young people as siblings, and prioritise their voices and experiences in order to explore everyday social and psychic meanings of being a sister or a brother at these points in the life-course. We interviewed children and young people between the ages of 5 and 21 from a range of families and households, class and ethnic backgrounds, and geographical locations in the UK, about their understandings and experiences of being and having siblings. Our interviews formed part of two qualitative studies carried out during 2002–4. One study, ‘Sibling Relationships in Middle Childhood: Children’s Views’, was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The other, ‘Sibling Practices: Children’s Understandings and Experiences’, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group programme of work at London South Bank University. Both studies concentrated on children’s and young people’s everyday life with their siblings, in contrast to research that focuses on siblings in families with problems and who are using particular clinical, therapeutic or other services. The ‘Sibling Relationships in Middle Childhood’ project considered the images and resources that underpin children’s understandings of their sibling relationships, what they themselves consider to be strengths and limitations, and the ways that they deal with them. We interviewed 58 children in ‘middle childhood’ (between 7 and 13 years), from 48 households for this study (in 10 households more than one child was interviewed). The children were drawn from a nationally representative sample of parents of 8–12-year-olds (although the sample for the study was not nationally representative in itself).1 The ‘Sibling Practices’ project addressed social capital

16

Introduction

through a focus on how siblings facilitate and constrain ties, norms, values and relationships for each other through caring practices. The sample was recruited through networking techniques. Groups of siblings were accessed through formal and informal contacts, with as many siblings in the group interviewed as possible (which ranged from two to seven siblings). Forty-four children and young people, aged between 5 and 21, were interviewed from 16 sibling groups. Together, the samples from the two studies provide a broad range of social characteristics. The majority of the children and young people were part of mixed sibling groups (containing sisters and brothers), and about a quarter were sister-only and brother-only groups. About half the children and young people came from strands of the working class, with the other half coming from strands of the middle class (based on parental occupation). Across the two samples, the majority of the children and young people taking part were White, with a quarter of Asian, Black or mixed parentage. In terms of household structures, just over half the children and young people lived in nuclear families with both their biological parents, and about a quarter lived in step-families, while the remaining children and young people lived with their biological mother. Combined, the samples are fairly evenly split between those who had one or two siblings and those who had three or more (up to seven in the largest formation), which is greater than the UK co-residential average of 1.8 children in 2001 (Office for National Statistics 2001). Furthermore, just under half the children had siblings living outside their family household, fairly evenly divided between those who had dependent full, half- or step-siblings living in another family household and those with older full, half- or step-siblings living independently. The majority had contact with these siblings. Geographically, the children and young people lived in a range of metropolitan, urban and rural areas across mainland Britain. The studies shared a similar ‘child-focused’ approach, in which children and young people are treated as socially competent interpreters of, and informants on, their relationship with their sisters and brothers. There are debates about the extent to which researchers should treat children and young people as vulnerable and in need of protection, or as competent, selfdetermining decision-makers. Although we incline towards the latter stance, and wanted to act as ethically as possible in treating what the children told us in the interviews as confidential, we were also aware of a responsibility to support children and young people if they were unhappy or in danger. Further, we also recognise that researching with children especially, but also young people, is shot through with power relations. Inequalities in status and power between children and adults can affect the research process. Children and young people can find it difficult to refuse to take part in research or to exercise much control over the research process. The process of gaining consent from them needs to be guided by each child’s and young person’s competencies, capability and ability. In order that the children and

Introduction

17

young people we contacted might make a decision about whether or not to take part in our studies, and as part of our ethical approach, we wanted them to have full knowledge about the topic and methods, presented in ways that they could understand. So, for each study, we produced an accessible leaflet explaining the nature of the research to them, as well as discussing it with them verbally. In designing our leaflets we took into account the children’s and young people’s age and competencies in the vocabulary that we used and the way that we presented information.2 In each case, we described what the project was about, as well as the interview process and its confidential nature. We gave the children and young people information about how to contact us in case they wanted to ask us any questions before or after their participation. Before the start of the interview we again gave them an opportunity to say if they did not want to participate, and during it to end the interview at any point. During and after the interview we also ensured that we gave them opportunities to ask us questions. Nobody decided not to participate once we had arrived to interview them, but we ended a few interviews early after children told us that they were tired or had another commitment. We also let the children and young people decide if they wanted to be interviewed with their parent/s present and/or siblings or friends, which a few duly did. During and after the interview we also ensured that we gave the children and young people opportunities to ask us questions about the research. Interestingly, what questions were asked were about us – whether we had sisters and brothers and how we got on with them, where we lived? In both studies, most of the interviewees chose their own pseudonym. Our flexible approach within interviews also enabled the children and young people to choose how they discussed their relationships and experiences with their siblings. This took the form that is usual in in-depth interviews, using broad and open-ended questions within the topic areas. In this type of interview, the interviewer attempts to exert a minimal amount of control and to follow up issues being raised by the interviewees while they are talking – a process that generates rich descriptive data. Thus the sequencing and content of questions were not exactly the same for each child and young person. This approach allowed us, as far as it is possible, to get a glimpse of children’s and young people’s understandings about their relationships with their sisters and brothers through their own eyes and discover the sense and meanings that they attributed to them. The interviews were tape-recorded and fully transcribed. We also used drawing, writing and reading activities as another means of enabling children and young people to choose how to discuss their relationships with their siblings. In both our studies, we asked children and young people to fill in a circle map as a way of identifying the people in their lives who they felt were close to them or important in some way. These maps are described and used in Chapter 2. The ‘Sibling Relationships in Middle

18

Introduction

Childhood’ project also used spider diagrams, flow charts and vignettes as part of an effort to enable younger children to lead the interview format and adapt it to their preferred balance of talk and activities. For example, some children preferred mostly to draw or write things down to express themselves while others felt more comfortable mainly talking. In terms of topics covered in the interviews and through the activities, across the two studies these encompassed the range and nature of children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers, including how similar to or different from them they felt; how they compared those relationships to other relationships such as with parents or friends; their family history memories; their daily lives, including household rules and responsibilities; their schooling; socialising with and without siblings; and being out and about in the local neighbourhood and further afield. It is the children’s and young people’s discussion of these topics that led us to identify identity and relationality as undercurrents running deep through their accounts, and thus the themes that we present in this book.

Outline of the chapters The book explores the special, but under-researched, place that siblings occupy in the lives of children and young people. Each chapter addresses different aspects of identity and relationality in relationships with sisters and brothers, drawing as appropriate on the insights provided by social constructionist and psychodynamic approaches that we have discussed above. In each chapter, we pay attention to differences between various sibling groups constituted around race/ethnicity, gender, social class and geographical location. The next chapter considers the question of who is a sister and a brother? It uncovers commonly held beliefs and assumptions about this issue, reviewing answers provided by different perspectives from the literature and drawing on the understandings of children and young people themselves. From a social constructionist perspective, the chapter brings into view elements of the biological and social bases underpinning relationality, in terms of who is considered to be a sibling. We show the way that children and young people themselves weave together biological and social dimensions in their understandings, highlighting the importance of subjective knowledge of each other and everyday living together. This relational social enactment of being a sister and a brother was fused together with, or held alongside, the more technical fact of biological connection. The social construction of who is a sibling raises deeper issues about the nature of these relationships, concerning emotional connections and separations. In Chapter 3 we examine children’s and young people’s feelings of similarities and differences between themselves and their sisters and brothers. We use extended case studies to show the place that siblings have

Introduction

19

in the emotional life of children and young people. The chapter interweaves psychodynamic ideas of identification and projection with sociological concepts of power and social divisions around gender, age and ethnic, religious and class cultures, to reveal the variable and shifting patterns of identification and disidentification among and between siblings. In Chapter 4 we turn to the everyday, taken-for-granted aspects of interaction between siblings through talk, activities and caring, to show how they matter for aspects of children’s identity and sense of relationality. We draw on the concept of ‘sibling practices’ – as the facets of everyday life together that children and young people see as having to do with being a brother or a sister – to pull out the ways that the routine interactions of sibling relationships are constructed around femininity and masculinity, birth order and age hierarchies, and thus are infused with power dynamics that are related to wider social differences. Here, a social constructionist perspective reveals how these practices and their dynamics are variable, fluid and contested. Conflict and aggression are also part of interactions between sisters and brothers, and in Chapter 5 we focus on this feature of sibling relationships – one that is a preoccupation of much other work in the field. Our consideration involves our looking at the social construction of contemporary childhood, to understand this focus and accompanying concerns about how to deal with disputes, rivalry and fights. We also pay attention to the more visceral and unconscious features of conflict and aggression as part of relationality between siblings, and show how these are interlinked with the more structural and socially constructed features of children’s lives. Chapter 6 ventures into the broader context of local communities. It follows siblings out of the home to consider some of the varied ways in which they construct and conduct their relationships in the places, spaces and communities of the ‘outside’ world. We look at the ways in which these sites form part of the complex arena in which children’s and young people’s identities are shaped, and the particular roles that siblings play in the negotiation and mapping of one another’s identities in those geographical, social and psychic landscapes. In so doing, we use both a social constructionist approach to understand sibling relationships within the local morality of community and the production of social capital as shaped by social divisions, and psychodynamic ideas about identification and disidentification with groups and individuals within a certain location. Finally, in Chapter 7 we conclude by reviewing our approach, and drawing together some of the recurring issues in sibling identity and relationships that have emerged throughout the book. We consider them in terms of the interplay between diversity in the sense of varying and shifting constellations of psychic and social themes, and difference in the sense of embedded and enduring emotional and social divisions.

Chapter 2

Who is a sister and a brother? Biological and social ties

Introduction This chapter considers the issue of who is a sister and a brother? At first sight this may seem like a question with a simple answer – siblings are related by biology, through their parents, or at least one parent. Indeed, this ‘technical’ fact is often an assumption underpinning statistics that are collected on children and their families, and in research on children’s sibling relationships. Children’s and young people’s own answers to this question, however, are more complex than this. Their responses bring a social dimension to the question of who is a sister or a brother: the ways in which sibling relationships are socially constructed. For children, sibling relationships are actively built in everyday interactions involving verbal and non-verbal communication as part of lived experience. In this chapter, then, we are primarily using a social constructionist perspective described in Chapter 1 in order to uncover commonly held beliefs and assumptions about the ‘who’ of sibling relationships, and in the process bring into view biological and social elements of identity and relationality. We begin with an overview and assessment of different sorts of approaches to the question of who is a sibling that underlies much research on the topic, and the various links posed between biological and social bonds. The often simplistic associations involved in these approaches are in contrast to the more complex understandings of children and young people themselves. In the rest of the chapter, we explore their accounts. We provide case study examples of the different ways that biological and social constructions of who is a sibling are interwoven. We note how everyday living together, and conceptions of distinctions and elisions between siblings and friends, reveal the socially constructed nature of feelings of identity and relationality in sibling relationships.

Who is a sister and a brother?

21

Who is a sibling? The increasing diversity of family structures occurring in most western societies raises a number of issues for the technical fact of who is a sister or a brother. Increasing rates of divorce and separation, repartnering and step-families (for example, for the UK see National Family and Parenting Institute [NFPI] 2004, and for the USA see US Census Bureau 2003), mean that children may now have full siblings (sharing both biological parents), half-siblings (sharing one biological parent) and step-siblings (who are not biologically related but each of whom has a biological parent in a partner relationship). The resultant sibling diversity is rarely captured in statistics collected on children and families, however. In this section we look at the facts as represented by statistics and typologies, and then consider three main approaches to their social and emotional implications, which stress in turn: social function, personality and psyche and genetics and emotions. Statistics and typologies The demographic figures collected by official bodies, notably government, provide an administrative model of social order and social connections, drawing boundaries around who falls inside a particular category of person, such as sibling, and who does not. These categories are regarded as socially significant, and such constructions then have important consequences for how the state of families is perceived in contemporary society. Statistics about the number of children living together in families are overwhelmingly collected from the point of view of the family as a household unit rather than from the point of view of the child, as Lala Carr Steelman and colleagues illustrate: ‘. . . imagine two families, one with one child and one with four children. If we use the family as the unit of analysis, the average family size is 2.5; however, if we use the child as the unit of analysis, one child is in a family of one and four children are in a family of four, resulting in an average of 3:4’ (Carr Steelman et al. 2002: f. 6). In 2001, in the UK, the average number of dependent children in a family was 1.8 (Office for National Statistics 2001). Just under 60 per cent of children lived in households containing more than one child and 20 per cent of these contained three or more children. This varied by ethnic group. For example, the majority of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children lived in households containing three or more children (50 per cent), most Indian and White children lived in two-child households (45 and 40 per cent respectively), while the majority of Black children (60 per cent) were evenly split between two-child and three- or more-child households (Platt 2002: Figure 4.5). Parental separation and repartnering can mean that children do not necessarily live in the same household as their full biological siblings, and

22

Who is a sister and a brother?

may have half- or step-siblings living in the same or another household. Children may also have siblings – whether full, half- or step- – who are no longer dependent, or are looked-after, and live outside their parental household/s. This adds a further caveat to the technical facts in addition to the one noted by Steelman and colleagues above. Taking children themselves as the unit of analysis and dispensing with boundaries of family/household, the average number of siblings per child may well be higher than the coresidence figures indicate. Yet, there are no figures available that allow us to estimate this. Such technical facts, though, do not address the social and emotional question of whether or not the children involved consider all these different sorts of sibling relationships to be their sisters and brothers? The definition of who is a sibling may be constructed differently among certain groups in different ethnic, cultural, religious and political contexts (Cicirelli 1994; Giallombardo 1966; Lugones and Rosezelte 1995). For example, AfricanCaribbean and African people may view a range of biologically and nonbiologically related family members as siblings (Chamberlain 1999; Graham 1999; Prevatt-Goldstein 1999), and there is research in the USA that focuses on the long-standing practice of ‘going for kin’ amongst African-American communities wherein non-biologically related people refer to, and act towards, each other as brother, sister, mother, father and so on (Liebow 1969; Stack 1974). This raises the issue of the importance of culture, language, interpretation and subjectivity to constructing definitions, and social and emotional experiences, of who is a sibling, rather than a self-evident, biological or legal, state. Being a sibling is a socially constructed relationship, not just a technical biological fact. Some researchers have developed technical typologies and terminologies of forms of sibling relationship (up to 26 categories in the case of Treffers and colleagues, 1999). These begin to move towards acknowledging siblings as a socially constructed relationship. Marian Elgar and Ann Head (1999), for example, relate their categories to family continuity or change. Their nine types of sibling cover full, half-, step-, adopted and foster siblings, and residential arrangements, and are based on some degree of one, some or all of: common genes; common history; family values and culture; and common legal status (see Table 2.1). Thus, their typology takes into account not only the biological tie (genes) but also social ties that are constructed in the everyday experience of living together or their absence (history, family values and culture). Marjut Kosonen (1999) distinguishes between ‘core’ and ‘kin’ siblings, contrasting sisters and brothers who have experienced coresidency with those who have never lived together but who may feel strong emotional ties. Salman Akhtar and Selma Kramer (1999) describe co-resident children who are not biologically related as ‘social siblings’. For some writers, however, this description raises the problem of how long non-biologically related children have to live together before they can be considered siblings

Who is a sister and a brother?

23

Table 2.1 Elgar’s and Head’s types of sibling relationships (1999: 21) Common genes

Common history, family values and culture

Common legal status

Full siblings brought up together







Full siblings brought up apart/separated during childhood



some



Full siblings, one placed away from another at birth



no

 (unless adopted)

Half-siblings brought up together

some



no

Half-siblings brought up apart/separated during childhood

some

some

no

Half-siblings – brought up by one parent – never lived with halfsiblings

some

no

no

Adopted children

no

some



Step-siblings

no

some

no

Foster children (nonrelated children)

no

some

no

(for example, Sanders 2002, on step-siblings). Such a question, in turn, raises the bases of decisions for the construction of categorical boundaries, and who should make them. Focusing on administrative time-frames ignores the meaning of the relationship for the children involved. Social function Much of the research on siblings is from a social functionalist perspective, which takes technical facts further to look at the configuration of sibling groups. The focus is on the number of siblings, their position in the age hierarchy, and the age gap between them. This type of work, which is extensive and overwhelmingly survey-based, highlights the functional outcomes of these technical sibling facts in terms of child development, behaviour and educational attainment (see Steelman et al. 2002; Sulloway 2001, for overviews of studies of this type). James Coleman (1988), for example, argued

24

Who is a sister and a brother?

that the greater the number of children they have, the less parents can invest time and attention in them, with detrimental consequences for children’s socialisation into acceptable social norms and educational attainment. While the definition of how many children constitutes a ‘large’ family would seem to be culturally specific, the number of children in a family has long been a preoccupation of national social policies in various ways. In the UK, it contains underlying fears of disproportionate parental fertility as symbolic of out-of-control sexuality and dysfunctional family life on the part of sections of the working class, immigrant or other marginalised groups. Such families are regarded as a threat to an orderly and controlled th society – from the concerns of the eugenics movement in the early 20 century, to notions of a ‘cycle of deprivation’ and ‘the underclass’ in the th late 20 century, and preoccupations with ‘anti-social families’ in the early st 21 century. In this sense, the biological and the social are tied together at the level of the state of the nation and its subjectivity. Personality and psyche Psychological and psychoanalytic work has also been concerned with sibling configuration, linking technical facts and the subjective space that an individual occupies within her or his sibling and family group. Thus, first-borns are said to develop dominant, conscientious and conforming personalities, and to feel resentment or ambivalence towards their younger siblings, while later-born children are risk-taking and creative, and middle children act as peacekeepers (for example, O. James 2002; Mitchell 2000; Sulloway 1996, 2001). Research on twins has also examined the effects of technical, biological sameness and birth order on personality, addressing tensions between conceptions of self as part of unitary ‘twinness’ or as involving individual autonomy (Stewart 2000). Stephen Bank and Michael Kahn (1982) argue that social changes such as smaller family size may be giving sibling bonds greater rather than lesser relevance, creating an even more intense and formative touchstone influence on personality as children grow up. They pose sibling bonds especially as providing the ‘object constancy’ against the vagaries of an uncertain world where there is what they call ‘high access’ between siblings (one sibling, living and playing together, narrow age difference, and so on) and parents are less available to their children (physically, for example, in terms of paid employment, or emotionally). Bank’s and Kahn’s stated focus is on full biological siblings, however. As noted earlier, this leaves aside the fact that children may have social ties to half- and step-sisters and -brothers both within and outside their household that provide larger sibling groups. Juliet Mitchell (2003) contends that these social forms of sibling relationship may be equally influential in terms of the sense of desire for connection, affinity and sameness of self and other, and of desire for

Who is a sister and a brother?

25

separation, autonomy and difference between self and other, that siblings can embody. Such connections and separations are said to create the dynamic structures of alliance/support and rivalry/conflict that found intimate relationships and wider understandings of social relations for people throughout their lives. Genetics and emotions In some perspectives on family life biological links are explicitly privileged in terms of underpinning emotional ties. Notions of shared biological parentage and common genes are promoted through the social concepts of lines of descent and principles of genealogy. Marilyn Strathern (1992) argues that genetic relations have come to stand as a symbol for the supposed naturalness of biological bonds. They offer an inner feeling of coherence and certainty in the context of family diversity and supposed fragmentation, where a general sense of uncertainty and risk pervades a society that increasingly appears to be moving away from the ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. A sense of stability is offered by regarding genetic ties as primary. This is most evident in evolutionary psychology’s (neo-Darwinist) posing of an essential link between biology and emotion. Evolutionary psychologists argue that, as part of the drive of natural selection, the genetic link between parent and child leads parents to feel love and commitment towards their offspring. If biological links are absent, then parents/carers and children will not gain from an emotional investment in a relationship with each other, in terms of genetic prosperity (Daly and Wilson 1998). In turn, siblings compete with each other to maximise parental investment in the continuity of their genes. In this model, personality differences between siblings are explained as adaptations to capture parental involvement (Sulloway 1996). Although this is not explicitly stated, presumably half-siblings are in competition for their one shared genetic parent’s investment, while step-siblings would each attach themselves to their particular biological parents and exhibit even more jealousy of their step-siblings. This perspective interprets emotions and threats in a simplistic and reductionist fashion. It bears little relationship to social explanations that draw attention to the construction of meaning in everyday life, or to psychodynamic approaches that highlight the interplay of love/care and hate/despisal as core aspects of self and other in sibling bonds. A social constructionist approach The above approaches to who is a sibling, configurations of siblings, and effects on subjectivity often pose a simplistic and universalist view of the links between biological and social ties. From a perspective that involves attention to dynamic interactions between social structures and subjectivity,

26

Who is a sister and a brother?

it would seem likely that social and cultural context is important in how these ties are played out. Working-class or minority ethnic sibling groups may be subject to different sorts of threats in an uncertain world than are White middle-class siblings, for example, and various gendered images will play their part too. Such processes also occur within overarching societal/ cultural contexts that privilege and value particular forms of self in relation to other. In western societies and bodies of expert knowledge, individuality and autonomy are generally regarded as preferable to collectivity and dependency, including their inculcation in children and young people (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Edwards 2002; N. Rose 1989; and see Stewart 2000 specifically in relation to twins). Within this orthodoxy, different ethnic and class subjectivities and practices of ties between self and others may therefore be marginalised and regarded as pathological, including relationships between siblings. These sorts of dynamics between social structures and subjectivity form key issues that we explore in subsequent sections of this chapter. The discussion so far has focused on the sometimes implicit, sometimes overt, links between biological and social ties with sisters and brothers raised in and by research addressing the technical fact of ‘who’ is a sibling. Another way to approach the question of who is a sibling is to start from siblings’ own understandings and experiences (Mauthner 2002; Mullender 1999). In the rest of this chapter we consider who is a sibling from the perspectives of the children and young people taking part in our research. Their understandings weave together biological and social dimensions in complex ways, highlighting the relational aspects of being a sibling. Because the children’s and young people’s accounts are so complex, we present case studies of individuals in addition to overviews of recurring themes in the data from our studies, in order to do justice to the detail of their narratives.

Children’s and young people’s understandings of biological and social ties In both our sibling studies, we asked the children and young people to fill in a circle map as a way of identifying the people in their lives who they felt were close to them or important in some way (see Box 2.1). In addition, most of the children and young people were also asked more abstract questions about the necessity of shared parentage and co-residency for sibling relationships, as well as describing their everyday lives with their sisters and brothers. Their accounts throw light on the interweaving of biological and social ties in considerations of who is a sibling, and the importance of the emotional quality of their relationships.

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Box 2.1 The circle map method The circle map consists of a series of concentric rings, divided into three wedges respectively labelled ‘My Family’, ‘My Friends’ and ‘Other People’ (see Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3). A small circle in the centre of the map represents the child being interviewed, while rings radiating outwards indicate different levels of emotional closeness. The children and young people were asked to write the names of people who were significant in their lives, or draw a picture of them, on coloured stickers and then to place the stickers in the rings. The stickers could be moved and repositioned, and overlap, as the interviewee desired. The nearer to themselves that the children placed a sticker, the closer they felt that the named person was to them. The children discussed with the interviewer who the people on the stickers were and why they had placed them in a particular ring, and this allowed us to look at their reasoning both in placing people in a particular wedge of the circle map and in which particular ring.

The children and young people had little difficulty in distinguishing between ‘family’ and ‘friends’ on the circle map. Many felt that children who were biologically related through their parents were siblings (although, as we will see, this was not the only definition they worked with). We did not stipulate that they should include all their siblings on the map. Indeed a minority did not place someone who was technically a sibling on their map or refer to them during their interview. In such cases, we would not have known the sibling existed if we had not been informed of this by other siblings or in chats with parents before or after the interview. This silence usually occurred when a child had little contact with a sister or brother, and had closer ties with other siblings whom they did talk about. For example, Daniel (a White working-class boy, age 9) started the interview by writing a list of his siblings and their ages. His mother, who was sitting in on the interview at Daniel’s request, reminded him about his 20-year-old half-brother, Harvey, who lived elsewhere but often visited them: Daniel:

Yeah, I’m 9. Sapphire is 8. Fay, she is 14 I think, yeah 14. Chantel, she is one. Interviewer: Is there anyone else? Daniel: No. Mother: Yes there is. Daniel: Who?

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Mum: Daniel:

Harvey. Oh yeah, I forgot.

Despite Harvey’s regular visits to the household, he did not figure in Daniel’s emotional world, which focused on his co-resident half- and full sisters. Co-residence did not necessarily prefigure a sense of positive emotional connection to siblings, however. One child, Jacob, felt so alienated from two of his co-resident full siblings that he did not put them on his map, although he acknowledged them as siblings and discussed their shortcomings extensively in his interview: Jacob:

I don’t think there’s any more [people to put on the circle map]. Interviewer: OK, so shall we talk about the people? . . . So you’ve got [your baby brother] Tobin on there with Mum and Dad. And who else? Who are your brother and sister? Jacob: Clara and Samuel. Interviewer: And why do you think you put Tobin very close to you and you didn’t put Clara and Samuel on? Jacob: Because they’re really annoying. Jacob’s desire for complete separation from two of his siblings is discussed further in Chapter 3. In contrast, some children and young people placed a sister or brother they had never lived with on their circle maps. Orla (a White middle-class girl, age 18) placed an older step-sister whom she had never met on her map, in addition to her two co-resident half-sisters. She felt an emotional and symbolic connection to this older sibling that has nothing to do with either biology or co-residence. Similarly, Sam (a White middle-class boy, age 11) put his only sibling – his 19-year-old half-sister – quite close to him on his circle map (see Figure 2.1). They had never shared a home, she lived some geographical distance away, and he remarked, ‘I hardly ever see her.’ Nonetheless, Sam felt a strong sense of emotional connection with his older sister that defied physical separation: Even though I can’t remember it I have been told that I saw her lots and lots [when I was very young] . . . I don’t see her much but I still have the same kind of relationship with my sister as [my friends who live with their sisters] do with theirs. A few children were so emotionally identified with one of their siblings that they chose that sibling’s actual name as a pseudonym for themselves, for us to use in writing up the research (see Dan’s case study in Chapter 3). These sorts of exclusions and inclusions of technical siblings in their maps

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Figure 2.1 Sam’s circle map.

indicate that, for children and young people themselves, the answer to who is a sibling is as much rooted in social ties as it is in biological fact. Who is a sibling understood as biological and as social: case study examples Most of the children and young people we spoke to drew on both biological and social constructions of the nature of ties in discussing their sibling relationships, fusing them together or holding them side by side. A few, however, privileged either biological or social understandings. In this section we present three case studies to illustrate the range of interpretations, from privileging biological ties, through holding both biological and social understandings, to stressing social ties. Each of these interpretations, however, also reveals contradictions and ambivalences around who is a sibling, and their emotional ramifications. A primarily biological tie – Eddie and China Eddie and China, a White working-class brother and sister, provide an interesting example of the minority who worked with primarily biological

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understandings of who is a sister or brother. Eddie was 10 and China was 8, and they lived together with their biological mother and China’s biological father, whom Eddie referred to as ‘my father’. In response to the question ‘Do you think that brothers and sisters need to have the same mum and dad?’, Eddie firmly replied, ‘It matters because then it’s a real family not a fake one.’ He also drew a distinction between family and friends, saying, ‘Your brother and sister is closer to you than a friend . . . friends could never do as much as a member of your family could do.’ Eddie’s assertion of the emotional superiority of his relationship with China over that with his friends recurred throughout in his interview: ‘We can play with each other, we can talk to each other about things . . . I know I can trust her.’ It would seem that Eddie saw his own family as ‘fake’ rather than ‘real’, and social relationships as inferior to biologically grounded ones. This placing of his family, and his own membership of it, as ‘fake’ was hidden, however, because Eddie did not tell the interviewer that he had a biological father who lived elsewhere. Rather, he stressed a projected biologically based affinity between himself and his sister. In contrast, China drew attention to the fact when she was asked whether or not siblings need to share the same parents: ‘Yes, but Eddie’s got a different father really, but this one is a stepfather really.’ She also marginalised Eddie as a sibling through his behaviour, discussing how he ‘acts like he’s a grown up . . . not like a sister or brother . . . and it’s just like I’m on my own with Mum, Dad and the dog’. Thus, although Eddie was firm about distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ families, when we take his sister’s comments into account we might interpret his seemingly adamant assertions as being underpinned by some uncertainty in his mind about the veracity of the family that he lives in and his position in it. In part, Eddie’s insecurity about his place in the family may be aggravated by his sister’s ambivalent feelings towards him. China not only cuts across Eddie’s claim to her biological father as his father, she also denies his identity as her sibling. China’s positioning of Eddie as peripheral needs to be understood in the context of his presence, placing her as the youngest sibling rather than an only child to her parents. Furthermore, China’s gender appears to marginalise her from shared activities between her father and Eddie: ‘They went out and played [tennis] together but I was left on my own because I am a girl . . . They think I can’t hit the ball, but sometimes I can.’ In the face of male bonding between ‘her’ father and Eddie, China attempted to undermine Eddie’s membership of the family unit. It may have been that – unlike other children and young people in similar situations whom we spoke to – Eddie had to work hard to feel part of a collective family unit with his sister. He highlighted the emotional closeness of his relationship to her in contrast to that with friends, and silenced the distinction in parentage between them in order to present himself as a ‘real’ member of the family, rather than marginalised through biology. Yet, China’s

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observation that Eddie may be a brother but he doesn’t act like one does introduce an element of the social construction of sibling relationships. It adds another layer to Eddie’s biological difference, involving the idea that who is a sibling is socially enacted. As we noted though, most children and young people moved further towards incorporating a social perspective on relationships with sisters and brothers alongside biological links. Biological and social ties – Spike Spike was 17 years old, and his twin sister, Zara, also took part in the research. They were working-class and of mixed parentage, living with their White mother and maintaining a close relationship with their father, who was of Pakistani origin. Spike and Zara had a 13-year-old half-sister, Juliet, from another of their father’s previous relationships. Juliet’s mother had repartnered and Juliet herself had a 9-year-old half-brother from this relationship, who had no biological relationship to the twins. Both Spike and Zara placed Juliet close to them on their circle maps, but only Spike’s circle map (see Figure 2.2) included Juliet’s half-brother as ‘my little bro’. When asked whether ‘blood is absolutely necessary to make somebody a brother or sister?’, Spike responded: I don’t call anyone else my brother or my sister. I call both my sisters my sisters and I don’t call any of my friends brothers or whatever. Friends are friends, and sisters are sisters, and my girlfriend is my girlfriend. And my little sister is my half-sister but I still call her my little sister. And – actually there is one example of that. My little sister has got a stepbrother, no, half-brother, and I just call him my little bro when I see him, because he’s just with her sometimes. So when I see him I say ‘What’s up, little bro?’, or whatever. He treats me as his older brother, like we play pool and stuff, and he kind of looks up to me. So when I smoke he goes, ‘Oh, when I grow up I know another one of my family smokes’, and stuff like that . . . [To him, I’m] an older brother who does all sorts of weird things, and the weird things are always seen as cool by little people. Spike interrupted himself in his initial assertion that there are different categories into which people definitely fall, including one for ‘blood’ sibling relationships, when he recalled his ‘older brother’ relationship to Juliet’s half-brother, which fell outside of the biological boundary. Rather, this sibling relationship was socially based, and seemed to fulfil emotional needs for Spike. His ‘little bro’ provided an important (masculine) family space for Spike to occupy; one in which he was looked up to and admired by another male. This subjective space was not readily available to Spike elsewhere. He acknowledged that he was getting himself into destructive situations

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Figure 2.2 Spike’s circle map. + Rather than writing individual names, Spike collectivised two groups of people: ‘Mum’s parents and other family’ in the family wedge of the circle, and ‘college friends’ in the friends wedge.

involving drugs and physical violence, pulling away from Zara and hurting his girlfriend, rebelling at school and failing educationally: In the end I just went off the rails, I started smoking dope and stuff . . . I just skived1 [off school], you know, went out drinking, smoking, chatting up girls, got into trouble with the police . . . I kind of have a habit of pushing people away if they get too close. [My girlfriend] tries to get close and sometimes I just do really stupid things and just push her away . . . I’ll tell you who I feel distant to at the moment is Zara. She is totally different from what I am, different mates, different social life and so on. Spike’s father was particularly censorious about his behaviour. This was in stark contrast with his twin, Zara, who was achieving well in all she did, praised by her father, and full of ambition. Zara did not seem to feel the same subjective need to annex a ‘little bro’ to look up to her. Spike’s assertion of ‘total’ difference from his twin sister socially and psychically constructs their sibling relationship for him, rather than the technical fact of their identical biology.

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Given the two accounts described above, it may seem that children and young people who are not living in a straightforward nuclear family use biological assumptions about family ties, to a greater or lesser extent, as an element of emotional stability and certainty for underpinning relationships in complex family formations. As we have seen, however, social ties enter these biological constructions. Furthermore, children and young people in equally complex family circumstances held socially based understandings of who is a sister or brother. A primarily social tie – Melody Melody was a 15-year-old working-class White girl who lived with her 13-year-old full sister, Chrissie, and their mother. They had an older, adult half-brother and -sister from another previous relationship of their father’s, who in turn had children of their own. Melody’s discussion of what makes someone a sister or brother included biology but privileged social relationships, involving a deep emotional link and subjective knowledge of each other. Thus she included some close friends who live on the same housing estate as she in the category of sibling: Somebody that you are close to, somebody that you don’t exactly get along with but you know well, like you’ve shared a lot of stuff with them. That doesn’t necessarily have to be blood. I have people that I call my brother or my sister that live on this estate, because I’m close to them and I know them well . . . You don’t need to live together, but you can spend time together at one point in your life. It’s just somebody you share a lot with, I think. You don’t have to necessarily spend time with them all the time, whatever. [You] share like memories, times together. And I think somebody that you can argue with as well. Because you have to have somebody you can argue with and you know them well enough. If you can’t argue with them then I don’t think you know them. And then carry on being close to them. In constructing her circle map, Melody placed some people who would not conventionally be defined as siblings in the ‘My Family’ wedge of the map as close to her (see Figure 2.3) in addition to Chrissie, her older half-siblings and their children, and other family members: I’ll put these people here because, although they are friends, they are more, I call them more family. Because Laurie is a boy who lives down there and I get on with him really well, and he’s close to me like a brother. And like he’ll look after me like he’s my brother. We can still muck around and play fight, and it’s just like having a brother around. Al’s an ex-boyfriend. He used to live on the estate and we love each

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Figure 2.3 Melody’s circle map.

other basically, and are still close like that . . . We can understand each other. So I think he’s close like family should be. I wouldn’t put him as a friend. Melody’s placing of some friends as siblings also has to be understood in the context of social relationships on the inner city housing estate on which she lived, where it was important for everyday survival to make close alliances with a group of supportive peers, especially boys, in the face of threats from other young people on the estate, with especially troublesome relationships between girls. We return to this issue in Chapter 6 in discussing sibling relationships in local neighbourhoods. While few of the children and young people taking part in our studies went as far as Melody in including friends as sisters or brothers, most of them also drew on socially constructed notions of sibling relationships invoking emotional relationships alongside biological fact – on the one hand, the not ‘acting’ like a sister or brother that China (above) referred to, and on the other, the deep inner knowledge and shared experiences connoting a sibling relationship that Melody espoused. These interpretations start to lead us beyond the biological fact of ‘who’ is a sibling to the socially constructed and emotional nature of these relationships. It raises issues

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around everyday social practice, as well as similarities and distinctions between sibling and friendship relationships. Being there and everyday living together Recurring themes in the children’s and young people’s accounts were that sisters and brothers were bound together because they ‘really know’ each other, and indeed sometimes could be ‘best friends’ (see Mauthner 2002 on this for teenage and adult sister relationships). Siblings provided the children with a sense of emotional security – a feeling that someone was ‘always there’ for them, which meant that they were not in danger of being an isolated, unconnected person: I’m never really alone. But one of my friends, she doesn’t have a brother or sister or a – she doesn’t have anybody at all, so she misses out . . . Because [my sister] kind of lives with me and she shares – cos she knows more about me so I’m kind of closer to her than I would be to [friends] . . . I went [on a school trip for half a week] and my sister, when I got back, my sister said – I said, ‘Oh, did you miss me?’, and she was like ‘Oh yeah, it’s so boring without you, I mean there’s nothing to do’, and I felt like really happy and stuff. So I wasn’t just ignored, I wasn’t not bothered about. (Izzy, White middle-class, age 9, talking about her younger full sister) They’re there when I need them . . . My sisters help cos when they’re – when I’ve come home and I’ve had a bad day at school and that they cheer me up and they help with my homework . . . The best things about having sisters are they’re there to help, they’re around when you need them. They’re there to have a good time with. (Ellie, White working-class, age 12, talking about her co-resident older full and half-sisters and her two non-resident older half-sisters) Being a sibling and having siblings thus is deeply relational; a social orientation involving a symbolic availability and psychological attentiveness. Such a subjective sense of connection was regarded as best brought about through everyday living and growing up together: I don’t really get to see Matthew and Louise that much. And I know Jasmine, I actually know Jasmine. And Matthew and Louise, I just don’t know them that much, you know. I mean I know that [Jasmine’s] pretty good and she’ll never lie and that she’ll never betray me . . . I don’t know that much about Louise and Matthew. I mean I can’t really trust them. (Laura, White middle-class, age 10, talking about her non-resident

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half-brother and -sister – Matthew and Louise – and her co-resident full sister – Jasmine) You can like live apart but it ain’t as good. Cos like, if you want to do stuff, right, and you really needed them, like if you wanted to like choose something, something really big, then you might need them. But then like if they lived in another country or like really far away, you wouldn’t like be able to get something. (Ashley, White working-class, age 9, talking about his older full brother) Indeed, while the children and young people acknowledged that sisters and brothers did not need to live together in order to be siblings and that biological links would exist whatever, they regarded keeping in contact as important. We return to this issue of keeping in contact with sisters and brothers who have left home in Chapter 4. Distinctions between siblings and friends Most of the children and young people asserted that friends could not cross the boundary to be siblings. Nonetheless, some did feel that a friend could feel or act ‘as if’ she or he were a sister or brother as a result of a combination of everyday contact and emotional closeness that mirrored the subjective construction of sibling relationships discussed above: [Friends] are not part of the family but they’re mixed in. They’re not in your family, but sometimes it can feel like they are. When we play games you think – like when you go to their house and they just follow you around and when they come here. (Fred, White working-class, age 11) [Friends] kind of become, act like we’re brother and sister, when we’re best friends, and we don’t really act like we don’t live together . . . Actually, they’re kind of the same, my sister and my friends, because sometimes we fall out and sometimes we won’t talk to each other, but like we always make good friends again. But my sister might be, my sister might be a teeny bit stronger, closer to me. (Izzy, White middle-class, age 9) The use of the descriptors ‘like a friend’ to describe a sibling relationship, or ‘like a sister or brother’ to describe a friendship, shows the importance of language – or its silences – in expressing the social meaning of connections between people. The descriptive assignment of sister or brother, or friend, reveals how ideas about the quality of relationship between self and other underpin notions of who is a sibling, rather than technical fact alone

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(Mauthner 2002). For example, the quality of sibling relationships is part of collective language and understandings. The socialist and trade union practice of referring to co-members as ‘brothers’ and – more recently – ‘sisters’, and the feminist notion of women as ‘sisters’, signal a particular sort of relationship – a political sense of the subjective quality of the bond between self in relation to the other.

Conclusion In this chapter, we reviewed several approaches to the question of who is a sister or a brother underpinning research on sibling relationships. Much of the work on siblings assumes a particular sort of link between biological and social ties. We argued that these approaches either rely on technical fact alone, or see biological ties as primary and social ties as arising from them. We further argued that such work does not address the potentially variable identity and relationality practices of siblings. In contrast, we took a social constructionist approach that considers the question of who is a sister or a brother from the point of view of siblings themselves. This produced a far more complex account of the links between biological and social ties in who is considered a sister or a brother, and of the emotional significance of sibling relationships. The children’s and young people’s understandings built upon and extended biological links into social constructions involving the subjective nature of sibling relationships. The emotional quality of relationships with sisters and brothers was important to children and young people. Moreover, they entailed a sense of self as connected to and separated from others, collectively and individually, involving a turbulent undercurrent of identifications and disidentifications around sameness and difference in children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers. We explore these issues of sameness and difference in depth in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

Siblings in the self Sameness, difference and changing identifications

Introduction When young people talk about what it means to be a sister or a brother they inevitably compare themselves with their siblings. Whether we are the same as or different from others is the language often used to think about and express significant questions of connection with others. This is especially so in families, where similarities and differences between siblings are casually and sometimes frequently commented upon. Sameness and difference, then, are two of the key intersubjective notions that children and young people use when describing and reflecting upon their own sense of self, notions that are closely tied up with feelings about individuality and being part of a group, belonging, connection and separation, dependence and independence. These everyday ideas constitute important ways of thinking about self and others and are core strands in the web of identifications through which we come to make sense of ourselves and the world we live in. As such, they are significant in the structuring of internal worlds. While perceptions of sameness or difference are significant sites of identification for sisters and brothers, they are rarely straightforward. Instead, they can involve struggle and contestation in the internal, emotional experiences of children and young people in families and in the everyday practices that make up their lives together. As we saw in the previous chapter, sibling narratives are rich in tensions and contradictory feelings about the desire to connect with one another, alongside the imperative to establish some measure of separation. We also saw that identifications are not only an individual, private matter – they are also profoundly subject to the influence of the social world, to history, gender, race, class and culture. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the place that sisters and brothers have in the emotional life of children and young people, and the ways in which they enter into processes of personal and group identity formation. We ask, in what ways do siblings figure in the structuring and experience of children’s and young people’s subjective sense of self? Why is it so important for some children and young people to see themselves as different from their

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sisters and brothers whilst others constantly stress their similarities? What tensions arise when siblings assert their individuality from one another and at the same time want to ensure that being different from their sisters and brothers does not exclude them from family and other social groups? In order to think about the intricate tensions and conflicting forces among and between siblings and the ways in which these might be implicated in how identities are formed through sibling relationships, we employ concepts deriving from sociological and from psychodynamic perspectives on identity formation. This multi-disciplinary perspective is useful because it gives a framework through which to think about how psychological processes, such as identification, projection, daily practices, changing circumstances, and the social dynamics of power, gender and age, are interwoven to produce variable and shifting patterns of identification among and between siblings.

Connection and separation Our consideration of sameness and difference brings us to siblings’ struggle to separate whilst staying connected, and to become unique whilst remaining one of the group. Freud (1921) emphasised that the wish to belong, be part of a collective and understood as the same as, can be at odds with our desire to be an individual, unique and free from dependence on anyone, including our families. As was signalled in Chapter 1, however, siblings occupy a valuable position when thinking about this psychic conflict, precisely because of what Mitchell refers to as their ‘seriality’ (Mitchell 2003). That is, they are simultaneously individual and one of a series. Yet the ideal version of personhood in western societies rests on notions of individuality, autonomy and independence. This model of what it means to be an emotionally and economically ‘healthy’ adult holds some glaring contradictions, not least that issues of dependency lie at the heart of family life, as a core function of families is to care for and nurture dependent children. There are other models of what it means to grow into desirable and fully formed personhood and the lived specificities of ethnicity, gender and social class are also integrally interwoven into desires for selfhood. In Chapter 1 we outlined how the centrality of the Oedipus complex has meant that sibling relationships have been marginalised within traditional psychoanalytic models. We noted how some contemporary psychoanalytic writers are challenging the primacy of the parent–child relationship and are arguing for a reconsideration of the importance of sibling relationships in the development of children’s internal life. Prophecy Coles (2003), working with an object-relations psychoanalytic perspective, looks to the evidence in her own and others’ clinical case studies, as well as in literature, for the importance of sibling love and attachment. She notes that despite the evidence, the legacy of Freud has meant that these experiences are either ignored, or understood only as a transformation

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of the ‘normal’ primal hatred that he insisted must inevitably exist between siblings. Coles highlights how sisters and brothers are therefore treated paradoxically; seen as significant enough to evoke primal hatred and yet dismissed as not important to the development of the inner world. For those who take an object-relations view of identity formation, the self is not unitary, but instead can be thought of as a series of selves, made up of other people and relationships that are taken in (introjected) and identified with during childhood. This approach suggests that there are many voices in dialogue with one another in a person’s internal world that make themselves heard with inconsistent feelings and opposing demands. As siblings often form the major object-elements of a child’s early life, the notion that siblings are introjected to become parts of the self is conducive to the idea that siblings are central to the development of the self. From a feminist Freudian viewpoint Juliet Mitchell is also critical of the emphasis on vertical relationships at the expense of lateral (peer and sibling) relationships (2000, 2003). In considering sibling relationships from a group psychology perspective she argues that we need to start by thinking about the construction of the ego and ego-ideal – what I am and what I would like to be. An ego-ideal can be an internalisation of someone to whom the ego (subject) aspires. It can also take the form of the highly critical internal policeman, the nagging conscience. In the Freudian classical model, this egoideal is viewed as being modelled on the father, whose approval or censorship the child takes in. This symbolic image of the father is taken up in the internal world of the subject as a dimension of her/his own personality. While Mitchell concurs that this may be likely to be the case, she also puts forward another psychic scenario involving siblings: But isn’t it also likely that the original model may be another child, a heroic or critical older (or other) sibling? For most of us when our conscience is putting us down, making us feel inferior, the voice we hear is reminiscent of the tauntings not of adults but of other children. (2003: 12) Both Coles (2003) and Mitchell (2003) maintain that intense positive sibling bonds are not merely a response to the inadequate quality or quantity of parent–child relations. Difficult feelings about sisters and brothers (including the wish for them not to be there) are as important as the role of parents in our emotional development. Additionally, siblings and peers are essential in helping us separate from our parents and in teaching us how to relate in a different way (Winnicott 1957). Positive and negative emotions for them therefore hold a crucial place in the complexity of emotional life, and to dismiss their significance is to impoverish our internal world. Bank and Kahn (1982) worked within an object-relations perspective to develop a typology of sibling identity processes based on clinical work with

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children and adults. Their research is useful for our analysis because it explores some of the irrational elements of sibling relationships and reveals the diversity and contradictions that they contain. Their eight sibling identity processes describe different intersubjective patterns in relationships between siblings ranging through ‘twinning’, to ‘disowned’ relationships that relate to three broad categories of identification. Close identification between siblings is characterised by each person feeling great similarity with and little difference from a sibling. This contrasts with partial identification, where each person feels some similarity with and some difference from a sibling. Siblings may feel that some aspects of personality are similar – physical, behavioural or attitudinal attributes – or that they enjoy similarities of choice. This partial identification, whereby one becomes like the other in some ways, reduces some of the uncertainty and emptiness in oneself, and allows for the differences as well. In distant identification each sibling feels great difference from and little similarity with one another. These processes are not fixed; change is possible, although some kinds of relationships are more rigid and less open to change than others. Close and distant identifications tend to create rigid relations, with one or more siblings invested in keeping the relationship ‘in place’ and resisting change. Partial identification is more flexible and because it allows for change, is more desirable. Bank’s and Kahn’s typology offers useful pointers for exploring identifications amongst and between siblings, but is not enough on its own. For instance, it does not allow us to explore how these processes can overlap or coexist simultaneously and says little about how leaps or shifts occur from one process to another. We need other perspectives on siblings to examine how identifications can vary from one aspect of a sibling relationship to another; such as experiences of education, care, work, sexuality or family history. Projection and projective identification The Kleinian concepts of projection and projective identification, as unconscious psychic mechanisms employed in the management of anxiety and central processes in the development of the mind, were conceived in the context of the infant in the family and are useful for us to think about sibling intersubjectivity. These concepts also shed light on the group dimensions of sibling dynamics. Their value lies in giving us a means to consider some of the ways in which very contradictory feelings about the self as well as others play a part in sibling relationships and the modes in which they can get played out. Projection is one of the processes in which we may manage difficult aspects of the self: feelings and attributes that we would rather not own such as envy, hate, aggression. Instead of psychically taking on board the knowledge that these negative emotions belong to the self, we project

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them outwards onto another and then experience them as belonging to that other. Projective identification, a concept that is closely connected to that of projection, highlights the relationship between the person who is projecting unwanted elements and the object that these feelings and thoughts become located in. Here, the denied part of the self is projected, not so much onto as into another person. Projection and projective identification can occur not only because one has to get rid of intolerably bad bits of oneself. It is important to remember that these denied parts can be good or bad. It can be equally difficult for a person to own their positive qualities, their assets and talents, because of guilt, fear of envy, retaliation, abandonment or loneliness. These good parts of the self may also need to be protected from the more destructive capacities of the self and so may be attributed to or deposited into someone else so as to be kept safe. Whatever is being projected, the object of the projections not only comes to be seen by the subject as containing the projected elements of the self, but is also unconsciously manoeuvred into having and even enacting the feelings, states and characteristics that have been projected (Klein 1952a and 1952b). Shifting identifications The idea of shifting identifications is contrary to much existing psychological and sociological work on siblings, which tends to be characterised by static notions of children and young people in families. The notion of shifts, however, is useful for interpreting the many contradictions that characterise children’s and young people’s accounts of themselves and their siblings. It is particularly helpful for understanding how they make sense of changes that occur linked to age gaps between them, when one sibling desires more privacy or independence than another does, for example. A more fluid understanding of familial relationships is useful for understanding how shifting identifications are key for emotional development and identity formation. For example, shifts occurring around the idea of sameness and difference can be extremely important for children and young people who, at times, may wish to partially disidentify from their sibling group in order to emotionally move on. In the following sections we use these insights from various psychoanalytic approaches to look more closely at the ways in which siblings are implicated in children’s and young people’s internal lives. First, we encounter five sisters, Azra, Habiba, Sabina, Shabnur and Misha, to consider how matters of sameness and difference, connection and separation, were complexly interwoven with issues of culture and gender. In the second case study, the narratives of brothers Steven and Ashley illuminate some of the contradictions of sibling relationships; in this case, the ambivalence of older siblings towards younger ones alongside their clear need of one another as

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protection against ontological insecurity. By ontological security, we mean experiencing oneself as present and continuous in the world and having a sense of security in one’s own being that is adequate enough to enable us to venture out into the social world to be with others, and face the risks of life. The dynamic of Cora’s relationship with her older brother Gordon highlights how differentiation from siblings through age and gender in culturally and geographically specific contexts can help keep them connected, albeit negatively. The last two case studies explore various aspects of separation from different sibling perspectives: from that of Dan, whose older brother recently began to exclude him and wanted to differentiate himself from his younger sibling, and from Jacob, who desired complete separation from two of his siblings and who experienced connection with them as a threat to his personhood.

Five sisters: identification, culture and gender In the following account of five sisters, we consider how matters of sameness and difference, connection and separation, were complexly interwoven with issues of culture and gender. The girls and young women were Azra, age 24, Habiba, age 21, Sabina, age 20, Shabnur, age 15 and Misha, age 11. All except the eldest sister Azra, who had married and moved away to reside with her husband’s family, lived at home with their mother and father, who originated from Bangladesh. The family were practising Muslims, and occupied an ambiguous social class position, between working and middle class. They lived in social housing accommodation in a desirable, gentrified inner city neighbourhood. In this case study we will focus on the emotional position that the oldest sister, Azra, held in this group of sisters, and the effects on the dynamics of the group of her marrying and leaving home. The sisters’ relationships with one other and with the outside world were constructed and practised in the light of expectations and norms that shaped what they should and should not do. These were to do with ethical and moral codes within the family and in the wider Asian community with which they identified; a willingness to help their parents and one another, to show respect for their parents and other elders, and to understand the self as part of a family and community collective rather than as an autonomous individual, were all strong tropes in their narratives. This last point seems to be the antithesis of the model of the ‘ideal’ self promoted by modern western capitalism, where dependence is viewed as weakness and desirable adult status is achieved by its rejection. These five sisters presented a strong challenge to the wishing-away of dependency, and instead put interdependency at the heart of their ideas about what it means to be a sister, a daughter, a Muslim, and an adult woman. This was something that was witnessed among sisters and brothers from white British, European and AfricanCaribbean families in the studies, but it was a pattern that was most

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pronounced in the Asian sibling groups. In this model of selfhood, growing into maturity is synonymous with active and responsible membership of intimate (familial), social (local and global communities) and sometimes religious groups. This involved a set of practices of the self including the practical care of others, respecting elders, being mindful of personal reputation within the community of identification, putting the needs of the collective before oneself and taking responsibility for the moral education of younger members of the family. These themes were present in the narratives of all of the sisters, but it is important to remember that although these represented model practices that should be aimed at, they were not necessarily achieved by all of the sisters, or all of the time. At these points, when a sister ‘failed’ to live up to these codes, the monitoring and regulative role of sisters, especially the older ones towards younger ones, was evident. In discussing the Freudian theorisation of the super-ego, Mitchell argues that siblings, not only parents, can become ego-ideals whose approval or censorship the child internalises in the construction of the super-ego. The super-ego is the internal faculty that symbolises ethical and moral restrictions on the pleasure-seeking id. Its role is to police desires that are deemed to be unacceptable and to advocate a constant ‘striving towards perfection’ (Freud 1953–1974: 67). That siblings can be internalised as ego-ideals would seem to be illustrated by these siblings’ identifications with Azra, the eldest sister who had married and left the parental home the year before. Azra was viewed as an almost saint-like figure by all but the youngest of her siblings, as someone who was ‘pure’, ‘good’ and the epitome of sense, kindness and care. Shabnur, the second youngest sister, said: We have respect for [Azra] and in our eyes she’s never done anything bad, and she’s so pure and good inside that we all respect her so much. Azra had taken on a parental role in various aspects of her younger siblings’ upbringing, not unusual in families generally where older siblings, especially sisters, are involved in the care of younger ones (Edwards and Alldred 2000). For example, Sabina, the middle sister, described how Azra helped her out with her homework, keeping herself updated with her progress at school and going to parents’ evening. This is a common practice where English is not the parents’ first language (Edwards and Alldred 2000). Azra represented a potent moral authority amongst her sisters and had been taken in as an internal policeman by Habiba, Sabina and Shabnur so that even the thought of disappointing her or incurring her disapproval in any way exerted a powerful influence on their behaviour. Interestingly, this was not the case with Misha, the youngest sister, for whom the age difference between her and Azra meant a more distant identification: Misha experienced Shabnur, her next oldest sister, as the more immediate regulating force.

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For the others, it was not that Azra was in any way harsh or cruel to her sisters – in fact they stressed her patience and kindness. Nor was it that they resented her entitlement to comment on their behaviour or attitudes; her authority was entirely legitimated within the family and sanctioned by her sisters as appropriate and ‘the right thing’, as indeed was their right to comment on the behaviour of one another. More than this, it was considered a demonstration of her care. Perhaps it is precisely because she was so loved as an idealised figure, who was perfect and beyond reproach in their eyes, that the very thought of being judged in any way negatively by her could be so dreaded. Habiba had told Azra that she was worried about disappointing her by getting a 2.2 (instead of a 2.1 or a 1st) in her degree. Despite reassurances from Azra that it did not matter, Habiba could not shake off her fears: I’d be more scared to tell her about a failure. Like, if I got a 2.2 I’d be more worried about what she thinks. Whereas Mum would think – she’s feeling bad. It’s OK. But then, if we had an argument or something she’d probably say – you didn’t do your studies, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that. You know? What are you doing with your life? For these sisters, the authority automatically invested in older siblings was closely linked to the importance of maintaining the family’s good reputation in the local community. Shabnur clearly expresses the moral duty that older siblings have to safeguard this reputation: Like when you’ve done something bad, [Azra] doesn’t shout at you, but her expression makes you feel even more guilty. So that keeps me out of trouble . . . We are the type of girls that we’ve got so much respect for our parents that if somebody saw us outside [at 10 p.m.] they’d be pointing, and then everyone would spread it . . . Mum and Dad have both worked very hard to keep our reputations good and clean. And at the end of the day it is for our benefit. It was incumbent upon all of the sisters to take on this surveillant and regulatory role in relation to the younger ones although Azra’s departure from the family home the year before seemed to have stirred things up among the remaining group in connection with this. Her status as a perfect older sister was so powerful in the sibling dynamic that her leaving had created a space that others were attempting to fill. Sabina expressed some guilt that she was not fulfilling her duty of moral care towards the youngest sister Misha and understood this as letting Misha down, whilst Shabnur seemed to want to take Azra’s place as the guardian of her sisters and the family’s reputation. She kept a watchful eye on Misha, and worried about her older sister, Sabina:

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Because there are more people at home, Mum and Dad don’t worry that much because we are here to look after [Misha] as well as them . . . And you can’t blame us for not wanting her to go out and spend time because all these kids, the ones she hangs around with, they’ve got blue hair, they wear black lipstick, they’ve got their nails painted . . . [I’m also concerned about who Sabina is mixing with] because she might be influenced in doing stuff. And if somebody’s in need of help, somebody might say ‘help me out here’, and it might cause her to get into trouble. It may be that Shabnur’s fears about her own abilities to live up to the behaviour required of her as an Asian Muslim young woman, and the standards set by her two oldest sisters, became crystallised in her concerns for her other two sisters. The accounts that this group of sisters gave of their relationships demonstrate some of the ways in which siblings can literally become part of the self. Their narratives also draw attention to how a sense of self formed in sibling relationships is shaped by ethnicity and religion, and by gendered images within this. Rather than putting emotional connection and interdependence with their sisters aside as they grew older, these girls and young women regarded independence and emotional separation from siblings and wider family (represented by having stronger relationships with friends than family and wanting to go out socialising with friends all the time) as denoting immaturity and unsuitable behaviour for an Asian Muslim woman. Shabnur preferred the company of her sisters and their ‘togetherness’ as a domestic group, and saw this preference as denoting a desired movement towards adult womanhood: [We often] make the effort to go out and get a film so we can all sit down, just as sisters . . . I think I’ve grown out of the stage of going out with friends and having to go to the cinema, blah, blah, blah. So whatever time I do spend with my friends, it will be in school, and that will be enough for me because I’ve grown to a stage where friends really aren’t that important any more. It is worth noting that even though Azra now lived with her husband’s family, daily connection with her sisters and mother by telephone, as well as regular stay-over visits, was a priority for her. A strong sense of connection to siblings is not always represented by a positive sense of affinity, however, as the following two case studies illustrate.

Steven and Ashley: dependency and ambivalence Steven (age 13) and Ashley (age 9) are White British brothers, who live with their biological parents. Their narratives illuminate some of the difficulties

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and complexities of connection and dependency. This was a family that was very embedded in the locality and in their wider family networks. Regular caring and leisure time was spent with maternal and paternal grandparents, who lived nearby, as well as aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides of the family. The parent and grandparent generations of this working-class family enjoyed close, positive relationships with one another. This was in contrast to Steven’s and Ashley’s accounts of their relationship, which they both described in separate interviews, as full of conflict. Steven was a shy reserved teenager who was resentful towards his extrovert and outgoing younger brother whom he experienced as intolerably invasive of his space and highly manipulative of their parents to ‘get his own way’. Ashley, on the other hand, was furious that Steven wanted literally and metaphorically to shut him out – of his room and his life – and took pleasure in complaining loudly to his parents and watching Steven being made to include him. Both boys were keen to deny their similarities and assert their difference from one another: I see myself as completely different. I have a completely different attitude to him. I think I can act completely differently to how he does. I’m really quiet and he’s the big-mouth one. Outgoing, sort of confident person. I can be, but not really. (Steven) Umm, I’m most different to Steven because I got different colour hair to him and I got different personality and we like different things and stuff. Like I might like Harry Potter and he thinks it’s stupid and I might like Lord of the Rings and he says it’s boring and it’s stupid.1 You know we have different hobbies and stuff. (Ashley) The boys’ insistence that they are totally different was perhaps less certain and straightforward than first appeared, however. Despite Ashley’s ‘big mouth’ and the antagonism between them, Steven included Ashley in some activities outside the home and even when he himself was with his older friends he tolerated Ashley’s company. Steven could be irritated by Ashley’s confidence and his habit of challenging Steven’s authority as the eldest: ‘He tends to think he’s older and bigger. And he back-chats when I say something to him.’ But although Steven seemed to view this characteristic negatively by describing Ashley as a ‘big-mouth’, we may also detect some envy in the ‘quiet’ Steven’s comments, perhaps a wish that he had some of Ashley’s self-assurance. Relationships in which siblings refuse to see themselves as alike in any way, draw sharp boundaries between one another, are highly competitive and gloat over one another triumphantly when superiority is established,

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are described by Bank and Kahn (1982) as ‘hostile dependent’. Here, identifications between siblings are distant and for Bank and Kahn denote a rigid relationship whereby they are invested in maintaining the status quo and resisting change in the dynamics of the relationship. Although Steven’s and Ashley’s attitudes towards each other might be illustrative of this kind of ‘hostile dependent’ sibling identity process, indicating a ‘distant identification’, there were also notable outbreaks of warmth, care and empathy between them: Well, he can be, quite annoying to the neighbours, knocking on doors and running away. They come out and chase him, so I have to come out and tell them to leave him alone. Tell them he’s only having a bit of fun. (Steven) Woven through the brothers’ narratives, with their stress on conflict, difference and the desire for separation, are strong, though not always as explicitly articulated, themes of dependence, connection and care. These highly contradictory feelings towards one another relate to the ambivalence (of feeling love as well as hate) that can characterise some sibling relationships. This ambivalence is illustrated in Steven’s interesting comments below: When you are together you can play with someone. But I still think I was meant to be an only child. . . . Cos I wouldn’t call myself a recluse, but I like to be on my own. I don’t like the intrusion of my little brother. But I’m not sure really, whether I’d like one or not, cos when he is away . . . I do like it. Then if none of my mates come round I tend to get bored. Steven’s conviction that he was destined to be an only child implies that fate has slipped up or played a trick on him. In wishing to be an only child, Steven also symbolically wipes out the existence of his younger brother. A Freudian take on his comments might interpret this as referring to the ‘murderous’ hostility provoked towards the new baby who usurps the eldest child and threatens to replace him in the affections of his parents. However, this would not capture the ambivalent identifications between the two boys. After this comment, the same brother who moments before Steven had wished away, entered into his talk in quite a different manner; less as an intruder and more as someone who might have his uses, including rescuing Steven from the very aloneness that he craved. In this way it becomes clear that Ashley, although experienced by Steven in conflicting ways, was an important figure in Steven’s internal world and as such was crucial to his own sense of himself. What of the younger brother, who was the object of Steven’s alternately

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and simultaneously aggressive, protective, envious feelings? Ashley also articulated the complexities of ambivalence: the pleasures of having a brother, especially when parents are old and slow. He brought to the surface fears associated with the idea of being alone. This theme of brothers guarding against feared loneliness recurs with Ashley conjuring up various scenarios in which Steven’s presence becomes essential. Well, umm . . . We normally get um, if I wasn’t, if I didn’t have a brother umm, I wouldn’t really like, enjoy as much as I do because well, sometimes we don’t get along like that good . . . sometimes we have arguments and stuff. But like, at Christmas and stuff you get toys that you like, have to have someone else to play with . . . and like, your dad and your mum um, might be like too old for it and like . . . How can I put it? You wouldn’t, like, enjoy it so much. You wouldn’t enjoy it. And if you had something like, remote control car or something . . . and you just like, done it on your own . . . you wouldn’t . . . Oh [struggling for words] . . . Like, if you wanted, you had two remote controls and you wanted to like, have a little battle or something, you couldn’t have a battle with yourself because it’d be a bit stupid . . . Ashley tried to find the words to express an aspect of his sense of identity and ontological security. Steven, the elder brother, felt present in Ashley’s life in a meaningful way by saving Ashley from the fate of being alone. Their parents were cast as too old here – heavily signifying their ‘difference’ and otherness to the youthful boys – whilst Steven was the ‘same as’. Coles notes that difficult feelings about siblings are as important as the role of parents in our emotional development: ‘we need our siblings and peers to help us get away from our parents and teach us how to relate in a different way’ (2003: 2). To sustain emotional connection with another requires some recognition that we are alike – human at the very least. The recognition of sameness may at times be painful to acknowledge, however; for instance, because we may see undesirable characteristics in another that we do not want to accept in ourselves. At these times we may draw back from or reject our similarity to another person or group. We may want to break the connection to insist on our separateness and assert our individuality and uniqueness. In denying or rejecting our sameness, we may see ‘them’ as other to ‘us’. In order to maintain those kinds of mental and spatial boundaries, a different order of psychological work is needed, such as projecting negative unwanted and disowned aspects of the self into another person or group. In the next case study we see an illustration of this type of emotional work that enforces strict boundaries in a sibling group.

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Cora: connection through negativity Cora was a 13-year-old White working-class girl who lived with her 16year-old brother Gordon and their mother and father in a small, rural village with few transport links. Her narrative illustrates how differentiation from an older brother as a means of defining the self can also keep siblings connected, albeit negatively. It also highlights the interweaving of social and emotional aspects of subjectivity and the ways that sibling relationships are conducted in a historically, culturally and geographically specific context. These contexts provide particular discourses, and specific subject positions, in this case of age and gender, that get ‘taken up’ and used by sisters and brothers in the construction of their relationships. Cora persistently raised Gordon’s shortcomings in her account of their relationship. These involved his everyday failure to act in the ways that she felt an older male sibling of hers should: He’s just immature. He doesn’t act like older . . . Sometimes he’s nice to me, more times just an idiot . . . He can never say anything sensible . . . Cos he’s always making stupid noises and it’s so annoying . . . I wish he’d go out more and act more like a teenager. Cos like most folk go out and hang about. And then if he went and did that I think he’d grow up more. Cos I’ve sort of grown up more, faster than he is. He’s always been with himself, a loner. I wish he’d just hang out with his friends cos maybe he’d start to grow up . . . He doesn’t do anything basically. And he’s just basically hanging around with people younger than him. Cos you know he never really asks if he can go up to [town] but I wish he would. Sad act. In her negative portrayal of Gordon, Cora placed herself as more mature in her behaviour than her older brother. Her account was not one of an emotional separation from him; rather Cora had a lot of herself invested in her differentiation from Gordon. Just as Steven and Ashley needed one another, despite their ambivalent feelings, Cora needed this negative sibling relationship. Indeed, she said that she missed Gordon when he went on a school trip to Belgium: ‘just like no one to argue with’. Cora’s remedy to bring about a more positive emotional connection with Gordon was for him to act in the ways that she would value in an older male sibling. Ironically, achieving affinity would not be achieved by spending more time together or sharing more activities, but by Gordon moving away from her and embedding himself in relationships with groups of older boys. For them to feel closer, Gordon needed to act like a teenage boy should do: I don’t think we’d fight as much if he would go out more and then I went out a wee bit more, you know. Cos we’d like be able to say [to each other] ‘What did you do tonight?’

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Cora says that she would go out more if she could, but as a 13-year-old girl her mother did not allow her to travel into the local town on her own, which is where most of her large group of friends lived. In contrast, and much to Cora’s derision, 16-year-old Gordon could travel about on his own if only he would. Thus, in the gregarious Cora’s eyes, his spurning of a mobile social life was perverse. Cora’s account of her feelings for Gordon is replete with disappointment, anger and contempt. Nevertheless, her sense of a gendered self was crucially bound up with her older brother, even though this put her in something of a quandary. On the one hand she could positively contrast her maturity with Gordon’s immaturity. On the other, what she saw as Gordon’s wilful refusal to act in an appropriately masculine way threatened to undermine her own rather fragile sense of emergent hegemonic femininity. Teenagers often want to differentiate themselves from their younger sisters and brothers, excluding them from their social group and leaving them dismayed by refusing to play the old games, or ‘spoiling’ those pastimes by calling them ‘babyish’. There is slippage between what the game now represents and the self – previously enjoyed pastimes must be relegated to the past in order to shore up the construction of a new and tenuous ‘grown-up’ identity so desperately needed if one is successfully to take up hegemonic masculine and feminine adult subjectivities. We might say that Cora needed to reject aspects of her self, especially those considered immature, in case they undermined these shaky foundations. The projecting of all things ‘immature’ into her older brother (although it is more often a younger sibling that is the recipient of such projections) meant that those denigrated, ‘babyish’ aspects of her self became reviled. For Cora, identifications merged with and went beyond her sibling dyad to other lateral, peer groups, and it was in this sphere that her brother’s behaviour seemed to undermine her. Cora’s characterisation of Gordon as a ‘loner’ who is not part of a group (of local boys of his own age) also chimes with other White working-class children’s and young people’s accounts of a sense of self that is defined through being part of a collective group. This can be a sibling group, or another group of peers. Fitting in and being part of a group, however, is the important issue.

Changing identifications Families are dynamic units that are changing constantly, because of children’s developing or shifting physical, cognitive and emotional states. Identifications between siblings often also change in response to these shifts. It is inevitable, however, that in the process of change, losses, however minimal, must be encountered. This is the case amongst most young and teenage siblings for whom there is an inevitable age difference (except for twins, as well as step- and half-siblings who may be the same age). As siblings grow

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older, increased separation often occurs even by school age, with more choice about whether to spend time together and how to interact. Evidence suggests that as siblings get older and move into adolescence, there is far less tendency towards the twinning, merging and mirroring of earlier years (Bank and Kahn 1982). Instead, more detailed and complex processes of social comparison, projection and identification come into play. Older siblings may themselves experience a considerable amount of loss at the prospect of having to give up cherished activities with siblings, as well as being unsure of how they feel about having to be a different kind of person, or how to perform a different identity. In the next case study we explore how Dan, who was subject to enforced separation from an older sibling who wanted to differentiate himself from his younger brother, tried to make sense of change and loss in his sibling relationships. Again we are alerted to the significance of siblings as part of a group in intersubjective development.

Dan: enforced separation from a sibling and a group Challenging the verticalisation of classical psychoanalytic theory Juliet Mitchell (2003) maintains that identities are formed in a group from the very outset. Development is not only dependent on the baby’s coming to understand that it is not its parents (the Oedipus and castration complexes within psychoanalytic theory), it also depends heavily upon mimesis and interaction with peers and siblings. It is important to remember that these interactions take place within and therefore are influenced by differentiated and layered social and cultural contexts within which particular forms of selfhood are valued more highly than others. For example, it was clear in our studies that siblings could provide children and young people with a feeling of being part of a collective unit; an individual who is partly defined through being part of a group. Nevertheless, where it was evident, this was especially important for the working-class children and young people taking part in our research. This kind of identification can be disrupted, however, if other siblings in a group act in ways that force separation. This was the case in Dan’s account. He was an 11-year-old White working-class boy who lived with his 16-year-old brother, 13-yearold sister, baby brother, and mother and father, in a large village. He chose his own actual name as a pseudonym for his older brother, which is significant in the context of his account of their relationship (and is the reason why we do not [pseudo]name his brother here). Being part of a group characterised Dan’s account. He felt that a group of his friends acted ‘as if’ they were his siblings in backing him up and helping him deal with trouble with other children at school: [Friends are like siblings] because they’re like close to you. And like I

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said, them lot [non-friends] will come after you and like get you and then go and tell your teacher, and then people won’t come near to you. [Friends]’re close to you, they’re helping you . . . If I got in a fight at school, they’d come up to them and hit them. Dan characterised his older brother and sister as ‘always out’ and mentioned that his brother had slept at Dan’s friend’s house the previous night. The reason that his older brother had stayed overnight at what Dan referred to as his friend’s house was that ‘for ages’ Dan’s mother had been friends with the mother in a family that lived close by; his older brother had been friends with the older son in that family; and Dan himself had been ‘best ever’ friends with the younger son. Dan said that he was not concerned about his older siblings being out a lot: ‘As long as they’re getting on with their friends, I don’t mind.’ In the sense that his older brother and sister were fitting in with their friendship groups, they were OK in his eyes. Dan himself, however, was not so OK; a cloud had recently crossed his horizon and he did mind about it. His older brother was pulling away from Dan, separating himself and strengthening his ties with his friendship group: Say I was down there [at our friends’ house] as well, my brother would just say ‘Can you go away Dan, cos I’m down here.’ And it annoys me a little bit because I’m with my other friend and why can’t he go away? I stay because he can’t shoo me out of my friend’s house because it’s not his house . . . I can’t go like [into town] like on my own, without my brother and sister. But if my brother went then I could go, yeah. Sometimes I go, if he like goes. But sometimes he doesn’t let me cos he wants to spend time with his friends . . . Many young people struggle with an inherent conflict between the wish to sustain strong connections with siblings and family, and the desire to establish themselves as individuals. They assert ‘individuality’ through exclusionary behaviours and practices, especially of younger siblings. Younger siblings tend to ‘look up’ towards older siblings to connect with them, whilst older siblings often seek to establish distance from younger siblings. Middle siblings meanwhile often occupy both positions (see Chapter 4). This process of identification and dis-identification is linked with status and power within the sibling group and tensions are often mirrored in how siblings conduct their relationships inside and outside the home. Thus, for some siblings, connection seems to be less problematic when they are at home, in a private family space, whilst separations are typically effected outside the home, through different activities and friendship groups. In a classical psychoanalytic framework primary identifications made with parents are subject to trauma because the child has to endure the knowledge that she is not like her parents – at least not yet. However, Mitchell

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argues that primary identifications made with siblings and peers are ‘subject not to negation but to differentiation: you are like the others but with differences’ (2003: 14). The point about differentiation is an important one, but Dan’s account (and sibling accounts across the studies) suggests that sibling identifications are also subject to negation and trauma – witness the trauma of the loss of the sibling who up until recently he thought was ‘the same as’ him: My brother’s just not interested sometimes, he doesn’t really care [about me]. He’s at that age where he doesn’t care. He hasn’t always been like that . . . When he like took me fishing, he’s not taking me fishing now. I don’t know why. He says that I play up but I don’t. I feel left out. Dan did have resources through which to attempt to repair some of the hurt of his older brother’s rejection, however: Dan’s choice of his own name as a pseudonym for his older brother could be seen as an attempt symbolically to mend and re-create a lost connection in this context. Importantly, he also sought and found comfort in his connection to his other siblings – he could talk to his sister about his feelings of being ‘left out’, and he played with his baby brother – and to his friends. Dan’s account represents an enforced separation with his older brother. His understanding of himself as part of, and protected by, membership of a group, was being threatened. His brother was not only rejecting Dan, as part of this he was also cutting across Dan’s relationship with his friend in the group setting of his friend’s home. Thus Dan’s sense of security in being part of a group was under threat on two fronts. Dan found this recent double separation disturbing and full of losses. We have said that the conflict involved in being both an individual and a member of the group is general and was an element, to a greater or lesser degree, of siblings’ narratives across the two studies. The meaning and value of group membership were not fixed, however, nor was its place and significance for children’s and young people’s sense of self static. Group affiliation was a site where the mutual constitution of the social and psychic in the construction of subjectivities could be clearly seen. Researchers in the fields of education, youth studies and family studies have documented how attachment to and recognition by groups, in particular family, peers and the local community, are more highly valued by people of all ethnicities from the working classes than the professional middle classes (Thomson et al. 2002; Edwards and Gillies 2005). The roots of this are profoundly psychosocial in that they are linked to the structural position of various classes and ethnic groups as well as the psychic responses to the anxieties provoked by the disadvantages and advantages of these structural locations. For the working classes, who continue to be at the sharper end of the economic, social and personal risks involved in capitalism (now global), connection to groups,

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especially family, is fundamental to the organisation of everyday life and even to survival. To leave the group or to be seen as having ‘changed’ (which can be viewed as a different kind of rejection) can take a significant psychological toll on working-class young people (Lucey et al. 2003). In contrast, the route to professional middle-class careers emphasises notions of independent, autonomous selfhood, where individuality and standing out from the crowd are more straightforwardly prized than they are amongst working-class groups (Butler and Savage 1995), but where other fears (perhaps of failure) circulate and produce their own defensive responses (Walkerdine et al. 2001). In the last four examples of siblings, the children and young people have identified, albeit ambivalently, with their sisters and brothers: they have viewed themselves positively as individuals in relation to being part of a sibling group. In the following example we explore how, for some children and young people, this kind of connection was experienced negatively and, instead, separation and independence from siblings was valued.

Jacob: separation through individualisation Children and young people could view physical and emotional separation from their siblings as autonomy and independence, rather than isolation. Rather than having their individual self defined through membership of a group, they saw themselves as an individual who happened to be a sibling. Where it was evident, this position was largely represented among the middle-class children and young people in our research. For a minority of them, this independent, individualised sense of self was taken even further with a desire for complete separation. Rather than connection to sisters or brothers through negativity, such a position denoted connection itself as a threat to personhood. Our last in-depth account in this chapter addresses this issue, intertwined with gender images. Jacob was an 8-year-old White middle-class boy who lived in a large city with Clara, his 7-year-old sister, Samuel, his 6-year-old brother, Tobin, his 1-year-old brother, and their mother and father. As noted in Chapter 2, Jacob did not include two of his siblings, Clara and Samuel, on his circle map, saying, ‘They’re really annoying.’ He expressed a visceral hatred of them, especially Clara, who was ‘a girl’. He experienced them as envious and destructive towards him and it seemed that their very existence blighted his life: They’re really annoying and Clara, my sister, she always says to my mum – she cries for my stuff and then she always ends up with them. She like steals things, steals like one pound from me, pounds from me. And Samuel, because I sleep with him and it can be really annoying. He keeps me awake all night. He has to have this light on and I just can’t get to

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sleep . . . And they come up and destroy the thing that I’ve been playing with. Especially Samuel because it’s his bedroom as well . . . Clara always does singing when I’m watching the telly. Jacob’s defence against these assaults was to attempt to create spaces where he could physically separate himself from Clara and Samuel, symbolising an emotional separation from them. He sought to isolate himself at home, and could not bear the thought of these siblings attending the same school as him, invading his sense of a self that was separate from them there: I spend most of the time by myself . . . [To avoid sleeping in the same room as Samuel], I go downstairs into the spare room . . . It doesn’t really [help] because when I go down, Clara’s in the spare room for no reason. I try to get there first and then, then I go downstairs and ask Mummy if I can go in the spare room and she doesn’t get to be in there . . . [When Clara sings] I go in the kitchen or bedroom and watch telly, but it’s not very comfortable . . . [At school], I get to be by myself longer . . . [Clara and Samuel] are going to come to my school and I don’t want them to. They’re going to be really annoying . . . [When they come] I’m fast away from them. I’m like the second fastest [runner] in the class. Or I’ll hide in the boys’ toilets until they forget about it, get bored . . . [I won’t mind if people at school find out that Clara is my sister] because I don’t like her and Clara would know that they don’t like her either. It would seem that in the face of this threat from two of his siblings Jacob disowned any identification with them: he asserted his difference from them, his lack of any need of them and of affection, however slight, for them. Indeed, Jacob’s hatred of Clara fuelled a fantasy that everyone at school would hate her as he did. Her own assertions of personhood were posed as not only a threat to his sense of self, but also intolerable to the wider world. In stark contrast to his feelings about his middle sister and brother, he felt his baby brother Tobin to be ‘cute and soft’. This brother provoked a very different emotional response in Jacob than Clara and Samuel; not anger and frustration but warmth and tolerance: I really like him . . . [I] play with him when he’s crying. I play with him when he’s not crying. I play with him all the time. It would seem that Jacob experienced his baby brother as having no enacted desires of his own that could cut across or clash with his own. Tobin appeared not to pose a threat to Jacob’s strongly asserted, but easily threatened, sense of independence, autonomy and masculinity. The difficulties of the negotiations between self and other were clearly illustrated in Jacob’s desire for separation from his two siblings, especially his sister. But while he

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seemed to long for differentiation between himself and them, it was their differences to him, and their refusal to be controlled by him, that were causing him such trouble. This is revealed in his remark about how he wished Clara was a boy: ‘[It would be] cool. She wouldn’t be sleeping [in her bedroom], she would be sleeping [in mine] . . . We’d be like twins. We’d have mostly exactly the same things and stuff.’ Although Jacob did have two brothers, one of whom he shared a bedroom with, he wanted connection to a fantasised brother (rather than a real one) who appeared to be a replica of himself (a twin with the same possessions). He could only love Clara by magically turning her into himself and annihilating the unendurable differences and distance between his self and her other. This imagined selfconnection was less problematic than the reality of emotional connection with Clara herself. Jacob’s exclusion of two of his siblings from his circle map symbolised his desire for complete separation from them; he wished that they did not exist. He wanted to distance himself physically as well as emotionally, ‘running away’ and ‘hiding’ from them at school and at home. It is important to observe, however, that other than his assertion that his sister was ‘a girl’, highlighting his masculinity, his account is characterised largely by a lack of differentiation from and contrast with his siblings, which would suggest an investment in a form of connection. Rather, it is redolent with a sense of threats to an autonomous self from these siblings that can only be repulsed by separation from their very existence and personhood. It would seem that Jacob’s striving for a (White middle-class and societally dominant) notion of autonomous, independent masculinity is a fraught and fragile process.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored the place that siblings can have in the structuring of children’s and young people’s internal, emotional lives. Drawing on contemporary work in psychoanalysis that challenges the marginalisation of siblings in traditional psychoanalytic models we have considered how lateral ties with sisters and brothers form an important part of who they are and their relationship to other people and the world. Through the case studies we have seen that at the heart of relationships between siblings are issues of identity. Tensions to do with being simultaneously unique as well as one of a group are everywhere in sisters’ and brothers’ accounts of their relationships, although it is clear that the form these tensions take and the emotional strategies that are used to manage them differ enormously. Conflicts of connection and separation, sameness and difference, can be characterised by contradictory feelings: of aggression and envy alongside a clear need of one another as protection against being alone, as with Steven and Ashley. Strong connections with siblings can be forged and maintained through various kinds of complex differentiations: Cora felt stuck in what

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she saw as the appropriate development of her feminine identity by her older brother’s reluctance to act as she thought a teenage boy should and she fantasised that clearer gender differentiation would bring them closer. Dan’s brother’s move into adolescence reminds us that families are dynamic units, and that sibling identifications are not static, but are subject to changes, some of which incur losses for siblings who may feel ‘left behind’. Change was also an important factor in the shifting identifications between Azra, Habiba, Sabina, Shabnur and Misha. For a few, connection with siblings seems to be so problematic that it constitutes a serious threat to a sense of self: Jacob disavowed and rejected any association with his brother and sister, and could only bear to have tender feelings about his baby brother. (We revisit this issue in Chapter 5.) It is also clear that the structural, cultural and gendered position of siblings is enmeshed with the ways in which they enter into the structuring of one another’s internal worlds. For Azra and her four sisters, there was much overlap between what it meant to be a sister, a daughter, a Muslim and an adult. The social and cultural context in which relationships are conducted provides particular discourses and subject positions through which practices and meanings are constructed. Generally, it was working-class children and young people for whom group membership held the most significance, with individual senses of self being intimately tied up with the group, whereas middle-class brothers and sisters were more likely to see themselves as individuals who also happened to be siblings. The narratives of the sisters and brothers presented here have revealed how a sense of self is constructed and felt through cultural, social and symbolic connections that bind us to others in both positive and negative ways. These complex interdependencies invoke a sense of self, a subjectivity that, as we have seen, is replete with the contradictions of love and hate, pleasure and discomfort, connection and separation. In the next chapter we continue this focus on identity as linked to relationality with siblings through a focus on the social construction of everyday sibling practices.

Chapter 4

Everyday practices Talk, activity, care and power

Introduction In this chapter, we follow on our discussion of identification in relation to sameness and difference in Chapter 3 to look at the power relations involved in siblings’ sense of connection to or separation from each other as they go about their daily existence. We consider the ways that taken-forgranted, seemingly unimportant, everyday talk, activities and caring have consequences for aspects of identity and relationality. This focus on the social significance of everyday interactions draws out the way that relationships between sisters and brothers are shaped around and shot through with ideas and practices that construct femininity and masculinity, and birth order and age status hierarchies. As they talk about what happened at school, watch television together, play computer games, help a younger sister get dressed, or fetch a drink for a sick brother, siblings are creating a social ‘world of meaning’ (James et al. 1998). It is through these everyday practices that sisters and brothers experience material and embodied aspects of their identity and their relationships. Their social identities are continually formed, embedded, and also contested, in and through their relationships with their siblings. Children’s accounts of their relationships with their sisters and brothers show that these everyday routine and trivial practices are infused with power dynamics related to wider social distinctions such as gender, generation and ethnicity (although these are not exhaustive categories for understanding distinctions between children’s experiences). In contrast to the universal emphasis of psychological theories of sibling interaction or of childhood development, however, we also show that these practices and dynamics are variable and complex. Specifically, in this chapter we consider the ways that gendered identities are shaped and contested through talk and activities with siblings, followed by an examination of how birth order and age status hierarchies are invoked and disrupted in how they care for each other. Before this, however, we consider the concept of ‘everyday practices’ that guides our discussion.

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The concept of ‘sibling practices’ Being a girl or a boy, or a youngest, middle or older sibling, is more than merely biologically driven, a technical fact of birth, or a matter of socialisation into delineated roles by parents. It is an ongoing interactive process, and sibling ties play a key part in their construction. What it means to be a sister or brother, or more specifically a younger or older sister or brother, and the corresponding everyday experiences through which this identity position is constructed and maintained, will vary. These variations are more broadly influenced by children’s and young people’s social and cultural locations in wider society as well as by the particular families in which they live and the different individuals comprising them. In considering the ways that everyday talk, activity and care between siblings are crucial for understanding identity and relationality, we draw on David Morgan’s (1996, 1999) concept of ‘family practices’, to conceive of and examine ‘sibling practices’. In place of a method that treats ‘the family’ as a clearly defined object, Morgan has developed a more open approach that sees ‘family’ as a constructed quality of human interaction. Family practices are practices that matter to the persons concerned as having something to do with ‘being a family’. This resonates with our own approach to sibling relationships. We have argued that they are not ascribed and given but constructed and achieved, both socially and psychically, and we have focused on the issues that sisters and brothers themselves see as mattering and having something to do with being a sibling. Morgan’s conception of ‘practices’ is useful because it highlights a range of related themes that can help us understand the significance of taken-forgranted occurrences between sisters and brothers. From his range of related themes, there are three to be adapted for our discussion here: 1

2

A sense of interplay between the perspectives of the social actor, the individual whose actions are being described and accounted for, and the perspectives of the observer: this draws our attention to the way that – in our case – sibling relationships are seen from a range of perspectives. Elsewhere in this book we have focused more firmly on wider social and cultural understandings and evaluations of the nature of sibling relationships such as bodies of psychological knowledge, and explained our own social constructionist and psychodynamic approaches as observers and reporters of these relationships. Here we use the social constructionist approach to look at the different perspectives of siblings (all of whom are observers of the other as well as being involved as actors) on the everyday interactions between themselves and their sisters and brothers, with a focus on talk, activity and care as part of sibling practices. A sense of the active, everyday and regular: this reflects the aspect of our discussion that is concerned with the social construction of sibling

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relationships; enacted as part of everyday life together, creating meaning, rather than enshrined in biological fact and delineated by universal developmental processes. Recurring and mundane fragments of daily life and actions are the unspoken medium through which broader concerns, distinctions and closeness are understood and constructed, just as much as more considered, weighty and dramatic events. They are located in wider systems of meaning and power relations, for example, as we consider in this chapter, concerning gendered identities and status hierarchies. A sense of fluidity: practices are not bounded and fixed. They flow into and interact with other practices in ways that have the potential not only to reinforce them but also to redefine them. Thus individual sibling practices interact with gendered practices and age practices that link to power and status positions in the wider social fabric. But this dynamic does not occur in a straightforward fashion, since practices are constructed and negotiated in varying ways between particular sisters and brothers.

We begin our exploration of everyday sibling practices through a focus on talk and activity, and their relationship to the construction of gendered sibling identities and relationships.

Talk and activity: masculinity and femininity as sibling practices Studies and accounts of gender in children’s lives have been documented in relation to schooling especially. Studies of peer relationships in the classroom and playground setting have highlighted the production and reproduction of versions of masculinity and femininity, and the ways that these are infused with power relations. Many studies of schooling show that boys’ involvement in activities, such as football, running and physical fighting, are markers of masculinity (Connolly 1998; Mac and Ghail et al. 2001). Interactions through talk, chanting and arguments are enactments of femininity (Frosh et al. 2002; A. James 1993; Thorne 1993). In both cases, as the studies show, there are also disruptions to these gendered identities and relationships. As we discuss here, relationships between sisters and brothers are just as important, and perhaps even more crucial, sites for the formation and challenging of gendered social identities and accompanying power relationships. Two particular aspects of life where gendered power relations are played out for siblings are through talking and undertaking activities together. It is in these everyday recurrent and tangible sibling practices that gendered power relations are enacted and challenged, with sisters and brothers positioning each other as powerful or powerless in shifting ways, as part of their sense of closeness to their siblings or divisions between them.

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For the most part, talking together constituted a significant sibling practice for girls, involving a strong feeling of closeness to their sisters. An inability to talk to and confide in sisters often represented a sense of complete or partial separation in the relationship: It depends what mood she’s in. If she’s in like a stressy mood, she’ll just talk about the room and stuff. And if she’s in a really stressful mood, she’ll tell me to go away. And then if she’s like in a really good mood and she’s like going out somewhere, we’ll talk about boys and stuff . . . I sort of wish she’d be here a bit more, but, yeah, cos if she was here, I’d like – she’d probably be like a bit closer, but she’s not so I don’t really talk to her. When I was in junior school, it was like really – it was like my sister was my best friend, but now, er, she’s like doing stuff and I’m stuck at home. (Natalie, age 12, White working-class, talking about her older sister) In contrast to girls, boys considered doing activities together as a significant aspect of a sense of connection with their brothers. If these shared activities ceased they perceived some sort of rupture in their relationship. We saw this in the case study of Dan in Chapter 3, where Dan spoke about how he felt that his older brother no longer cared about him and voiced this sense of division around the fact that his brother no longer took him out fishing. In the case of sister–brother relationships, it appeared that activities largely took precedence over talk as a feature of closeness and connection. In other words, this aspect of the relationship worked on male terms, revealing gendered power relations. These points can be best illustrated through an in-depth discussion of two groups of siblings involving both brothers and sisters, and an older sibling who had left home. Anne, Jay and Natasha Anne (age 11) was a White working-class girl who lived with her older brother Jay (age 18) and had an older sister, Natasha (age 21), who had recently moved away to another part of the country. Talk was an important sibling practice for Anne, signifying her sense of connection and closeness to her older sister: [An older sister] is someone to help you, someone to help you with your homework, someone to talk to, someone to look after you and be kind to you . . . I spend a lot of time with my sister when I go and see her with my mum. [We] just talk about life . . . [If I was upset] I would go to my sister . . . Cos my sister has moved, like I keep in contact with her and like that makes me feel better cos I still know what she looks like and

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what her voice sounds like and things like that. We write letters, we talk to each other on the phone, and we send text messages to each other. To a large extent, Anne’s relationship with Natasha was characterised by talk even before she left home, but Anne’s account also highlights how the medium and form of the sibling practice of ‘talk’ had to change once Natasha had moved away – from face-to-face to mediated forms of communication. Anne remained invested in and committed to keeping the alternative means of the sibling practice of ‘talking’ with her sister going as demonstrating and embodying their connection to each other. If this form of contact broke down, it is likely that Anne would feel there had been an emotional as well as physical distancing in her relationship with Natasha. In some contrast, Anne described her relationship with her older brother, Jay, in terms of shared – or restricted – activities: My brother’s got a drum kit now. He don’t let me [play on it]. I went, ‘Jay, can I sit at your drum kit?’, and he goes, ‘No!’, and I goes, ‘Oh why?’ [and he replied] ‘Cos I don’t want you breaking nothing’, and so I’m like ‘Oowwhh’ . . . But sometimes I spend time with my brother. Like sometimes he takes me to the cinema to see different films, but not all the time . . . We do get on with each other. But sometimes we muck around and beat each other up, but not hurt each other, but just muck about . . . Well, he does let me watch his DVDs . . . He helps me with my homework if I get stuck on it. Anne mentioned talking with Jay, but when asked what they talked about she was unable to give an expansive description similar to the one of her talk with Natasha: ‘Umm [pause], umm [pause], umm [pause]. I don’t know about that one.’ Unlike the talk ‘about life’ shared with her sister, Anne’s sense of closeness to and connection with her brother centred around sibling practices of ‘mucking about’, occasional trips to the cinema and watching DVDs. These activities, however, appeared to be based largely on his terms: they watched his DVDs and he took her to see films. If Jay were to leave home and move some distance away, such shared activities would be less likely and it is not certain that Anne would be able to maintain communication with him in the way that she had with Natasha. It is also clear from Anne’s account that Jay exerted power over her through the prevention of activities, not always taking her to the cinema and stopping her from playing on his drums. Anne positioned him as powerful by her dismayed response and lack of challenge to his claim that she would break his drums. Nonetheless, gendered sibling practices and power relations are complex and multi-layered rather than straightforward. Anne also covertly disrupted Jay’s power; as she admitted, ‘It’s OK cos I play on it when he’s not here!’ In her interview, she further challenged Jay’s powerful

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position, using images associated with Jay’s masculinity to disrupt the gendered power he maintained, which the interviewer (one of us – also female) immediately identified with: Anne: Interviewer: Anne: Interviewer: Anne:

I don’t like going in his room. Why’s that? Cos it stinks! That’s like my brother. Maybe all brothers are smelly! Yeah.

Jody, Jason, Tom and Jessica Jody (age 13), Jason (age 11) and Tom (age 9) were White working-class and lived in a village with their mother. Their older sister, Jessica (age 25), had left home to go to university in a town quite a distance away and continued to live there. Jody’s sense of closeness to her older sister was built around talking together (discussed further below); she said that they ‘talk about everything’. Like Anne, above, Jody maintained connection with her non-resident older sister through this sibling practice using alternative means of face-to-face communication: My sister went to university so I couldn’t see her all the time. She kept phoning us every night and she came to visit in the holidays and stuff. It was really hard at first but then it got better . . . I talked to Jessica, saying that I didn’t want her to go and stuff. And then if I got worried or I got scared, then I just phoned her and it made me feel better. In contrast to her relationship with Jessica, Jody felt that her brothers mocked her interests and concerns, and thus it was pointless confiding in them: I don’t talk to my brothers because it goes in through one ear and comes out the other . . . I don’t think I would tell my brothers everything, like boyfriends and stuff, because they’d just be silly . . . I can’t tell them about girly stuff because they’re boys and they don’t understand, they just muck about . . . My friends, like if I went out with my friends and we did something, I wouldn’t be able to tell them cos they’d just laugh about it. Magazines, when I find something in there, I wouldn’t tell my brothers because they think girl magazines are funny. Thus, the practice that Jody considered important in a close sibling relationship was thwarted in relation to her brothers. Rather, Jody’s sense of connection with her younger brothers revolved largely around sibling

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practices involving activities, such as making time to take them for a walk in the forest or for a picnic on the nearby beach. Unlike Anne and her older brother above, however, Jody experienced these activities as an older sister. She had a strong sense of identity as a maternal-like carer for her two brothers, describing how: Sometimes when my mum goes next door or goes up the street, I look after my brothers and put them to bed and stuff. And sometimes they muck about and stuff, but sometimes they just calm down and I take them to bed and tuck them in and stuff. Jody also took it upon herself to try to regulate the relationship between herself and her brothers, at one point describing how she tried to contain her own anger and frustration on a day out at a theme park so that they would not argue and ruin the day: When we go to theme parks and stuff, we get along then because it’s a happy day and you’ve been looking forward to it for ages, you don’t want to ruin it so you don’t ruin it for other people . . . [One time] we had an argument where [Tom] said something to me. So instead of retaliating I just ran away and pretended I didn’t hear it. And then I acted as though I didn’t hear it for the rest of the day, even though I did. We all got on better and stuff. Thus Jody’s self-positioning as a maternal carer and responsible older sister in relation to her brothers salvaged a sense of connection to them that was compromised by her inability to talk to them about ‘girly stuff’. Jody, however, also used this absence of confiding talk as a form of gendered power, to help her retain a position of authority. While her brothers dominated their bond through sibling practices based on activity, this helped Jody to construct an identity of caring and powerful older sister. This sense of both closeness and distance, and gendered power, was summed up in her musings on where Jason and Tom might put her on their circle maps (one of the interview tools we used, described in Chapter 2): I think Jason and Tom would put me in the fourth [circle], because they talk to me but I don’t really talk to them much because I don’t really think they understand. But they might put me in the third one because I take them out and stuff and we get along sometimes. The marked differences in sibling practices between sisters and brothers – the way that they are formed in gendered ways around, respectively, talk and activity – have consequences for the conduct of relationships when a sibling leaves home. We have seen above how Jody, like Anne, was able to

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maintain a sense of closeness with her older sister over geographical distance through talk. For brothers, however, activity rather than talk was often the main sibling practice that gave them a sense of connection to their siblings. Jody’s brother Jason took quite a different approach to coping with Jessica’s absence: I tried to remember that she would come back often because she used to a lot before she had a job. You get used to it and probably she’ll come down sometimes, and just remember about that. [You] could try and spend more time, if [you’ve] got any other relatives, spend more time with them . . . [When Jessica left I felt] sadness, because I’d hardly ever see her again. Now she’s got a job she doesn’t come back as often, but I don’t mind because I am getting used to it. Jason’s approach to dealing with physical separation from Jessica was to spend time with others, alongside ‘waiting’ for the connection to be revived when she returned and relying on time to heal the sense of rupture. Unlike Jody, Jason did speak about maintaining communication across geographical distance. Shared activities do not have the same potential for stretching across geographical distance as talk. Thus sisters’ sibling practices appeared to be substantially more useful in maintaining connection when a loved older sibling leaves home. These two sibling sets of cases above have demonstrated the importance of the sibling practices of talk and activity, and how they are gendered. Of course, brothers did refer to talking to each other and sisters did undertake activities together. Bob, whom we discuss later on in this chapter, in particular stands out as a boy whose relationship with his three younger brothers was framed around talking to them. For the most part, though, shared activities between sisters, or talk between brothers or brother and sister, were not stressed as a core aspect of the relationship by the children and young people we interviewed. The cases we have discussed in depth above have involved sister–brother relationships in order to show the intersection of sibling practices with broader gendered identities and associated relations of power. Gendered identities and contested power relationships are also implicated in same-sex sibling relationships, as we demonstrate in our next discussion of a sibling group. Jasmine and Laura Several sisters explained elaborate imaginary games that they played with their sisters, a shared activity that was, in fact, organised around roleplaying talk. Laura (age 10) and Jasmine (age 7), White middle-class sisters who were interviewed together, provide a good example. In their fantasy

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play, Jasmine appeared to set out to differentiate herself from her older sister through the parts that they played, involving a complex interplay between gender and power: Jasmine:

I normally play the Princess. Laura likes to play all the different characters. Interviewer: What characters have you been then, Laura? Laura: Oh well, in Cinderella, I’ve been the Prince, the Fairy Godmother, the . . . Jasmine: . . . Evil Queen. Laura: There is no Evil Queen. The Prince, the Fairy Godmother, and that’s about it. Jasmine: The Ugly Sister. Interviewer: What was your best character then, Laura, do you think? Your best performance? Which one did you enjoy being? Jasmine: I think ‘Princess and the Pea’ is the goodest one, because there’s always laughing in it and there’s only three people so you don’t need three people to play, and of course, I was the Princess, and I was the King and the Queen. Laura: The Queen and the Prince. Actually, I was the caretaker. Jasmine: We made up the caretaker. Underpinning the sisters’ play are gendered images associated with femininity and power. Jasmine chose to act out the popular, powerful and successful characters from traditional fairy-tales. In turn, Laura accepted her less glamorous roles and corresponding attributes, which both sisters understood as related to her own personality traits: Interviewer: Would you ever want to be the Princess then? Jasmine: No, she doesn’t really like to be the Princess. Laura: I’m just not that kind of girl, I don’t really like being the Princess in the top rank, I just like things the way they are. I mean, if I was a Princess, I’d never be able to walk. In stark contrast, Jasmine established herself as generally more feminine and pretty, and popular, than Laura in real life too, although Laura attempted to resist this: Jasmine: Laura: Jasmine:

Laura’s a bit fatter, Laura’s a bit chubbier. You’re chubby, you’re chubby. Laura’s not a dressy skirt person. She wants to but first she’s got to get rid of her chubby body . . . Our hairs are different. Mine’s a bit longer. Interviewer [referring to Jasmine’s written list of differences between her

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Jasmine: Laura:

and her sister]: What do you mean, friends, the difference is friends? I’ve got friends and she hasn’t. She used to have this friend called Mary. Well actually she still is.

While Jasmine asserted herself as the more popular and model-like sister, through a gendered power based on femininity, birth order hierarchy and age status also played a part in the power dynamic between the two sisters. Jasmine shifted to the position of vulnerable younger sister in need of care from her older sister, especially when she had nightmares. Nonetheless, this shift also invokes the particular type of femininity redolent in Jasmine’s gender power play, involving a young heroine in need of protection from others: Jasmine:

I feel like I don’t need to worry about anything because I’m the youngest and I need more care . . . [Laura] lets me come into her bed if I have nightmares.

Laura accepted this positioning of herself as older sister, taking on the role of maternal carer in a similar fashion to Jody, above, even though she found it onerous: Laura: I’m her big sister, I’ve got to look after her. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t have the responsibility because I don’t like it. I have to look after my sister . . . Mainly I think being an older sister is kind of like being a second mum. One way in which children and young people experience their sense of who they are as individuals in a sibling unit is through the way that they care for and about each other. Both Jody and Laura see caring as a sibling practice related to their birth order and age status, for example. In the rest of this chapter, we focus more explicitly on caring, its manifestation for oldest, middle and youngest siblings, and its subsequent intersection with power dynamics.

Caring: birth order and age status as sibling practices Most of the sisters and brothers talked about ‘looking after’ each other, whatever their position in the sibling order. Nonetheless, many understood caring as a sibling practice that was integrally related to practices shaped by their predetermined position in the sibling birth order hierarchy, and as involving issues of power and authority. They spoke of

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older siblings as exercising care and protection of younger sisters and brothers, and younger siblings as receivers of this safe-keeping. We saw this above for Laura and Jasmine, where Laura regarded herself as having caring responsibilities as the older sister, which she understood in a gendered way, to be exercised in a maternal fashion, and Jasmine saw herself as entitled to care and protection as the younger sister. Similarly, two White middle-class brothers, Bart (age 12) and Zack (age 9), had distinct ideas about being an older and a younger brother centred largely around the provision and receipt of protective care. They were interviewed together: Zack:

Bart:

Interviewer: Zack:

He’s in secondary school now and I’m in primary school. It was good [when we were in the same school] because if someone was picking on me I could go and tell my brother and he would come and sort it out for me. I don’t go to the same school as my brother but I want to so if he gets into any trouble I can stick up for him. Yeah, people down the street keep kicking his bike and he got a stone thrown at him at school but we didn’t know who it was so I couldn’t do anything about it . . . And did Zack ever help you and stick up for you [Bart]? It’s mainly older brothers that stick up for younger brothers.

Bart’s and Zack’s understanding of the sibling practices associated with birth order position are gendered too, invoking more masculine and paternal images of care as physical protection from threat and violence rather than the more maternal and feminine caring described by Jody and Laura, above. Middle siblings In the face of ascribed sibling order positions shaping flows of care and associated power dynamics, the place of middle sisters and brothers is interesting. They understood themselves as both to provide care and protection down the sibling order and to receive it from above: My older brothers and sister stick up for me . . . around the house and in the street . . . My little brother goes to the same school as me and we have to go there on the bus, so I help him on the bus. (Emily, age 11, White middle-class, talking about her older siblings age 18, 16, 14 and 13, and younger brother age 4) Another example is Thomas (age 10), a White working-class boy, living in a village with his mother. Thomas’s sibling relationships demonstrate a

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complex interplay between the sorts of socially constructed sibling ties that extend beyond biology and co-residence that we discussed in Chapter 2 when considering who is a sibling, and ascribed ties and sibling practices associated with birth order status. He had an older stepbrother, Rick (age 19), whom he referred to as his brother and whom he idolised. Rick had moved away to live in a distant town, although he sometimes came home and was expected to return more permanently in the future. Within this relationship, Thomas positioned himself as a younger sibling. Thomas’s father lived in a city some distance away with his partner and her two daughters: Saffron (age 8) and Emmelia (age 9), and Thomas visited them quite regularly. He referred to Saffron and Emmelia as his younger sisters, positioning himself as older brother. Thus Thomas regularly shifted between being a younger and an older sibling according to where he was and who was present. Like other middle siblings in our research, he had an understanding of his position that was made up of elements of both being older and younger, but for Thomas this was delineated by his physical location rather than being experienced simultaneously: Interviewer: Thomas: Interviewer: Thomas:

So you’re more like the middle one? Yeah. And what’s it like being the middle one? Horrible. Cos when I’m up here [with my mother] I don’t have to do a thing, but when I go up there it’s like I have to do everything! . . . It’s fun but I hate doing stuff for Saffron and Emmelia all the time . . . Interviewer: Do you look after Rick? Thomas: No. You have to be older than them to look after them. Nonetheless, the age hierarchy and gendered caring sibling practices, and associated power dynamics, that we have discussed for older, younger and middle siblings can be challenged.

Disruptions and challenges to birth order and age status sibling practices In this section we look at disruptions and challenges to sibling practices that are shaped by birth order and age status. As part of this, we also take further the sibling practice of caring protection outside the home that was evident earlier in Bart’s and Zack’s account of protection from bullying at school. (The topic of sisters’ and brothers’ interactions and relationships within their local communities also forms a focus of Chapter 6.) Most children and young people who talked about protecting or being protected from bullying at school and in the neighbourhood, like Bart and Zack, referred to the usefulness of older sisters and brothers in protecting

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younger siblings. This was usually the case, even if their relationship with each other at home was more fraught. Bullying at school is a concern of educational policy and practice, and we have discussed this and the implications of the protection and intervention that siblings can offer each other for anti-bullying schemes elsewhere (Hadfield et al. 2006). Here we are more concerned with the issue as feature of disruption to the conventional sibling status order; where the flows of caring protection in birth order and age status practices are reversed or unsustainable. In this respect, two of the cases we feature involve particular issues of caring protection outside the home for minority ethnic siblings, as well as cultural understandings of the sibling practices associated with position in the birth order hierarchy. Indeed, in Chapter 3, we saw that different cultural understandings can shape sisters’ and brothers’ perceptions of self and relationality, shaped by both ethnicity and class. Finally, a further case study, the third, involves a challenge to the conventional order through sibling practices that draw on notions of equality rather than birth order or age status. Kelly, Jessie and Mark Kelly (age 10) and Jessie (age 8) were middle-class and of mixed parentage: Black African and White British. As well as two older sisters who lived only intermittently at home, they had a younger brother, Mark (age 6). Their case shows how younger siblings can transgress the order of the sibling hierarchy to provide protective care for older sisters and brothers. The sisters’ joint interview was dominated by images of caring and cooperative sibling relationships at home and protective watchfulness outside of it. Kelly in particular described some incidents that both confirmed and challenged the flows of protective care associated with birth order and age status: Kelly:

Jessie: Kelly:

Like when there is a bully in school and Jessie, and my brother and sister, they just pick on them. There is this boy, this was in year 3 with Jessie, and he was chasing her round the playground. So Jessie came to me and I started chasing him around the playground, and then I caught him and took him to the teacher. Because I am pretty fast . . . They look after me when I get bullied as well. Like my little brother Mark used to do that as well. Once when Jessie, yeah, this boy in her class kept kicking her and Mark, yeah, said, ‘Leave my sister alone’ . . . Tell her [the interviewer] about the party and the balloon stick. When my brother went to [a friend’s] party with Jessie he went straight with the balloon stick [to the boy who kicked Jessie] and hit him with it.

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Kelly did not directly refer to racism as a feature of the bullying she reported (nor did Bob in the case below), although it may well be an issue. It may be particularly difficult for Black and minority ethnic children to talk to White people about racism – and we (the people interviewing them) are all White. In relation to Kelly’s and Jessie’s account, the feeling of togetherness in the predominantly White area in which they lived may account for instances of the reversal of flows of caring protection associated with status positioning for their younger brother. It may also, however, demonstrate a gendered dimension, with a brother protecting a sister even if he is younger than she. Other – White – siblings also spoke about reversals of the flow of care down the sibling hierarchy in the face of an older sister or brother being bullied. Richard (age 12), a White middle-class boy, for example, explained how his younger sister (age 4) attempted to comfort him and help him deal with bullying, reversing the conventional sibling status order of older advice-giver and younger receiver: Richard: Sometimes Elsa comes up with ideas that sound amusing that make me feel better. Like if someone hurt me at school then she would say, ‘Well you could hurt them back or you could tell the teacher or you could just tell yourself that someone hits you.’ She thinks that if you tell yourself you will be able to get rid of [the horrible feeling]. Other disruptions of caring sibling practices linked to birth order status were often associated with times when the older sister or brother was ill, and younger siblings cared for her or him; for example, bringing them drinks and blankets, and stroking their hair. Bob and his three younger brothers Bob (age 9) was working-class and of Pakistani origin. He lived with his mother, father and three younger brothers, age 7, 5 and 3, on a small estate near the centre of a city with a large Asian population. Bob’s account centred on his feelings about being an older brother, drawing on gendered ideas of protective care and paternal authority and power, but his case also shows that this cannot always be sustained. As we noted earlier, Bob was one of the few boys who had the sibling practice of talk as a core aspect of his relationship with his brothers. He reported spending a lot of time as a guiding presence and monitor, endeavouring to ensure that his three younger brothers were on the path to a successful future: I like teaching them things because it’s quite fun . . . I ask the teachers

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every day how’s their behaviours, how their behaviour’s been. And then if it’s bad, when they come home, I don’t hit them, I just tell them off, I just shout at them . . . Cos in the future, when I’m older, I’m gonna help them with their [schoolwork] so they can be the cleverest in the class and get a good job. Bob’s identity as oldest brother was linked to a type of paternal power based on care and protection, and generational and institutionalised power hierarchies. For Bob, his relationship with his younger brothers entailed the responsibilities and aspirations associated with fathering and pedagogy. He explicitly modelled his own behaviour on his father’s, and allied himself with him. Further, he valued the authority structures at school and the use of systems of sanction and reward: Bob:

My dad sometimes brings us sweets, and I sometimes give some of my, some of the sweets to my brothers if they’ve been good in school. You know, my father, he lets me, since I’m the oldest. He’s older than me, he teaches me things so then I can be the cleverest in my class. Like, do you know, like lessons, home lessons like we do in school, like maths and English and things. It’s the same with me . . . Interviewer: Why do you think you check up on them and give them sweets and things? Bob: Erm, mainly because it’s, because it’s – do you know, when I grow up I want to be a teacher, and this is what sometimes teachers do if their children be good. They sometimes give them a treat if they be good. Despite his identity as a caring, paternalistic pedagogue to his younger brothers, Bob felt unable or unwilling to take this beyond the realms of teaching and monitoring, into physical protection. He explained how his peer reputation as a ‘softie’ meant that children who were bullying his brothers at school would also turn on him: Everyone knows we are brothers. It’s quite bad if someone hurts someone, do you know, if someone hurts my brother. Cos they know that I’m softie and I don’t like much proper fighting, like beating up people! Yeah, and do you know, if they hurt my brother it’s bad, cos they know that I’m softie. Then they go for me. After they go for my brothers, they go for me then . . . I tell the teachers sometimes, and [the bully] gets detentions, or sometimes we go to the head. Under these circumstances, for Bob, the flows of protective care based on masculinity, birth order and age status are disrupted. In contrast to the

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situation earlier described by Kelly, Jessie and Mark in the face of bullying, the disruption to the conventional flow consists of an inability to exercise it, rather than its reversal. Nonetheless, Bob still kept his sense of protective caring hierarchy intact; he approached the powerful authority figures at school rather than relying on himself. In both the cases of minority ethnic sibling groups we have discussed above, the sibling practices associated with birth order and age hierarchy, and concomitant power, were disrupted in some way. Nonetheless, they confirm the existence of the sibling status order in that they provide moments of disruption or transgression. For a minority of sisters and brothers, however, sibling practices associated with birth order and age status were absent in their accounts, and as such provide a challenge to them. Our final case study in this chapter illustrates this. Rachel and Toby Rachel (age 9) lived in a White working-class family in a small town with her younger brother Toby (age 7). Unlike other children and young people, Rachel did not focus on birth order or age status in discussing her relationship with Toby and their everyday life together. Rather, equality, interdependency and sharing were to the fore in her account, with an emphasis on ‘we’: Because Toby and me both get treated the same, we don’t – if I get into a row for doing something and Toby did it as well, so we’d both get [into trouble] . . . In the summer we still have mud around the house, around the place, like mud outside. Because we were doing the garden, and we walked in and we had muddy feet print all over the floor. So we got into trouble for that. We both got into trouble . . . Like on Mum’s birthday, we did like all the chores that she’d usually do, like wash the dishes, hoover, and we made her breakfast in bed . . . [When we do housework] we split the house in half. Like he gets that side of the house and I get to do like the living room and things . . . I think it’s equal. Rachel also referred to the way that the ‘rules’ laid down by her and Toby’s parents were the same for them both: ‘One of the rules is we’ve got to come home straightaway and do our homework, that’s one of our rules . . . I think it’s fair’; and part of her advice to other siblings consisted of: ‘Always play together.’ Rachel’s sense of equality and interdependency with her brother – rather than a big sister/care provider and little brother/care receiver relationship – is echoed in her discussion of (or maybe is an echo of) her parents’ treatment of them as an equally accountable unit. Guide and Scout Laws1 also appeared to play their part in her sense of fairness and helping each other to achieve household tasks:

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I’m a Brownie Guide, so like I’m meant to help out in the house. It’s part of the Brownie Guide Law . . . He’s a Beaver [Scout]. He did his Law, and he had to promise that he’ll do his best and to help around the house. And so he has to do that as well. When Rachel was explicitly asked about being an older sister, she responded ‘Doesn’t really bother me’, rather than recounting sibling practices of care and the exercise of power associated with birth order and age status. In having such a sense of egalitarianism as core to her understanding of her relationship with her younger brother, Rachel was quite exceptional among the children and young people we spoke to – albeit that several had more subdued moments of equity in their accounts alongside the conventional sibling order and power dynamics. Nonetheless, her account shows that substantial challenges to birth order and age status are possible in sibling life, and that an alternative understanding of identity and relationality between sisters and brothers based on equality and interdependency is possible.

Conclusion In this chapter we have been concerned with sibling practices as the mundane, everyday features of life with sisters and brothers that matter to children and young people as having something to do with being a sibling. In particular, we have focused on the sibling practices associated with being a sister or a brother, as embodying masculinity and femininity, and on being an oldest, youngest or middle sibling, as invoking birth order and age status hierarchies, and the flows and shifts of care and power involved. Our focus on sibling practices has revealed talk and activity as two aspects of identity and relationality for sisters and brothers that enact gendered power relations. For the most part, confiding talk together constituted a significant sibling practice for sisters, denoting the felt extent of their closeness to or division from their siblings. Talk between sisters, whether practised or withheld, also involved power relations that shifted around. In contrast, brothers considered doing activities together as an important part of a sense of connection or rupture in their relationship with their siblings, again involving power dynamics. Gendered power relations were also evident in the way that activities largely took precedence over talk as a feature of connection in sister–brother relationships. We also saw how reliance on the sibling practice of activity as a channel for close relationships was not as flexible as the sibling practice of talk when it came to maintaining relationships when an older sibling leaves home. Care and protection were another significant sibling practice, integrally linked with practices around birth order and age status that invoked flows of power. For the most part, older sisters and brothers were seen as, and saw

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themselves as, exercising care and protection of younger siblings. These responsibilities were often perceived in a gendered fashion, with older sisters as maternal carers, and older brothers as paternal protectors. Younger sisters and brothers, in turn, were receivers of this safe-keeping and authority. Middle siblings experienced themselves as both receiving care and protection from above, and providing them down, the sibling order. We also showed, however, that the conventional caring and protective sibling practices associated with birth order and age hierarchy, and their accompanying power dynamics, could be disrupted and challenged. Younger sisters and brothers can transgress the sibling order to provide their older siblings with care and protection, or older siblings can find it difficult to sustain the responsibilities associated with their place in the sibling order under some circumstances. Moreover, an alternative sibling practice of equality and interdependency is possible, rather than an identity and relationality based on the conventional sibling order. At various points in this chapter it has been evident that the sibling practices of talk, activity and care, and the gendered and status-ordered dynamics of power that play through them, can also involve conflict and division between sisters and brothers just as much as closeness and connection. In the next chapter we explore conflict and aggression in more depth.

Chapter 5

Dealing with conflict and aggression

Introduction At various points in this book we have drawn attention to the dominance of sibling conflict and rivalry in expert understandings of relationships between sisters and brothers. This is especially the case within the realm of developmental and clinical psychology, and in self-help books written by experts that are directed at parents. While some studies and advice books pose conflicts between siblings arising from jealousy as both natural and, if dealt with in the right way, healthy, other work draws attention to the more problematic and dangerous aspects. On both sides of the debate, however, the assertion is that responsibility needs to be taken for dealing with conflict and aggression between siblings, either by professionals, parents or children themselves, and that rational solutions can be found to ameliorate disharmony. Yet, as has become apparent through our discussion in previous chapters, relationships between siblings are not entirely rational and social constructions, but are the sites of irrational and unconscious internal struggles and tensions too. In this chapter we look at these issues in more depth. In order to understand why conflict and aggression between siblings are a preoccupation, the way they are contradictorily posed as both normal and a problem, and the placing of responsibility for dealing with them as a key feature of advice, we need to look at the construction of contemporary childhood. We thus begin with a consideration of three overarching policy, social and emotional processes that are evident in the construction of childhood for children living in post-industrialised countries: institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation. We explore how each of these features has relational implications, in particular constructing responsibility for dealing with jealousy and conflict between siblings and placing it on the shoulders of certain people. We then follow up this discussion of broad issues in a specific and grounded way, to consider how children themselves understand and experience everyday disputes and dissonance with their sisters and brothers. We look at constructions of who is responsible for dealing with quarrels and fights in

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their accounts, and how this responsibility should be implemented, noting age status and class differences. Subsequently, we consider the more visceral and unconscious features of conflict and aggression as part of relationality between siblings, tracing the psychic dimensions of rage and destructiveness, alongside creativity and the desire to repair damage done, as well as the more structural relationship to birth and age hierarchies. In addressing the social construction of responsibility for dealing with rivalry and disputes and the psychodynamic playing-out of conflict and aggression in relation to our empirical data, we concentrate on the accounts of the children we spoke to who were aged between 8 and 13 years, rather than those of young people in their mid to late teens and older. This is because the status of young people is subject to liminality and ambiguity as they cross the threshold into autonomous adulthood, displacing them from social constructions of the nature of childhood and adult responsibilities for children’s lives. In contrast, children in middle childhood (approximately 8–12 years old) are the subjects of constructions of childhood, and are strongly situated within and between the institutions of family and formal education (Edwards 2002). Their lives are more easily subject to assertions about the need for regulation by adults, at the same time as they are also meant to be learning how to take responsibility for themselves and their actions in readiness for their forthcoming entry into the self-regulating world of adulthood.

Constructions of childhood: who is responsible? As many commentators on the topic have noted, children have long been conceptualised and generally thought about in terms of their distinctiveness from adults, with an emphasis on their dependency, vulnerability and innocence (Archard 1993; Cahill 1990; Gittins 1998; Hendrick 1997; Higonnet 1998; Hockey and James 1993; Mayall 2001). A ‘good’ childhood is portrayed as a separate phase of life; a time of freedom from worries and responsibilities, of spontaneity and happiness, and of cognitive and emotional development in preparation for adulthood. Part of the spontaneity of childhood, however, includes an irrational, ‘uncivilised’ wildness (Elias 1994). In preparation for adulthood, children are also posed as needing to learn how to override their primal emotions, or at least keep them under control and hidden. Thus, conflict and aggression between sisters and brothers can cut across visions of this special time of childhood and children’s pathway towards rational adulthood. Someone needs to take responsibility for creating a ‘good’ childhood, preventing and dealing with sibling rivalry and quarrels, with their disruption to happiness and innocence, and visible demonstrations of savage behaviour. In the field of childhood studies, three main processes have been identified as shaping contemporary childhood in post-industrialised societies, each of

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which implicitly places responsibility for dealing with sibling disputes: institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation (Brannen and O’Brien 1995; Edwards 2002; Qvortrup et al. 1994). We discuss each of them in turn below. These various processes can also be traced in the advice provided by experts for how to deal with sibling conflict and rivalry, and we draw attention to this. Such advice is often complex and can be helpful, so we do not mean to simplify or dismiss it. The important issue for our discussion here, however, is the allocation of responsibility and suggestion of rational solutions. Institutionalisation refers to children’s increasing compartmentalisation into specifically designated, separate and organised settings and bodies of professional knowledge, structured around and defining age and ability. Schooling, for example, represents part of the ordered passage from child to adult status, and has been extended ‘downwards’ and ‘upwards’ as an institutionalised period, with a growing emphasis on pre-school education and the raising of the leaving age for compulsory education. Institutional bodies of knowledge and practice, such as developmental psychology, increasingly define and supervise a ‘proper’ childhood. They lay out educational and social stages and trajectories along which children should travel developmentally. Such professional prescription theorises the effects of everyday patterns of behaviour between sisters and brothers, shaping common-sense understandings of ‘problem’ or ‘normal’ aspects of sibling relationships (Mauthner 2005). Indeed, there is a range of books, websites and training courses on the topic targeted at parents and offering advice about ‘helping siblings to be friends’ and ‘beating the bickering’ (including Faber and Mazlish 1988; Hart 2001; Spungin and Richardson 2002; Woolfson 2002; www.raisingkids.co.uk; www.raisingkidsright.com). The advice for parents on how to deal with relationships between their children contained within self-help literature is also an aspect of the familialisation of childhood. The concept captures the emphasis on children’s being the responsibility of their parents (in effect, their mothers), and on their upbringing and home lives as shaping their behaviour and attitudes. Their identities and activities, including relationships with their sisters and brothers, are incorporated into the ‘private sphere’ of their family life. Children are conceived of as emotionally, culturally and materially dependent on and shaped by their parents, including as part of the expert bodies of knowledge involved in the institutionalisation of childhood. Indeed, in Chapter 1 we have already discussed how the psychological and psychoanalytic emphasis on parent/mother–child bonds constitutes the core formational relationship, marginalising the importance of sibling and other lateral relations. Policy prescriptions also emphasise, reinforce and impose parental responsibility, based on the fear that contemporary children are being inadequately socialised with detrimental consequences for society generally (Brannen 1999; Edwards and Gillies 2004). Some experts pose

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parents/mothers with dysfunctional styles of parenting and inadequate means of dealing with arguments between their children as complicit in creating sibling conflict and later problems of generally aggressive behaviour in adulthood (Furman and McQuaid 1992; Kramer et al. 1999; Siddiqi and Ross 1999; Valsiner and Cairns 1992; Vivkerman et al. 1997). Thus parents need to prevent this, ‘stepping in’ with ‘constructive resolution tactics’ to deal with jealousy and conflict (Patterson 1986; Hair et al. 2001). At first sight, the third process that shapes childhood in contemporary society appears to be in tension with the previous two. Individualisation refers to an increasing emphasis on children as responsible for their own ‘project of the self’ – that is, the formation and surveillance of their identity and relationships with others, and their personal development and life trajectory. Further consideration, however, shows that institutionalisation and familialisation are harnessed towards this self-production. Expert bodies of knowledge mandate, and ‘good’ parenting/mothering is posed as working towards, the inculcation and internalisation of values and competencies of self-discipline and responsibility in children’s production and policing of the self (N. Rose 1990). They promote a future-oriented, ‘open’ style of education and socialisation of children – democratic and authoritative in order to foster self-responsible choice and reflexively deployed reasoning and negotiation (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). In this way, the individualised citizens and workers of tomorrow are produced as ‘stand alone people’, necessarily responsible for and to themselves in the context of a liberal capitalist society (Walkerdine et al. 2001). In this mode, expert advice about how to deal with arguments and aggression between siblings stresses that parents should monitor and encourage, but from the sidelines, in order to enable their children to learn how to solve their own conflicts. This restrained action is said to lead to a reduction in disharmony between siblings, and is posed as a positive contribution to the development of children’s social understanding (Brody et al. 1987; Kelly and Main 1979; Leitenberg et al. 1977; Levi et al. 1977). It is only when conflict escalates into more serious fighting that parents should take assertive intervention. For example, later in this chapter we refer to Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s (1988) four levels of sibling conflict, with parents only actively stepping in to resolve the issue at stage 4. In the light of these academic and expert constructions of the nature of contemporary childhood and who needs to take responsibility for dealing with conflict and aggression, we now turn to children’s own understandings of these issues. But before we do so, it is worth highlighting how ambiguous and paradoxical are the prevailing norms about how to be a ‘good’ sibling. Stephen Bank and Michael Kahn draw our attention to some of the contradictions between implicit and explicit exhortations that children are likely to receive about their relationships with their siblings:

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Be close, but distant enough to be separate and distinct individuals. Be loving, but don’t become intensely or sexually involved. Be co-operative, but don’t become dependent on each other. Be loyal, but not in preference to caring about your parents. Be admiring, but don’t let your sibling take advantage of you. Be competitive, but don’t dominate. Be aggressive, but not ruthless. Be tolerant, but defend your own point of view. (Bank and Kahn 1982: 11)

This inventory contains elements of the constitution of a ‘good’ childhood as part of growth into future individualised adulthood that we noted above. It is clear also from this list that children and young people are likely to experience, at one time or another, some confusion about how to behave and how to feel about their sisters and brothers.

Children’s constructions of conflict with siblings The children we spoke to all referred to having arguments and fighting with their sisters and brothers. Their accounts of such conflict reveal again the sort of power relations between siblings structured around age status that we addressed in Chapter 4. The term ‘annoying’, or variants such as ‘she bugs me’ and ‘he winds me up’, was often used by children in describing aspects of their relationship with their siblings: It was annoying, cos when my friends came round here he would be annoying, expecting us to play with him. (Abbey, age 9, White middle-class, talking about her younger brother) He is annoying . . . Sometimes he does stick up for me if I am crying but usually he just blames stuff on me. (Bethany, age 9, White working-class, talking about her older brother) Children’s constructions of annoying behaviour and arguments with their sisters and brothers often invoked issues of age status and associated power hierarchies, but also involved some social class differences. Older siblings were particularly prone to describing their younger sisters’ and brothers’ behaviour or mere presence as problematic. Their accounts portray younger siblings as ignoring, or failing to understand, unspoken rules about space inside and outside the home, about the ownership of possessions, and how to behave around friends. Younger siblings acted in reckless and inappropriate ways. This could be attributed to their lack of competence and ability, or sometimes to a more wanton disregard or malevolent intent:

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Tom thinks he’s the youngest of the family. He thinks that he is the baby and stuff and acts a bit like it, which gets on everybody’s nerves. And he gets into tantrums and shuts himself in his bedroom. (Jody, age 13, White working-class, talking about her youngest brother) And like when I’m watching TV, like best programme or something, he screams more and shouts and runs around the room. [Why does he do that?] I don’t know, probably just to annoy me. (Michael, age 10, British Pakistani middle-class, talking about one of his younger brothers) For older siblings then, conflict with younger sisters and brothers is constructed and understood as a marker of the boundary between immaturity and maturity, with the older sibling well on the road towards reasonable, rational and authoritative adulthood. Implicit in these constructions of conflict are relational power struggles around assertion and recognition of status and sense of self. In contrast, younger siblings rarely referred to ‘annoying’ behaviour on the part of their older sisters and brothers in the same way. Rather than inappropriate and immature behaviour, their accounts invoke constructions of inequality, with their older siblings mentally and physically dominating them. They are more explicit about the underlying relational power struggles occurring between older and younger siblings within families: They interfere with things. Older brothers and sisters look down on you. Like Robert, he is older so he thinks he knows more. Well, he does, but you know, it’s like [sighs]. When I don’t know things, he makes it like I don’t know that much. (Chris, age 11, White middle-class, talking about his older brother and sister) Cos you’re younger you can get picked on a lot easier. The youngest seems not able to argue back easily. (Ellie, age 12, White working-class, talking about her four older sisters) Within these power struggles around birth and age hierarchy in the sibling order, however, some class differences are also evident. Younger siblings’ invasion of space within the home, and especially their ignorance or flouting of the rules surrounding ownership of possessions, seemed to be especially problematic for some middle-class older siblings. We saw this as an issue for Jacob (age 8), a White middle-class boy, as part of his case study in Chapter 3, when he discussed his annoyance at his younger sister’s appropriation of his property as well as space in their home, and his distaste at sharing a bedroom with his younger brother. Other middle-class children voiced similar feelings of material incursion by younger siblings:

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And she goes through all my magazines when I tell her not to. I don’t like it but she still goes through them. Cos she gets children’s magazines but I get big ones . . . Once I walked in on her putting my make-up on and I don’t like it . . . She only has lip gloss and nail varnish but I have eye liner, lip gloss, lipstick, everything. I’ve got tattoos, fake ones. So I get them and she puts them on, and I just get really, really, really annoyed with it. Cos like she takes my clothes, like she goes out in my coats when I tell her not to. She tries to wear my shoes out, she tries to wear my make-up. (Mariko, age 9, White middle-class, talking about her younger sister) In contrast, some working-class children – although they could certainly experience conflict around other aspects of their siblings’ behaviour – shared quite cramped accommodation and possessions without dispute: I just get all my stuff on one side [of the shared bedroom] and put all his stuff on that side. He can use my stuff and I use his. (Lee, age 10, White working-class, talking about his older brother) These sorts of distinctions of understanding around material space and possessions resonate with the issues that we discussed in Chapter 3 around different experiences of a sense of self through establishing autonomy and uniqueness, or through a sense of sameness and of belonging to a group. They echo other studies of aspects of family life and upbringing that identify different emphases on being an individual and being part of a collectivity for middle- and working-class people (e.g. Skeggs 1997; Edwards and Gillies 2005; Gillies 2005; Ribbens McCarthy et al. 2004; Stewart 2000; Walkerdine and Lucey 1989; Walkerdine et al. 2001). This sort of work highlights social class as lived experience and relationships, rather than as a category into which people fall. The class-shaped emphases in children’s accounts also indicate that conceptions of sibling conflict as based on scarcity of parental resources (as in the investment of parental time noted in Chapter 2) are far from straightforward. Rather, as Chapter 4 indicates, whatever the level and type of resources available, it is what their allocation symbolises to children as part of their standing in relation to their sisters and brothers that is at issue. The symbolic aspects of conflict and aggression, whether played out around structural features of age status or access to resources, also have a psychic dimension, and we go into this in more depth later in this chapter. Nonetheless, the psychic still demonstrates traces of power struggles between siblings around birth and age hierarchies as well as constructions of contemporary childhood. For most children, everyday annoyances and arguments with their sisters and brothers were just a normal part of life (discussed further later). At the

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same time, however, they also saw arguments and fights as in need of amelioration, requiring someone to take responsibility for dealing with them.

Children’s constructions of who is responsible Earlier in this chapter we discussed how the major processes of institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation constructed childhood for children living in post-industrialised countries, and how they had relational implications, in particular constructing responsibility for dealing with jealousy and conflict between siblings and placing it on the shoulders of certain people. Children’s own constructions of who is responsible for dealing with quarrels and fights, and how this responsibility should be implemented, draw on notions associated with familialisation and individualisation, but contain a silence with respect to institutionalisation. Again, issues of birth order and age hierarchy, involving power dynamics, are evident. Familialisation, as we have discussed, poses parents as responsible for children’s development and well-being, and for relationships between their children. In a number of situations, children in our research spoke about turning to and expecting their parents to deal with ‘annoying’ behaviour and conflict. This was mainly posed in terms of parents weighing in on the child’s own side in the dispute, to support their reasonable and justified position in the case of older siblings, or younger siblings feeling that parents should right the wrongs inflicted on them by more powerful older sisters and brothers: When I was playing with my friends yesterday, I told my mum that Jessica was being really annoying, so she took Jessica and told her to go and watch TV. (Holly, age 9, White middle-class, talking about her younger sister) I just tell my parents and they send them all down. Then they lock the door. (Bob, age 8, British Pakistani working-class, talking about his younger brothers coming into his room while he does his homework) [The worst thing is] that they shit on you. They call you retard, they call you batty boy, they call you invalid. Yeah, and that’s it really. [What do you do when they call you that?] I tell my mum. (Beckham, age 9, White working-class, talking about his older brothers) He kills me sometimes, tried to suffocate me [laughs]. I tell Mum. (Daisy, age 9, White middle-class, talking about her older brother) In addition to supporting them through exerting parental authority, drawing further on images of children as materially dependent on parents,

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some middle-class children also wanted or expected parents to provide resources (money, treats, household space) that would prevent conflict: Interviewer: Is there anything brothers and sisters can do to get along and not argue? Bart: Pay me! Zack: Tell them if you shut up we can go to McDonald’s. Bart: Have separate bedrooms. (Bart, age 12, and Zack, age 9, White middle-class brothers) Thus children can have expectations of how their parents can and should take responsibility and intervene that are rooted in their different locations in the class-based social structure, and associated access to and expectations of the investment of material resources. Relying on parents to deal with conflict and intervene on their behalf did not always appear to be a successful practice, but the children’s discussions of this failure still invoked parental responsibility. John Parker (age 9, White middle-class), for example, discussed his frustration at the immature behaviour of his intractable younger brother, David, in particular, in contrast to his own reasonable desire to get on and do his homework without distraction. Most of the time David is positively annoying . . . David doesn’t try to work. It really gets on my nerves. I have to shout at him if he comes in my room to help him understand . . . I tell Mummy and Daddy but they sort of go like, ‘Oh, what harm is he doing?’ They can’t like make him stop. They don’t think he is annoying so it is hard to get him to stop. As a result, John Parker was thrown back on his own resources, attempting to exert his own authority as an older sibling through a pedagogic method of shouting at his younger brother to ‘help him understand’. He also tried this strategy with his younger sister, albeit equally unsuccessfully for the most part. An alternative practice he adopted was, in turn, to annoy his younger siblings; another pedagogic manoeuvre through which they might realise the perversity of their behaviour: They start singing, it’s really annoying. I shout at them. Shouting makes me feel better. It doesn’t necessarily work though . . . Well, they sort of like start it off and then I start doing something that they don’t really like, and then it’s like I am teaching them a lesson. John Parker’s attempts to deal with conflict with his siblings in the face of the failure of reliance on processes associated with familialisation, demonstrate

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aspects of individualisation. He took responsibility for changing his brother’s and sister’s behaviour on himself. While this did not appear to require self-control on his own part, it did rely on ideas of his siblings learning self-restraint with himself as teacher. Other older siblings did see themselves as needing to override their more destructive and aggressive feelings to exercise self-control and responsibility as mature beings. They spoke about ignoring the annoying behaviour of younger sisters and brothers, changing activity or removing themselves in order to diffuse tension and conflict. We saw this for Jody (age 13), a White working-class older sister, as part of her and her siblings’ case study in Chapter 3, where Jody spoke about regulating conflict between herself and her younger brothers by maturely attempting to contain her own anger in the face of their provocation. Such actions kept a boundary between immature and mature behaviour in place, usefully placing them on the side of the reasonable, rational individual. They also invoked pedagogic ideas of learning rationality, with themselves as teacher, explaining and reasoning with younger siblings to ‘make them see’ the right course of action: I just shout, but he doesn’t get scared, he does it more. So then I just leave him alone. (Michael, age 10, British Pakistani middle-class, talking about his younger brother screaming and running around the room while he watches television) I’d say, ‘I really want to go and play’ . . . I tried that and it worked. I said, ‘I really want to go and play, why don’t you go and play with your friend?’ (Holly, age 9, White middle-class, talking about her younger sister) I tell him not to. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I explain to him what I am doing and then it stops. (David, age 10, White middle-class, talking about his younger brother) Older siblings’ individualised means of dealing with conflict thus attempted to retain and exercise power in various ways in the face of struggles with their younger sisters and brothers. Younger siblings also adopted such individualised ways of dealing with conflict, but their less powerful position in the birth order and age status hierarchy meant that these were limited. They were far less likely to attempt to reason with their older sisters and brothers and teach them rationality; rather they relied on non-confrontation and self-protection: Jason calls me names a few times. Sometimes I tell Mum, sometimes I just run off and relax. If your older brother is picking on you, you

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should tell somebody. Don’t hit them back, call them names to their face, cos they will just hit you back and it will get worse. (Tom, age 9, White working-class, talking about his older brother) There was a silence in the children’s discussions – none spoke of turning to institutions outside of her or his family to deal with difficulties in the relationship with their sisters and brothers. There was no reference to teachers, professionals, or advisory services such as telephone helplines, as a resource to turn to that could help or intervene in conflict. This suggests that sibling problems are regarded by children as ‘private’ family matters, to be dealt with inside these boundaries by parents or self, even when arguments and fights with their sisters and brothers occurred at school. Other studies have also noted that children can see their family lives as private matters that are not the business of experts (Edwards and Alldred 1999; Wade and Smart 2002). Our analysis above shows that conflict between siblings brings to the fore tensions that are cross-cut by age hierarchy as well as social class. These involve power struggles, and focus on the learning and exercise of rational, mature control and the restraint of more primal, immature and aggressive behaviour. Thus, as well as overt conflict and struggles between siblings, there are psychodynamic struggles within siblings. Underlying visceral struggles between ‘civilised’ and ‘wild’ feelings, however, may be less amenable to amelioration through the rational interventions of experts and parents, or the learning of self-directed conflict resolution. They speak of more inherent, irrational and unconscious tensions that are at play in relationships between sisters and brothers. We now turn to explore the psychodynamics of conflict and aggression between siblings in more detail.

The psychodynamics of conflict and aggression In our previous discussion we pointed to the way that the three main trends of institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation in contemporary childhood variously shape the way that conflict and aggression between siblings can be understood, and in particular who is responsible for dealing with them. In relation to individualisation, we noted that children take responsibility for dealing with conflict themselves in various rational ways, such as through pedagogic manoeuvres or consciously trying to override their own feelings of anger. Here, however, we are concerned with the actual playing-out of aggression and violence. As we noted earlier, advice literature on sibling conflict can pose sibling jealousy or rivalry as a natural and normal part of the developmental process of learning to deal with conflict (e.g. Faber and Mazlish 1988; Spungin and Richardson 2002). More problematic and dangerous aspects of conflict between sisters and brothers are nonetheless highlighted as an issue that

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needs to be remedied and avoided; steered in the right direction through rational strategies introduced by parents and developed within the family group. Faber and Mazlish (1988), for example, have depicted sibling conflict as a series of intensifying stages. As shown in Box 5.1, they provide a guide for parental intervention that will diffuse an escalation into serious aggression and violence, and avoid negative effects on children’s self-esteem or personality.

Box 5.1 Faber’s and Mazlish’s (1988) levels of conflict HOW TO HANDLE THE FIGHTING Level I: Normal Bickering 1. Ignore it. Think about your next vacation. 2. Tell yourself the children are having an important experience in conflict resolution. Level II: Situation Heating Up. Adult Intervention Might be Helpful 1. Acknowledge their anger ‘You two sound mad at each other!’ 2. Reflect each child’s point of view ‘So Sara, you want to keep holding the puppy, because he’s settled down in your arms. And you Billy, feel you’re entitled to a turn too.’ 3. Describe the problem with respect ‘That’s a tough one: Two children and only one puppy.’ 4. Express confidence in the children’s ability to find their own solution ‘I have confidence that you two can work out a solution that’s fair to each of you . . . and fair to the puppy.’ 5. Leave the room Level III: Situation Possibly Dangerous 1. Inquire ‘Is this a play fight or a real fight?’ (Play fights are permitted. Real fights are not.) 2. Let the children know ‘Play fighting by mutual consent only.’ (If it’s not fun for both, it’s got to stop.) Level IV: Situation Definitely Dangerous! Adult Intervention Necessary

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1. Describe what you see ‘I see two very angry children who are about to hurt each other.’ 2. Separate the children ‘It’s not safe to be together. We must have a cooling-off period. Quick, you to your room, and you to yours.’

The stages shown in Box 5.1 with the appropriate steps for parents to take demonstrate not only the promotion of a rational, pedagogic, self-controlled approach to sibling conflict on the part of parents as adults, and how the aim is to inculcate similar self-restraint and negotiation in their children, but also assumptions about the material as well as emotional resources available in the households. Notably, the second step in dealing with Level IV conflict takes it for granted that each child has her or his own room to be sent to. In our studies just under half the children and young people taking part shared a bedroom with one or more siblings, and in three households space was so limited that the living room doubled as a bedroom for parents. Further, nowhere does the guide for intervention acknowledge the age status hierarchical power struggles and inequalities in ability to negotiate revealed in the children’s own accounts above. The influences of institutionalised clinical and developmental psychology on such self-help literature are clear. As we noted earlier, sibling conflict has been the subject of numerous clinical psychological inventories. Developmental psychology, especially in the work of Judy Dunn and colleagues (Dunn 1993; Dunn and Boer 1992; Dunn and Deater-Deckard 2001; Dunn and Kendrick 1982; Dunn and Plomin 1990), has examined sibling conflict as part of a child’s development and understanding about the world. What has been neglected in this emphasis on conflict and solutions to ameliorate disharmony is that relationships between sisters and brothers are not entirely rational but are also the site of psychodynamic struggles that are not always amenable to rational strategies. Whilst parents may be reassured that their children’s fights and teasing are perfectly normal and healthy in such approaches, the emphasis on universal stages of conflict and corresponding rational strategies fails to address the complexity of the experience of conflict for different individuals and how they make sense of it. The interplay of conflicting and ambivalent emotions, feelings and desires playing out in relationships with sisters and brothers cannot easily be boxed into stages or strategies. A psychoanalytic approach can help here. While it similarly poses aggression as a natural and normal aspect of relationships, in contrast to developmental explanations it does not suppose that the kinds of feelings that underlie sibling conflict are always open to rational interventions. If we examine children’s accounts of sibling conflict using ideas from

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object-relations theorists about the place of anger and destructive feelings as well as impulses towards reparation in early relations, we can begin to see a more complex and irrational picture of sibling conflict. Freud characterised all sibling relationships as deeply, even murderously rivalrous. Since then other psychoanalytic clinicians and writers have taken a more open and optimistic view, however. Those working within the objectrelations school allow for the possibility that while one child can rival a sister or brother for the affection or attention of a parent, ‘for a friend’s interest, for a prized family role’ (Bank and Kahn 1982: 197), it is by no means automatic that all sibling conflict has rivalry at its roots. As we have discussed in previous chapters, the kinds of conscious and unconscious identifications that children and young people form with their siblings are complexly layered and interwoven. The dimensions of these layers are simultaneously internal and external; social, cultural and structural circumstances merge with and are mutually constitutive of personal, internal worlds. Two key ideas in psychoanalytic thought are that we are defended subjects who unconsciously employ a range of strategies to avoid and manage anxiety (Hollway and Jefferson 2000), and that we are desirous beings, seeking the satisfaction of our emotional needs. Both of these ideas can help cast another light on aggression between siblings; for instance, the notion that we can be unconsciously invested in behaviour and forms of relations that are damaging. Bank and Kahn dispute the idea that aggression between siblings is always motivated by rivalry where one desires something that the other has. In many forms of sibling aggressions, ‘the payoff is internal, having to do with a forbidden satisfaction or the fulfilment of a deeper emotional need’ (1982: 197). These needs include the need for constancy, the need to be recognised by others as subjects with our own desires worthy of fulfilment, to be thought well of, to be loved. In order to highlight further the contradictions of aggression and explore the difficulties in applying universal rational solutions to them, we have selected three children from our sample as illustration. We introduce them here and then discuss their cases in more detail below. Marshall (age 12) lived in a White working-class, lone mother family in a small village with his baby sister. His older brother (age 19) had recently left home. Marshall claimed he had an uncontrollable temper that caused violent outbursts towards friends and teachers at school. He had been attending support sessions with an educational psychologist as a result. Violence and aggression were a strong part of Marshall’s everyday life, and this had a significant effect on his relations with his brother and his own internal world. Marshall’s relationship with his older brother can be identified as at the extreme and damaging end of sibling conflict stages, such as Faber’s and Mazlish’s level IV. Nikki (age 9) came from a White middle-class nuclear family living in a large city. She had two younger brothers: Rupert (age 3) and Conrad (age 7),

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and in particular she fought and argued with Conrad, each being aggressive towards the other. Like Marshall’s, Nikki’s account was also characterised by conflictual behaviour at school and she described in great detail the fighting, name-calling and arguing occurring between herself and friends, as well as an incident where she was called into the head teacher’s office for bullying. She can be placed towards the higher end of expert conflict stages, such as Faber’s and Mazlish’s level III. Finally, Claire (age 11) lives in a White middle-class nuclear family, situated in a large town, with her younger brother Mark (age 8). In contrast to the extremes of aggression discussed by Marshall and Nikki, Claire’s discussion of conflict refers to everyday fighting and bickering, more closely allied to the ‘natural and normal’ lesser stages of expert assessments, such as Faber’s and Mazlish’s levels I and II. It would be too simple to view these three children’s relationships as either ‘unhealthy’ or ‘healthy’. The starting points within a psychoanalytically informed approach are that the potential for human hate and destructiveness is equalled by the potential and capacity for love and creativity, and that aggression is a normal, although widely varying, feature of people’s internal dynamics and relationships with others. Indeed, in various forms, conflict and aggression are part of everyday interaction for all children, something that points to the idea that aggression can be put to many and diverse uses. We do not want to suggest that sibling aggression is never damaging, or that for some children and young people (and indeed adults) being with a brother or sister is not an emotionally unsafe experience. Research makes it clear that sibling aggression and abuse can have devastating and enduring effects (Wiehe 1991). At one extreme, desires to dominate, hurt and humiliate can drive aggressive behaviour between siblings. It is, however, also possible for siblings to engage in conflicts that do not terrify, belittle or silence the other, but have become part of an altogether more creatively charged dynamic. It is clear that the level of violence experienced by Marshall is vastly different from the squabbles and play fighting of Claire, as well as its being subject to professional intervention from the school and psychologists. Nonetheless, even between these extremes, conflict and aggression at whatever level have an effect on the relations between siblings and more widely, and it can be difficult to apply rational strategies to such complex emotions. For all three children, fighting with their sisters and brothers was part of everyday life. In her account Nikki discussed fighting as a shared activity with her younger brothers, which they could all join in and enjoy: It is not a bad thing, it is fun! We have this time, I can’t remember how it started. Conrad’s got a wrestling game on the carpet and Rupert, he didn’t even know what it was but he said, ‘Have a wrestle.’ And we did. And Conrad really liked it so he joined in.

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For many children rough, physical play such as wrestling, even though it may also include painful pinches and punches, does hold the potential for a lot of bodily contact, and can follow a predictable pattern of attack and counter-attack (Abramovitch et al. 1979). The home, to some extent, can become a ‘social laboratory’ where a constructive function of sibling aggression is that it forces children and young people to learn how to manage and resolve conflict: The ability to deflect aggression, to use it wisely and at the right moment, to use humour, to surrender without debasing oneself and to defeat someone without humiliating that person, are all skills that children and adolescents can eventually use in relationships with peers, spouses and ultimately their own children. (Bank and Kahn 1982: 199) In Marshall’s world, violence and aggression between siblings and other children were also considered normal, but this, it seemed, was something that had been imposed upon him by his older brother. Interviewed in the presence of his cousin Sarah, Marshall felt that he and Sarah came from ‘the same worlds’, where it is the norm for older brothers to attack younger siblings: She gets on crap with her brother. Yeah, but her brother and my brother used to skate together. So we’re both coming from the same worlds. She gets it much worse than me though. Marshall also explained how he and Sarah built a form of connection through fighting, actively relating to each other through this form of contact, with which she concurred: Sometimes we can just batter each other and other times we can just like – even though I kick her ass every time like. This recognition of the potential of play fighting to symbolise a connection between self and siblings is also reflected in Claire’s account. Claire was interviewed alongside her younger brother, Mark, who was relatively quiet in their joint interview but agreed with the picture Claire painted of the role of aggression in their relationship as normalised practice. Claire appeared to have a particular investment in fighting with her brother as a means through which her frustration with him could be articulated, and as a rational remedy for it: Everybody fights, every brother and sister I know fights at some time. Because if we didn’t fight we’d be really, really, really weird, if we didn’t fight. We’d be way out of place, we’d be just too weird. I couldn’t live

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without fighting him . . . [You do it] just to get everything out of your head. And you just kind of let go, and just sort of kick them and hit them, and it makes up for them being a right little prat at times. And you can just kick them and punch them and then you’ll feel much better. In Chapter 3 we explored how identification with siblings can sometimes involve elements of projection, with sisters and brothers becoming the convenient repository for aspects of the self that are unbearable. The violent projection of these elements onto a younger sibling may be cleansing in some way. As Claire says, after hitting and kicking her little brother, she feels much better. The eliminating function of such interactions, however, is short-lived. Underneath the normalisation of aggression and ‘play fights’ in these three children’s accounts, more visceral emotions peer through. What Claire first presents as fun can get out of hand and shift into something quite different: Yeah we have big fights at times. Like we’ll sit on the sofa – I’m sitting on the sofa and he comes over, and starts kicking. And then he sits over me and he starts kicking and punching and fighting and stuff and pulling hair and biting. Sometimes it’s a game, sometimes it’s good fun to have it as a game. Other times it gets a bit out of hand and it isn’t a game. Then what happens, you start crying, start crying, and then we get a big row and we get shouted at, and we get sent to our rooms. What was a game and connective play fighting could shift into an intensely emotive event. Such shifts from portrayals of normalised, acceptable conflict to more raw, out-of-control aggression and rage can become apparent at different points for different children. Marshall’s experiences would perhaps not be the same as Claire’s. Leaving aside the perceptions of professionals and parents, children’s own attributions of responsibility for dealing with conflict and aggression between siblings become relevant once this shift has occurred to them, whether as familialised offspring or individualised persons, and rational strategies for amelioration come into play.

Rage, the illusion of self-sufficiency, and destructiveness From a psychodynamic perspective, far from being a demonstration of immature behaviour and a lack of a developed individualisation, rage is an enduring aspect of the self and psychic life. For Freud, rage is an outcome of that pivotal developmental process, the Oedipal drama and the realisation that, no matter how loved and special we may be as children, we are invisible to some people, mean nothing to them, including our parents at least some of the time. Object-relations theorists and the Kleinian school would

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place it much earlier, to the first weeks and months of life when the entirely helpless and dependent baby psychically splits the good ‘breast’ who provides food and warmth and is the object of the baby’s loving feelings, and the bad ‘breast’ who denies these things and receives the baby’s rage. In this respect, rage is also related to humiliation, linked to our need for other people: ‘the tyranny of one’s need for the other; or rather, one’s inevitable need experienced as – or turned into – a tyranny’ (Philips 1998: 101). Here, it is not the need that is tyrannical; what is really tyrannical is an individualised fantasy of not-needing. Marshall’s account demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between rage and illusions of individualisation with their promise of ‘stand alone’ self-production and self-sufficiency. Despite his account of play fighting as a means of connection with his cousin and the normality of aggression in their world, the violence directed at Marshall by his older brother caused ambivalent feelings around his own emotional self-sufficiency: Cos me and my brother don’t get along that much. We fight more when my mum is around. So it’s like – me and my sister get along well. I love my sister. I mean, I do love my brother obviously, it’s just the fact that I love my sister more. Because my brother always hits me. Anything really [can make it happen]. He mostly does it for fun. It made me feel lonely before my sister was there, but now she is here. Because he hit me, I just ran off on my own. Let them have their own way, that’s the way I do it. At least you get some peace and quiet. Marshall’s use of the rational strategy of physically separating himself from his brother when he was violent was not accompanied by an emotional separation. His desire for a positive connection to his brother remained. Marshall’s expressed sense of loneliness makes this clear, and exposes the mirage of individualised self-sufficiency. The birth of his sister offset these feelings of being lonely, a sibling to whom he could relate safely both physically (through cuddles) and emotionally, further underlining the illusionary nature of the ‘stand alone’ human being. Despite the aggression from his brother, however, Marshall did not express any anger or hatred towards him. He seemed somewhat resigned to it, and was careful to state that he loved his brother (just not as much as his sister). Thus Marshall attempted to not care and to love at one and the same time. His rational avoidance of extremely negative feelings towards his abusive elder brother may seem laudably mature, but viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is a highly defensive coping strategy put in place to manage, rather than resolve, significant feelings of anxiety, fear and rage. The psychoanalytic theories that we discussed in Chapter 1 see human beings as having a considerable capacity for destructiveness. This destructiveness is not simply a product of an inadequate environment with an absent or

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lacking parent. Rather, angry, hateful and hating feelings are viewed as intrinsic to human nature and, even if people want to disown them, such emotions are still a crucial dimension of the self. Furthermore, destructiveness is not solely directed at others – it can also be directed very powerfully and with serious consequences at the self. Importantly, however, while the capacity for destructiveness is considerable, in this model it is matched by a creative capacity: to build, to love and to repair relationships and the self. We turn to this feature of human nature in sibling relationships below. All the children and young people taking part in our research filled in a ‘circle map’ (see Chapter 3) that mapped their closeness to the people whom they considered important in their life. In completing his map, Marshall placed his older brother close to himself on an inner ring of the map, signifying his brother’s importance to him. Marshall then pondered which ring his brother might put him in were he to undertake the exercise. He said that, if anywhere, his brother would put him on the outer edges, reflecting Marshall’s feeling that he meant nothing to his brother. At this point in the interview, there was a shift in Marshall’s mood, where he struggled to articulate why he felt he couldn’t be bothered with the interview (and yet he refused the interviewer’s offer to end it): He probably wouldn’t even put me in a circle. He might put me in that one, but I know for a fact he wouldn’t put me in that one . . . I don’t feel like doing nothing at the moment. I just feel crap. Dunno [why], it’s just me. Marshall seems to be a prime example of the negative consequences of an aggressive relationship with his sibling, which makes him feel lonely and unconnected. Mirroring aspects of his relationship with his older brother, Marshall appeared to build his relationship with his cousin Sarah around fighting, he normalised violence in others, and had difficulties in controlling his temper at school. Yet Marshall’s experience of conflict and aggression was complex; at the same time as it isolated him, he also saw it as symbolising connection (as in his relationship with his cousin). Bank and Kahn (1982) argue that aggression in childhood is important for emotional development because it can help people to defend themselves against real or imagined aggression. They cite Anna Freud who maintained that a child who responds aggressively in the face of threat or harm from a sibling is identifying with the aggressor and, thereby, ‘transforms himself [sic] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat’ ([1946: 121] quoted in Bank and Kahn 1982: 200). If the threat is from an older, bigger sibling by whom the child is afraid of being hurt, however, this fear can be countered by turning on another sibling or sibling-like figure. Marshall was a younger brother subject to an abusive older brother, and we have seen the importance of age hierarchy and associated power

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differentials in children’s constructions of the nature of sibling conflict earlier in the chapter. In contrast, Nikki was an older sister. Consequently Nikki was much more able, both physically and positionally, to project her angry and hateful feelings towards the oldest of her younger brothers, acted out through fighting and squabbling: I hate him cos he’s like – he hates me exactly the same because we get into fights where I punch him and he kicks me, and then he’ll start crying even if I never even hurt him much, and that’s really annoying . . . Usually when Conrad and I are having a fight it starts off by me doing something to him by accident. I’ll step on his toe or something, which he’ll think I’ve done on purpose and then he’ll start punching me, so I’ll kick back, and that’s how they start . . . Usually in the car we’ll start kicking each other. We’ll argue about stupid stuff like who gets to sit in the front. In relation to their siblings, Marshall’s and Nikki’s accounts and experiences differ in the sense that Marshall was a younger sibling on the receiving end of extreme violence from his older brother, whereas Nikki was an older sibling who seemed much more able to come out on top and deal out what she gets from her younger brother. Thus the playing-out of psychic aspects of rage and destructiveness that are part of human nature is shaped by differential status positions and associated power in sibling relationships.

Differentiation and reparation A psychodynamic focus on conflict and aggression between sisters and brothers can also tell us something about their role in issues of sameness and difference that were addressed in Chapter 3, and also points towards the more creative capacity for reparation of destructiveness that we noted above. At the very least, in its negative manifestation towards siblings and others, aggression is one of many ways of actively relating: it requires relational contact in some form, as the sister or brother towards whom hatred and anger are felt, even if she or he is not present, is considered someone important enough to make this form of destructive emotional connection. Similarly, reparation involves a positive capacity to love and build relationships, and to repair and make good damage to others and self. Again, birth order and age status hierarchies play themselves out in both these processes between siblings. The kinds of verbal and physical aggression that older siblings can use to dominate younger siblings, such as hitting or teasing, can be regarded as a means of differentiation. Conflict allows older sisters and brothers to exercise power and feel superior to younger siblings. Throughout her interview, Nikki drew on characteristics associated with her age status in relation to

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her younger brother Conrad to assert her ascendant difference from him. For example, she remarked that they played in different playgrounds at school (hers being for older pupils), and that she was allowed to go on different rides to her brother at the fair: If we go to a theme park because I’m taller than Conrad and he can’t go on all the rides, he gets really upset. That’s good, as my Dad says I can go on and Conrad gets really upset. Nikki felt angry when Conrad appeared to usurp her status as oldest sibling, to act in a pedagogic fashion towards their youngest brother Rupert, initiating him into the verbal aspects of conflict and aggression: Conrad thinks it’s really cool if he can swear and Rupert’s learnt how to swear off him. Rupert says like ‘idiot’, and swears and stuff. I think that’s Conrad’s fault that he’s started doing that. I get really annoyed if he starts swearing. [Sometimes] I kick Conrad [for teaching him to swear]. Thus Nikki’s aggression towards her brother, and perhaps his towards her, was part of a fight for supremacy and power around differentiation in the sibling hierarchy. Birth and age status differentiation can also be a feature of the reparative capacity for making good the damage of the destructive side of human nature, whether self- or other-directed, in sibling relationships. For both Marshall and Nikki, their youngest siblings symbolised vessels for more positive feelings (as indeed we saw for Jacob in Chapter 3). In contrast to their relationships with, respectively, their older and younger (middle) brother, their smallest siblings were spoken of with love and affection. These ‘cute’, ‘cuddly’ little beings to whom they were related did not pose the threat of aggression towards Marshall or Nikki nor were a cause of its erupting in themselves. Their little siblings allowed Marshall and Nikki to demonstrate their creative capacity for love and affection (towards another and within themselves), and redeem themselves from destructive relationships (to both other and self): Marshall:

It was nice [when she was born]. It was like I had this really good feeling. It felt like I had butterflies in my stomach. I was there every day. I skipped school for a week. I felt happy. She’s fifteen pounds, two months . . . When she’s being sick I get her a tea-towel, make her bottles, all that sort of thing. I felt happy cos I always wanted a little sister.

Nikki:

Because Rupert, well he’ll probably turn out like Conrad when he’s older, but as he’s only 3 he can’t really be that bad and

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sometimes he’s really sweet. When I come downstairs in the morning and my mum’s gone to work, he’ll want to watch a video and he’s like, ‘Please Nikki come and watch it with me.’ These sorts of reparative capacities are unlikely to be considered rational solutions to conflict with another sibling by professional and expert commentators, nor were they rational resolutions for conflict and aggression on the part of Marshall and Nikki. Rather, they were unconscious reparations. In contrast, Claire (who had no alternative cute little sister or brother) attempted to come up with a rational activity as a response to her feelings of rage at her brother, Mark (a strategy with which he agreed in their joint interview): Claire:

If you had like a special thing in your room where you could just, a special part of the house, which was like a cooling-down room, and just have like all these activities, you could punch and just kick and do anything you like to them and nobody would really mind. The other day I was thinking ‘I hate you Mark, I want a punch-bag to punch you’. So I just thought, well why don’t I get a punch-bag for my birthday, and then let rip on that? Every family should have one. Save lots more fights.

Claire’s admission that she hates her brother is interesting precisely because she allows this hatred to psychically stand alongside her loving feelings towards him. She spoke of the alliances that she and Mark formed against their parents, together persuading their parents to take them on holiday abroad, and their joint achievement of a high score when playing a pinball game on their computer. Earlier we noted how she felt some emotional release through hitting her brother; in the above quote we see her desire to move her physical aggression away from his body and towards a punch-bag – a far more appropriate object to receive the blows. We could see this as a highly creative way for Claire to manage her hostile feelings towards Mark. As well as being a practical strategy that is in part born out of unconscious conflict between them, the idea of installing a punch-bag has its social elements too – it would form a resource for the family as a whole, including Mark. Claire’s suggested tactic for dealing with conflict relied on her parents to provide the necessary resources (a large enough house with a dedicated ‘cooling-down room’ furnished with punch-bags), however, echoing the tendency that we saw earlier in the chapter for middle-class children to have expectations that their parents can provide material goods to prevent conflict between siblings as an aspect of the parental responsibility involved in familialisation. Indeed, in part, her strategy was a response to her parents’ dislike of the conflict between herself and Mark: ‘We get big talks, big

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lectures, about not fighting.’ This familialisation is further underlined in that Claire was unable to test out her rational strategy as her parents did not like the idea of a punch-bag and refused to buy one for her birthday. A key aspect of familialisation is its posing of the responsibilities of parents for children’s well-being, behaviour and pathways in life, including through the tutelage of individualised self-control and self-sufficiency. Familialisation is built on generational power hierarchies between parents and children, yet as we have seen in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, birth order and age status hierarchies and their associated power play themselves out in children’s understandings and experiences of conflict and aggression with their siblings – displaying an interconnection between more structural and socially constructed features of siblings’ lives and their psychodynamics. These work in different ways for different children, both in terms of their positioning in the sibling hierarchy and in society more generally, and in terms of their specific relationships with their sisters and brothers and within their own psyches. This makes the production of universally applicable, rational solutions for dealing with sibling conflict a difficult process, perhaps even a fraught and futile exercise.

Conclusion This chapter has been concerned with conflict and aggression between sisters and brothers – one of the major preoccupations of the literature on sibling relationships. We noted the widespread assumption that someone needs to take responsibility for resolving disputes between sisters and brothers in order to restore the ideal of childhood as a carefree and safe experience. Who should exercise this responsibility is related to the thrust of three overarching trends in the construction of contemporary childhood. As part of institutionalisation, where children are subject to the definitions of a ‘proper’ childhood structured around age and ability, professionals are regarded as experts who have knowledge to dispense to parents concerning how best to tackle problems in relationships between their children so as to help them along the developmental pathway towards mature and rational adulthood. In turn this advice is part of the familialisation of childhood, where children’s development and actions are firmly placed as the responsibility of their parents, including sibling conflict. Both processes are harnessed towards children learning to take responsibility for themselves and their relationships with others, and the inculcation of self-discipline and reasoned negotiation, as part of the third trend towards the individualisation of contemporary childhood. Turning to children’s own complex accounts of having fights and arguments with their sisters and brothers, we saw that both parental responsibility and their own responsibility for dealing with difficulties were woven into their accounts. But crucially, focusing on both socially produced meaning and deeply embedded psyche, we also saw that issues of age status and

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associated power hierarchies, and the children’s location in the class-based social structure, shaped their understandings and experiences. Conflict between siblings is characterised by relational power struggles around recognition of status and sense of self. Within the sibling order of birth and age hierarchy, older siblings invoked a boundary between mature, rational and authoritative conduct on their own part, and immature, reckless and inappropriate behaviour by their younger sisters and brothers. Younger siblings, however, portrayed arguments and fights as rooted in inequalities between themselves and their older sisters and brothers, and the unfairness of being subject to their mental and physical domination. Thus parents were expected, respectively, either to support the reasonable older sibling, or right the wrongs done to younger siblings – albeit that these expectations were not always satisfied. As either a first choice or a last resort, older siblings used various pedagogic methods to ‘teach’ their younger sisters and brothers how to behave, again portraying themselves as on the path towards rational adulthood. Such strategies were not available to younger siblings, who relied precariously on their parents’ recognising the injustices done to them or on judicious retreat from confrontation. We also showed, however, that very young siblings, as babies and toddlers, could also be the vessels for reparative feelings of love and affection on the part of older sisters and brothers, since they often did not pose the same contestation of the supremacy of the oldest sibling potentially posed by ‘older’ younger siblings. Cutting across these hierarchical material and psychic power struggles, middle- and working-class children often gave different accounts of the causes of conflict and their resolution. Younger siblings’ flouting of the implicit rules of space and possessions could be problematic for middle-class older siblings, for example, and some middle-class children also expected their parents to provide materially to resolve conflict between them and their sisters and brothers in ways that working-class children did not. These sorts of distinctions in understanding about what conflict is about and possibilities for its amelioration reaffirm the way that social class is a relationship, rather than a category, that can underwrite different emphases on a sense of self as involving autonomy and uniqueness or sameness and belonging. In the chapter, however, especially through our psychodynamic analysis of case studies, we have also been concerned to show that conflict and aggression between sisters and brothers are not always amenable to universalistic rational solutions. Fighting and violence between siblings are a complex intrinsic emotional aspect of sibling relationships. As we demonstrated, it can embody both connection between self and sibling, and differentiation within the sibling age hierarchy. In this context, rage and destructive feelings are related to the exposure of the illusion of self-sufficient individualisation, since sisters and brothers provide the relational subject of both emotional connection and status differentiation. Reparation of the emotional damage

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done through aggression and violence is also a feature of relationships with self and others. We have argued that it is more psychically driven than a rationally enacted, self-controlled demonstration of developing mature individualisation, and again interlinked with more structural and socially constructed features of children’s lives. In the chapters so far in this book we have focused largely on identity and relationality as these key aspects of sibling ties are constructed and experienced as part of children’s and young people’s family lives within the domestic setting of the home. At various points, nonetheless, it has also been clear that relationships with sisters and brothers have implications for children’s and young people’s sense of self and others in settings outside of this sphere, such as at school and in the neighbourhood. The next chapter considers these issues specifically in relation to the physical and social landscapes of local communities.

Chapter 6

Siblings in local communities

Introduction The most familiar territory on which sibling relationships are thought about is within the family and in the home. But for the sisters and brothers in the studies presented here, it was striking how much of the to and fro of their interactions went on beyond the living room and the bedroom, to include the street, the stairways and walkways of flats, the homes of neighbours, friends and wider family, parks and playgrounds, places of worship, schools, buses and trains, sport centres, shopping centres and out-of-school classes. Most of these locations outside of the home were fairly immediate and local, and were the mundane, everyday sites of journeys, leisure and learning. Importantly, these are the physical spaces in which communities exist. This chapter follows siblings out of the confines of the home to consider some of the varied ways in which they construct and conduct their relationships in the places, spaces and communities of the ‘outside’ world. We look at the ways in which these sites form part of the complex arena in which children’s and young people’s identities are shaped, and the particular roles that siblings play in the negotiation and mapping of one another’s identities in those geographical, social and cultural landscapes. Why should we be interested in the relationship between young and teenage siblings and the formation of identity in the context of location and community? Our identities are, in part, constructed in and through everyday interactions with the spaces and places where we live. Space refers to the physical location and environment in which objects and events occur, while place is space that is imbued with social, cultural, and emotional symbolic meaning and significance. In Britain, the locality people live in and the kind of accommodation they occupy, is closely tied up with social class, ‘race’/ ethnicity and family history, and it is along these social, economic and emotional axes that communities are formed. At the heart of communities are people who feel a sense of belonging and some identification, however ambivalent or contingent, with others who make up that community. The flip side of this, however, can be a sense of marginalisation, of not belonging,

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or of exclusion, all of which can just as powerfully affect one’s sense of self (Reay and Lucey 2000). This chapter explores how identities are shaped in relation to and with the places that brothers and sisters live in, the ways in which identities come to be ‘embedded’ (McLaughlin 1993) in the local spaces and places that are inhabited, used and defined by and for them. Children and young people are engaged in constructing and understanding their personal biographies and sense of self in and of their particular localities. As Pia Christensen and Alan Prout express it, ‘children map their experiences and memories of growing up on to spaces. As these come into place, so, at the same time, the children themselves come into place’ (2003: 140). They demonstrate how children’s understandings of themselves are developed through their experiences, memories and use of their ‘houses, streets, villages, neighbourhoods and their cities at large’ (2003: 140). It is important to keep in mind, however, that neither the meanings of places held by children and young people, nor the ways in which they are positioned in them, are entirely fixed or unitary. Places are experienced in multiple and complex ways by children and young people and these ways are structured in part by broader socially constructed relations which include age, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, and class. A popular way of thinking about location and communities currently is through the notion of ‘social capital’. Social capital refers to the values that people hold and the resources that they can access, which both result in, and are the result of, reciprocal and socially negotiated ties and relationships. Families, and particularly child-rearing within them, are central to much of the social capital literature, and are seen to have implications for the sort of communities and wider society in which we live (see overview in Edwards 2004). Children from lone mother families, with dual worker parents, those from large families, or whose parents move to a new neighbourhood, are said to derive less social capital from their parents and from their neighbourhoods (as well as teachers, religious leaders, etc.). This stems from James Coleman’s arguments (1988) that children need to be supervised and inculcated with approved values and norms by parents and within communities. In his view, communities and schools where parents are linked together, hold the same values and bring their children up in the same way produce ‘intergenerational closure’. This prevents children being socialised into socially unacceptable values and norms, or notices and exerts sanctions if they are. This model supports the idea that groups of children and young people mixing together and interacting (however reciprocal) is not a good thing. This applies to ‘large’ groups of siblings – in whom their parents apparently cannot invest the required amount of attention, and so by implication the siblings are mixing together in an unregulated way. It also refers to groups of children and young people in the neighbourhood – where they mix together and develop a ‘youth culture’ with values that challenge or exist outside of the regulative control and norms of parents, adults and the

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local community, leading to crime-ridden, low social capital neighbourhoods (Wright et al. 2001; see also Putnam 2000). There are two main challenges to this view of sibling groups specifically, and children and young people generally, as a potential threat to social order. First, in critiquing the mainstream social capital arguments, Ginny Morrow (1999) has pointed to the potential for children and young people to generate, draw on and negotiate social capital for themselves and others in local communities. In relation to large sibling groups, she argues that such approaches ignore how siblings interact with each other and within wider peer group networks, and how opportunities and constraints for this may be differentiated according to gender, ethnicity and location. Second, within contemporary cultural geography and the sociology of childhood, research has looked specifically at the position of young people and children in spaces and places (Matthews et al. 1999; O’Brien et al. 2000). This work highlights the ways in which the ‘moral landscapes of childhood’ (Valentine 1996a) themselves shift and sway in response to public discourses which construct young people variously as ‘angels’ and ‘devils’ (James and Jenks 1996). Children and young people are positioned in contradictory ways, both as in danger, and as a danger to others, especially when they are ‘out of place’, unsupervised and other people’s children (Lee 2001; Skelton 2000; Valentine 1996b). Class, race and gender are heavily implicated in adult perceptions of children, particularly in the oftenarticulated view of troublesome and ‘dangerous’ children and youths in public (Cross and Keith 1993). Indeed, histories of ‘youth’ suggest that this has long been the case (Humphries 1981). Such work, however, has not paid attention to sibling relationships outside the home. These issues of social capital generation and the moral landscape of community, shaped by social divisions, form the backdrop to this chapter. We now turn to our data to examine the significance of siblings in children’s and young people’s interactions with spaces and places beyond the domestic arena, to cast light on how social divisions of gender, ‘race’/ethnicity and social class, as well as age, fuse with location to produce various kinds of ‘embedded identities’ (McLaughlin 1993), and to consider how siblings themselves can shape the construction of ‘communities’ for each other. In the first section we consider the ways in which siblings shape, constrain and expand one another’s everyday physical worlds. We then move on to look at how siblings can be centrally implicated in one another’s moral reputations in the locality and beyond. The importance of relationality runs through the siblings’ accounts of their engagements with the locality. The last section highlights this further in considering the significance of emotional identifications and dis-identifications with certain groups and individuals within a location.

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Expanding the physical world Research into children’s mobility indicates that their physical worlds are shrinking as parents increasingly restrict children’s access to public spaces (Valentine 1996a). In our studies we found that the spatial world outside the home was fairly limited for many pre-teen siblings, whose independent movements were highly constrained. Of course parents were key to these children’s mobility, but older sisters and brothers also played a crucial role in extending the physical, spatial horizons of young siblings as well as expanding their imaginative landscapes. Children were often dependent on an older sibling for all kinds of engagement with the neighbourhood and local community that were prohibited to them when on their own. This could take the form of providing an escort for the younger child to and from local shops, parks and playgrounds, neighbours’ and nearby friends’ houses, the library, swimming baths or activity clubs. For example, Maya (age 7) enjoyed being taken by older sister Alannah (age 12) and her friends on the bus to a shopping centre and Alannah spoke of taking Maya to the cinema; Gerry (age 14) was happy to ride with Ryan (age 10) on their bikes to the local shop on a Sunday morning; and Thomas (age 10) relied on his older brother (age 19) to take him down to the beach and into the countryside, and in turn was relied upon by his two younger sisters (age 8 and 9) to take them to the shops: ‘Because I’m the oldest, I can just walk to the shop and get sweets whenever I want, but they can’t.’ In some families, there are strong expectations that older siblings should look after younger ones. For some sisters and brothers, this obligation is taken on in a mainly positive light; it might be ‘a pain’, but it is also a mark of their more powerful status in relation to younger siblings, as indicated in Thomas’s comment above. Although going out together can also be enjoyable for siblings, this is not always the case. Some older siblings are resentful of the duty of care they have for younger sisters and brothers and see it as a burden. Razia (age 17) and Alisha (age 13), middle-class sisters of Asian origin, provide an example. In both sisters’ interviews it emerged that Alisha was positioned as ‘the baby of the family’ and was viewed as in need of the care and protection of her older sister both inside and outside the home. This was a problem for both sisters. Razia felt that Alisha insisted on copying everything she did, and demanded the same privileges as her older sister, even though she was four years her junior. Razia spoke of constraining her own movements in response: And I had to change quite a bit of myself to adapt to her because I know now she’s going to copy everything I do. Which means that everything that I do now has to be suitable for her as well. So going out with my friends, I don’t any more. Sometimes I go for a couple of hours’ shopping. But I don’t go out because I know she’d want to do it as well, so I can’t.

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It was usually the case that younger siblings had to be accompanied to certain places by older brothers and sisters, and this was one of the practices that established the younger child in a tangible relationship of dependence with older ones. Attention to relationality, however, also points to the issue of an interdependent emotional dynamic between people: the constant circulation of emotional states and positions that are produced and felt in relation to one another. Although there are strong elements of dependence in many younger siblings’ relationships with older ones, some older sisters and brothers also revealed facets of this interdependence. For instance, Tracey (age 14), a White working-class girl, presented herself as a street-wise young woman, and yet until recently she felt unconfident about travelling on buses by herself and relied on her younger sister and brother (age 10 and 12) to accompany her: ‘I used to get scared. I didn’t want to go on my own and everything, on the bus. I wanted Marcie or Andy to come with me.’ In their mid and late teens, many young people begin to move beyond the familiar spaces and places of the locality. Studying at college or university, and/or entering employment, getting a driver’s licence, going on holiday with friends, having a girlfriend or boyfriend, being allowed to stay out later, going to pubs and clubs, are just a few of the ways in which older siblings extend their own personal geographies. But older siblings’ separate sojourns into the wider world are nonetheless important for their younger sisters and brothers as they can map territory, laying down paths for siblings’ future options, and most significantly, giving a glimpse of an expanded world that may contain possibilities for them. For Elizabeth and Alison, mixed heritage and middle-class sisters age 11 and 9 respectively, their older half-sister – Orla (age 18), who was studying at college and had a part-time job – was seen as an exotic character who had access to the wider world and brought back tales of exciting, different places, tales that the sisters experienced as gifts. Alison remarked: And sometimes when she comes back she tells us about all the towns she’s been, where she’s been. And once when she went on a holiday she told us all about a holiday in Faliraki. Younger sisters and brothers can also follow in their older siblings’ footsteps in participating in out-of-school activities. As several studies have shown, middle-class parents in particular can put much effort into ensuring that their children develop social and cultural capital resources through joining clubs and undertaking music, dance, gymnastic classes, attending Brownie and Cub groups, and so on (Allatt 1993). What has not been so acknowledged, though, is that older siblings can also be involved in this effort too, in terms both of charting possibilities and of accompanying their younger siblings. For example, Gerry (age 14) was a gifted musician whose skills and involvement in orchestras and bands had led to international

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travel, and who shared and encouraged his music interests with his younger brother (age 10); Louise was in the same gymnastics club as her older sister (age 15) and they travelled around together to competitions; and Jasmine (age 7) had joined the same Brownie group as her older sister (age 10).

Siblings and moral reputation Sisters and brothers could be implicated heavily in the moral reputation of children and young people in the context of their neighbourhood. Most often this was articulated as being ‘shown up’ when out in public spaces, especially in front of their friends. Younger siblings could be mortified by older sisters and brothers. For example, we saw in Chapter 3 how Cora (age 13), a White working-class girl, criticised her older brother (age 16) for ‘hanging out’ with younger boys instead of those of his own age, and felt that this reflected back on her own emergent identity as a teenage girl in their neighbourhood. Generally, out-of-order gender behaviour in public could be embarrassing to siblings wherever they were placed in the sibling hierarchy. For the most part, however, the tendency was for younger siblings to embarrass their older sisters and brothers. For instance, Tracey (age 14) used to take her younger sister, Marcie (age 12), out with her and her friends to wander around and window-shop at a local shopping centre; that is, until Marcie behaved inappropriately: . . . when my mate got bullied on the bus by this girl called Natalia that no one likes in our school, my sister was mucking about laughing and my mate got really upset, thinking she was laughing at her. So I don’t take her out any more. Marcie’s behaviour so compromised Tracey’s identity relationships with her friends that she could no longer allow her younger sister to be a part of them: in order for Tracey to maintain those relationships, Marcie had to be cut out of the picture. Siblings could also be important in how children and young people negotiated their access to locations and particular communities within them. Social places, as these overlap with geographical spaces, require tacit ways of behaving and particular values as part of access to the social capital and other resources provided by membership of the occupying group (Bourdieu 1997). A good illustration of this process, and of how siblings can affect each others’ integration into social places, are two White working-class sisters, Chrissie (age 13) and Melody (age 15). They separately recalled the same significant incident when they had recently come to live on their estate: Chrissie:

And I was running down, we was all racing down the road, about fifteen, twenty of us. And there was a bottle in the road

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where I was running, and so I twisted up, like that. I’ve still got the scars there. And all I hear is ‘Chrissie!’ And Melody goes, ‘Chrissie, we’ve just made friends, do not cry.’ And as soon as I got in the door I screamed. I sprained my wrist and she wouldn’t let me cry. Melody:

When we first moved to this estate, we were playing out with some boys on the estate, didn’t really hang around with the girls because they are not very nice. And she was racing and she must have fallen over and sprained her wrist. And I ran up to her and I said, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry. You’ll embarrass yourself for life.’ And she didn’t cry. She went all the way into the house without crying and got into the house and screamed the house down. Like, she listened. And I think she remembers that day, as well.

Chrissie’s and Melody’s richly layered comments highlight some of the interdependent aspects of identity-work that siblings are engaged in. Melody also tells us something about how the sisters perceived gender relations on the estate: that for them, friendships with girls are more problematic than those with boys. For these newcomers, it was vital that neither of them revealed their vulnerability or weakness and in this sense they came as a unit. Melody warned Chrissie not to embarrass herself, although it is not difficult to think that perhaps it is Melody who would have been ‘embarrassed for life’ had Chrissie cried. Gender intersects with culture and ethnicity to produce varying relationships to places in other ways, where siblings’ behaviour can affect each others’ and perhaps also their whole family’s reputation in their community. Research on Asian teenage girls and young women highlights differences in behavioural norms from their white peers (Hennink et al. 1999), finding that they are influenced more heavily than White girls and young women of the same age by cultural traditions, religious obligations, family loyalties and community expectations. Research also highlights how children’s and young people’s fear of racial harassment in public places and spaces also leads them to become more home-centred and therefore lessen expectations of going round to friends’ houses (Reay and Lucey 2000). In our own studies, older teenage Asian siblings often talked about spending their free time with family members such as parents, siblings, cousins or close relatives. This is not to say that White siblings of the same age did not choose to spend the majority of their leisure time with family – many of them did. Nonetheless, in their interviews, Asian siblings stressed social activities that centred around their home, family and religious centres, more than their White peers. In this way, their siblings were an important part of their identity, including as embedded in the wider community. Beverley Skeggs (1996) has demonstrated the centrality of respectability

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in the lives of young White working-class women. The production and maintenance of respectability and reputation can also be a key theme in the organisation of Asian sisters’ public lives. For those taking part in our studies, it certainly had consequences for young women’s relationship to the spaces and places of the local neighbourhood and their movements within and through them. Habiba (age 21), the second oldest in a family of five middle-class Bangladeshi sisters (see case study in Chapter 3), explained: I think it’s partly being a Muslim, because like staying out late . . . well, not Muslim, more being Asian. It’s still very cultural. For a girl to be out late night by herself is a bad thing. So just to avoid that. That’s our lifestyle. It’s not like we are restricted. No one is going to say anything. But that’s just how we’ve become. As with young White working-class women, respectability and sexuality go hand in hand. It was around the time of puberty and adolescence that the older sisters in Habiba’s family began to take on an overtly regulative role around their younger siblings’ engagement with the locality. At 11 years old, Misha was the youngest of this sibling group, and had lately come under the surveillant eye of her older sisters. In Chapter 3 we discussed how Shabnur (age 15 and the second youngest sister) was concerned about Misha’s reputation particularly in relation to the potentially corrupting influences of the wider world. Asian teenage brothers did not escape this regulation from older siblings either. Fareeda (age 17) was the oldest in a working-class, Pakistani, mixedgender sibling group of seven. She was very worried about one of her brothers, who was not doing any school work and spent a lot of his time out of the house: I opened his drawer and I found all these weird rings and jewellery and all these weird things . . . And I asked him, ‘Where did you get this stuff?’ And he goes, ‘It’s my mate’s.’ I go, ‘No it’s not. Your mate has got twenty fingers?’ . . . Because I think, as the eldest, I think it’s my responsibility to ask him where he gets it from. Because I don’t want him to get into dodgy things . . . I don’t want to be blamed that way, because even my uncles would turn around and say, ‘Didn’t you see him do that, he was doing this or that?’ Even though an individual family may tolerate certain behaviour, concern was expressed about how such behaviour would be judged within the Asian community and whether it would have a negative impact on the family’s reputation. The behaviour of these two groups of siblings was also influenced by the community in which they resided; a ‘culture of the community’ in which expectations about the behaviour of families and the individuals in

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them are constructed through and imposed by the community (Hennink et al. 1999).

Siblings and the defensive landscape of the neighbourhood The spaces and places that are the sites of most siblings’ everyday experiences outside of the home are the schools they attend and the local neighbourhood. Much of the focus on children and young people in public space has centred around notions of safety and danger, with menace and risk lurking in the highly visible form of road traffic, and the less visible forms of ‘stranger danger’. Increasingly added to this is the potential jeopardy that children and young people face from their peers, with a focus on bullying and gang cultures. As we indicated in Chapter 4, this concern has led to much research on bullying in schools (Glover et al. 2000), the setting-up of telephone helplines for victims of bullying (for example, ChildLine) and the development by government of anti-bullying strategies (Hadfield et al. 2006). Although schools and local public spaces certainly do hold the possibility of difficult interactions with other children and dangerous adults, they are nevertheless one of the few remaining arenas available to children and young people that are free from the regulative gaze of adults in which they can ‘play out identity struggles between self and others’ (Percy-Smith and Matthews 2001: 52). Barry Percy-Smith and Hugh Matthews, in their research on bullying in local neighbourhoods, use the concept of ‘encounter-space’ to understand the everyday power struggles between young people in their neighbourhoods. These struggles do not happen in terrains with fixed boundaries, ‘but fluid spaces of interpersonal interaction. Accordingly, bullying can take place anywhere and at any time in a neighbourhood, having both visceral spatiality and temporality’ (2001: 52). The kind of bullying and conflict in neighbourhoods that the children and young people in our studies talked about was usually mundane, rather than the dramatic stories that can appear in the media. It was part of the everyday lives of some. In Chapter 5, we explored conflict and aggression between siblings. But what part do siblings play in children’s and young people’s negotiations and constructions of local neighbourhoods with particular reference to bullying? Age difference is important here as siblings with a large age gap between them can move in quite different orbits once outside the house. The greater the age gap, the less likely they are to be in the same places at the same time, although, as we have discussed, the wider spatial independence of older siblings can be extremely important for younger sisters’ and brothers’ imaginings of the geographical, social and cultural world beyond their family. Generally speaking, siblings who were closer in age were more likely to share some experiences of the locality and community through play and

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friendship. Gender and age come together as significant factors in creating and marking differentiations between sisters’ and brothers’ engagements with schools and the local neighbourhood and with one another in these spaces and places. In our research, siblings’ accounts were saturated with the idea that brothers and sisters ‘stood up’ for one another when they were outside the home and faced with aggressive attack (verbal or physical) from anyone who was not a family member. In particular, as we discussed in Chapter 4, there is a widespread understanding that older siblings take responsibility for the care and protection of younger ones (Hadfield et al. 2006; Morrow 2003; Percy-Smith and Matthews 2001). ‘Sticking up for each other’ was a strong motif amongst sisters and brothers, even when there were highly ambivalent feelings about siblings. For instance, Kate (age 9) was a White working-class girl with an older sister (age 13) and a younger brother (age 5). In general, her largely negative account of her relationships with her siblings was characterised by talk of constant bickering and fights, and a sense of the unfairness of her position in the family. Nonetheless, they formed a strong alliance if a child outside the family meted out the kind of treatment to one of them that they routinely administered to one another: At home, me and my sister, we’re always like, ‘You did it’, ‘No I didn’t’ . . . I told her that a boy at school was beating me up . . . And she sticks up for me when people beat me up at school . . . When another boy hit my brother I pushed him. And that’s like sticking up for family. Like you stick up for your brother. In our research, it was not uncommon for groups of siblings, even those with significant age gaps, to have at some stage spent time together as a group in the local area, often in the street, stairways or grounds immediately outside the home. These, along with schools, were the everyday ‘encounter spaces’ where siblings from neighbouring and local families met (PercySmith and Matthews 2001). The dynamics of these spaces were extremely complex, involving a dense and often unstable matrix of friendship, falling out, fighting, playing, hanging around, boredom, creativity, destructiveness and excitement. Annette (age 15), Lisa (age 13) and Peter (age 11) were White workingclass siblings living on a small, established, low-rise housing estate where it was usual for children and young people to play and gather in one another’s front gardens and the traffic-quiet roads of the estate, especially in the daylight hours of the spring and summer months. Annette vividly described the shifting ground of conflict and camaraderie between her sibling group and other local children: Say if I got into an argument with this girl Harriet. She lives up the road

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and we used to be quite close and we are supposed to be best friends. But I don’t really say she’s my best friend any more because we’ve just grown apart. And say if I get the hump with Harriet, and I’ll go to Lisa and she’ll just go, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, just ignore her, Annette, she’s such a silly . . .’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, thanks for the advice, Lis’ . . . But say you are getting into an argument outside with the boys, because I always do. I always get into an argument with this little boy called Simon. And Lisa would come over and get involved, and I’m like, ‘Oh, you are so embarrassing, go away, I can look after myself.’ Annette’s comments reveal how, although most children shared an ideal notion that siblings should stand up for one another, in reality this can put a sister or brother in a tricky identity situation in various ways (see also case study of Bob in Chapter 4). Annette was discomfited by her younger sister’s getting involved in her argument with another girl. But Annette also perceived her younger brother as vulnerable to bullying by some of the boys on the estate, and herself embarrassed Peter when she stood up for him: I basically just look out for Lisa and Peter, like if they are in trouble or everything. If ever Peter is getting picked on then I’d look out for him, or Lisa would stick up for him, which he doesn’t like, because it gets him embarrassed . . . But Peter is the funniest one, because whenever you stick up for him he just goes bright red and just says, ‘Oh go away, go away.’ And he’ll try and hit you with something and he goes, ‘It’s all right, Annette, I can do it myself.’ And then he’ll just go to the boy, ‘Ignore her, she just don’t know what she’s chatting about.’ And I’m going, ‘Thanks Peter.’ Particular sets of highly gendered practices are required for the successful construction of socially and culturally specific masculine or feminine identities that are easily recognised as such by peers, including minutely nuanced styles of clothing, hairstyle, make-up, accent and language. Some of these practices are locally created and shaped, and some, especially in relation to what are considered to be appropriate feminine or masculine emotional responses and behaviour, have a wider, hegemonic basis (e.g. boys don’t cry). In their conflicts with other youngsters, both Annette and Peter were outwardly embarrassed by and denied the protective involvement of their sisters, but it is particularly important for boys to differentiate themselves from the feminine and present themselves as ‘tough’ in order to maintain their masculine identity (Frosh et al. 2002). Brothers might on some levels be glad of the protection of older sisters, but this can lead to the danger for some boys of having their masculinity undermined in the eyes of other boys. Interestingly, although caring is viewed as a firmly feminine activity and

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caring for baby siblings is more likely to fall to sisters, Luke’s care of his toddler brother Jack (age 3) did not seem to compromise his masculine status amongst his male friends. Luke:

And I always take my brother out, sometimes if he’s really getting on my mum’s nerves I take him out. Interviewer: And how is that, do you mind? Luke: No. It’s fun. Interviewer: What’s fun about it? Luke: Because it means I can go and play as well, because we go up the park and he goes on the swings and so do I. So I don’t really mind taking him up the park. Despite the conflicts that go on between various factions of children and young people in their neighbourhood, Annette, Lisa and Peter by no means painted a wholly negative social landscape. Their accounts also point to the ways in which bonds of friendship, care and loyalty amongst themselves as a sibling group and between themselves and their local peers, were also created and sustained. This was in part achieved by identifying themselves as belonging to a wider group outside of the family, with which they made strategic alliances. Annette described this collective approach: If someone’s having a bad day then they’ll take it out on everyone else. But then you’ll have your argument for five minutes and then five minutes later everyone’s friends again. Because people around here, we all stick together. Say if like [my friend] was getting picked on by a gang of boys, then all of us lot would just go over there and sort it out and say leave him alone and stuff. We are quite close. One of the most effective ways of avoiding domination by other children and young people was for siblings to make tactical coalitions with one another and with other groups of children. For some groups of siblings, however, there was less sense of the possibility of resolution to difficult, conflictual aspects of relationships with local children and young people through an awareness of common group interests or goals, however shortlived and variable this consciousness might be. Fay (age 14), Daniel (age 9) and Sapphire (age 8) lived in a very similar location to Annette and her siblings, and were also White working-class. Like Annette, Fay spoke about having to protect her younger brother from being ‘got at’ by local boys from the same estate; something that makes her feel ‘really proud’ of herself. Fay and her brother and sister were a connected sibling group who, despite their age differences and a flow of petty arguments, took pleasure in each other’s company; for example, they all looked forward to playing board games together most evenings after their tea. Nor were they isolated socially; each

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described positive friendships with school mates and some neighbours. Unlike Annette and her siblings, however, in the landscape of their immediate locality, their sense of belonging to a collectivity did not extend beyond their sibling group. This seemed to be, in part, supported by distinctions that had arisen in the area between those residents who had lived for some years on the older parts and those who had moved into the more recently built houses and flats at the ‘bottom’ of the estate. Fay, Daniel and Sapphire had a shared view of the children and young people from the bottom of the estate as ‘rough’, and the place and the people as well were feared and where possible avoided. Places are constructed on emotional terrains as well as the social, cultural and physical planes. Understandings of what is ‘our sort of place’ provide a sorting mechanism, sifting out the type of people we are from the people we are not (O’Brien et al. 2000; Reay and Lucey 2000). In Chapter 1 we discussed how the psychoanalytic concepts of projection and projective identification help to illuminate processes of individual and group identity formation. These defensive psychic processes are ways in which we differentiate between ‘me’ and ‘not me’ and are the means through which good and bad parts of the self are dispelled onto those categorised as ‘not me’, as Other to ‘me’. Otherness is in the myriad large and small signs through which people recognise themselves and categorise both themselves and those from whom they seek difference, distance and distinction. Ideas about whom we are like and whom we are different from take shape within parameters about who can and cannot ‘belong’, based on an infinite range of ‘credentials’ including skin colour, gender, religion, language, clothes, where you were born, the area you live in, what kind of accommodation you live in, and what kind of school you go to. These psychological processes of othering are intertwined with and supported by processes and structures in the social world. For instance, certain kinds of residential areas, such as the large social housing estates that some of the siblings of our studies live on, and others refer to as ‘rough’, are routinely devalued or even demonised by politicians and the British press (Anderson 2002). These areas and their residents become ‘containers’ for the projections of those who do not live on them. Fay and her siblings were not alone in fearing the closeness of people identified as from such places: persistently negative judgements may affect how the people who live on those estates come to see themselves and their community (Reay and Lucey 2000). Siblings can be part of the joint construction and understandings for each other of the boundaries of spaces and places, and the definition of the identities of those who inhabit them, as we noted for Fay and her siblings. The same locality, however, can be experienced in different (sometimes diametrically opposed) ways by members of the same sibling formation because of their psychological, biological, social and cultural positioning. For instance, masculinity, ethnicity and age work together to make some

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locales much less ‘safe’ for some teenage boys than for their sisters. The accounts of mixed-heritage teenage twins Spike and Zara (age 17) illustrate how inner-city public spaces are highly racialised and how this shapes siblings’ sense of belonging. They lived in an area that, at the time of the research, had become a popular location for artists to live and work and young people to socialise in. But while property prices rocketed, and shops, nightclubs and bars proliferated, the borough continued to have one of the highest levels of deprivation in the country. Spike’s and Zara’s family was not wealthy: their mother, who was a lone parent, was updating her original professional training, and they lived in a small housing association flat in which the living room doubled as their mother’s bedroom. For Zara, who had left school and begun studying at a college of further education, her excitement about the sense of herself as changing and growing seemed to put her in a different relationship with her locality, which she had begun to experience as a place of exciting possibility and freedom: But I do feel I belong in London. When I go out of London I feel really away from home, as if I don’t belong there. In London, just anywhere in London, I feel I belong there and I feel safe. But it’s cultures as well. When I go to Lincolnshire I just see White faces, and I don’t know, I just feel dark, and very visible. Yeah. I think only one time I’ve been there and seen a Black family. So I suppose I feel I fit in more here because there’s people from all different places. And it’s busy. Yeah, I’m definitely a Londoner. I feel comfortable. I don’t feel invisible, but I feel comfortable. ‘Race’ and ethnicity are central to this shift. Being in a place in which there are enough people from ethnic minorities for her not to stand out and be ‘othered’ was key to Zara’s feelings of belonging and safety in the city. For her brother Spike, however, the same streets were places where he must be ever-vigilant against the attack of White and Asian boys. That the same physical locality was experienced differently by siblings illuminates the complex intersections of ‘race’/ethnicity and gender with issues of safety and danger, protection and care in sibling relationships: Zara will give you a totally different answer, because if you are hanging around with girls, in a large group, or just a girl, people won’t mug you. But say last time I probably got hurt was last year . . . I went down to the shop and could just tell that something was going to happen. You know when you keep looking over your shoulder and keep crossing over the road when there’s large groups of people? So I did that and was OK, and so I went to the shop . . . I still had the same feeling, but I just wanted to get back as soon as possible. And these guys said, ‘Hey, you.’ And I thought oh damn. So I kept walking and pretending that I didn’t hear

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them, and then one of them ran in front of me and punched me in the stomach with a knuckle duster. And the day after I was spitting blood, you know? So, that was quite scary, but I managed to get away from them. I kicked the guy who punched me in the shin and ran like I’ve never run before, with two bags of food in my hands, just run. It is important to note that Spike was on his own in this scenario and therefore more vulnerable to attack from other youths. While fears about gangs of youths in public circulate in the popular media, for many young people, their decision to move around in groups is a rational response to feeling in danger themselves, from other young people or adults (Loeder et al. 1998). This brings a new light to claims in mainstream social capital theorising that unregulated groups of young people are destructive of neighbourhood social capital and lead to crime; rather, it is a form of defence against crime that draws on available social capital. This defensive response is intensely racialised in some urban areas as research on the construction of new ethnic identities and their connection to local geographies illustrates. Importantly, too, it illuminates the ways in which community, trust and a sense of belonging, all viewed as central to the production of social capital, are also constituted on social and psychic terrains.

Conclusion This chapter has considered sibling relationships as they are created and conducted beyond the spaces of the home. Through an exploration of the physical, moral, psychological and emotional aspects of siblings’ relationships to one another and to the neighbourhood the chapter has attempted to map out the significance of siblings for the everyday life of localities. Taking a sibling’s-eye view has cast a fresh light on the interrelations that lie at the centre of local neighbourhoods and communities. Importantly, it has explored the ways in which being a sibling intersects with everyday interactions in the locality and the construction of spatially embedded identities for children and young people. The chapter has illustrated how sibling relationships are highly implicated in issues of belonging, trust, risk, safety and danger for children and young people in localities – all crucial elements in the generation of social capital in communities. The accounts of sisters and brothers have illuminated the diversity of siblings’ relationships with one another and with other children and young people in their localities. The chapter has highlighted the contingencies as well as the complexities of gender, age, ‘race’, ethnicity and social class in the formation of siblings’ relationships with one another and with the outside world. Moreover, it has explored the ways in which everyday, local spaces and places form part of the complex arena in which children’s and young people’s identities are shaped, and the particular roles that siblings play in the negotiation and

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mapping of one another’s identities in those geographical and social landscapes. Gender, age, social class and ‘race’/ethnicity as key features contributing towards sibling identity and relationality on material, social and inner psychic levels, have also been a recurring aspect of our discussion throughout this book. Our final chapter overviews these and other overarching issues.

Chapter 7

Conclusion Diversity and difference in sibling identity and relationships

Introduction We began this book with a quote from Crow Lake, a novel that puts a relationship with a brother at the heart of the central character’s emotional experience and thereby points to the intricate and subtle weave of sibling bonds. In this book we have put sisters and brothers at the core of our analysis in order to learn about the emotional and social processes through which identities are formed, and the importance of children’s and young people’s relationships with their siblings for these processes. In this final chapter we want, quite briefly, to draw out some of the strengths of our particular approach to understanding sibling ties, and consider some themes in sibling identity and relationships around diversity and difference that have recurred throughout the book. We are not providing the usual sort of linear progressive overview of each chapter, with a condensed repetition of all our findings in each. These chapters contain very rich and complex descriptions and analyses of the emotional and social aspects of children’s and young people’s relationships with their sisters and brothers that emerged from our studies. We refer you back to these chapters for the details of our evidence and the particular concepts we have used to explore them. Nor are we going to engage with and reference particular theories or other relevant research in this conclusion. We have discussed our multidisciplinary, social constructionist and psychodynamic, theoretical perspectives in Chapter 1, as well as in each chapter as we have gone along. Rather, we draw out two overarching strands of the book at a more abstract, freefloating level – strands concerning both diversity in the sense of fluid and shifting constellations of themes, and difference as embedded and enduring divisions. In this way, we acknowledge and stress the variable social and psychic meanings of sibling identity and relationships, and their links to ingrained social and psychic divisions in wider society. Our book’s overarching message – that children’s and young people’s emotional and social sense of themselves is inscribed in and through their relationships with their sisters and brothers – is especially important, we

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believe, in a context where too often the significance of these relationships is neglected or made marginal to both sociological and psychoanalytic accounts of people’s lives. The neglect of sibling relationships is especially strange when both sociologists and psychologists often place an emphasis on family as central to the formation of social identity and psyche, and as a primary site where children learn to relate to other people. Psychology is one discipline that does pay due attention to siblings, but while it has extremely important insights to offer into the developmental dimensions of sibling relationships, it does not, on its own, provide adequate explanatory power in helping us understand the sheer range of experiences and feelings that the children and young people of our studies were telling us about or how they link with more structural features of wider society. Underpinning these experiences and feelings, were recurring issues of identity and relationality as these are both specific and general, fluid and categorical, changing and ingrained, at one and the same time.

Diversity in sibling identity and relationality We have looked at the children’s and young people’s accounts of themselves and their sisters and brothers through the twin themes of identity and relationality because they are everywhere in their narratives and could not be ignored. Their discussions of a whole range of facets of their relationships with siblings as part of family life, in the home and outside of it in schools and neighbourhoods, were redolent with understandings about themselves as people and their place in the social world. Relationships with siblings contributed powerfully to, and were an integral part of, the way they saw themselves, how they felt and how they acted. Despite the persistent disregard of sisters and brothers in both sociology and psychodynamic theories, we were nevertheless convinced of the potential of some key concepts in both of those disciplinary traditions to cast a powerful analytic light on these interconnected topics. Drawing on work in the sociologies of family and childhood that take a broadly social constructionist perspective and bringing this together with key concepts in Kleinian and object relations psychoanalysis, we illuminated some of the complex and contradictory ways that siblings are intimately tied up in our relationships with ourselves and others. This multi-disciplinary framework enabled a creative exploration of the interdependence of internal, emotional and external, social worlds, by working with rational/irrational and conscious/unconscious understandings, experiences and motivations. At times we explored a particular question through one or other of these theoretical lenses. For instance, when looking at the issue of who is a sister or a brother in Chapter 2, taking a social constructionist approach allowed the children’s and young people’s understandings of what this means to emerge. Their accounts challenged the kinds of simplistic associations between

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biology, law and residence that are contained in official accounts of sibling relationships and brought into view the interplay of social, emotional and biological elements of who is considered a sibling. The Kleinian concepts of projection and projective identification were put to use in our Chapter 3 discussion of the part that sisters and brothers can play in the structuring of internal worlds. These ideas gave us a useful framework through which to think about some of the tensions in being simultaneously a unique individual and a member of a group that play themselves out in and through sibling relationships. One of the interesting outcomes of taking these two perspectives to look at the same sibling phenomena is not that they reveal entirely different aspects of the data. In fact the same themes, of power, conflict, care, play, love, status, difference, connection and ambivalence (to name but a few), consistently emerged no matter which theoretical framework was employed. Rather, one of the strengths of using facets from social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives has been their capacity to reveal quite different dimensions of the same practices, processes and experiences. This dual theoretical framework has allowed us to contain aspects of experience and daily life that are normally considered separately and to hold together the interweaving of the social world of constructed meanings with the psychic world of emotions. It has also meant that we can challenge some orthodoxies and universalisms about sibling relationships. As is clear from the narratives of the children and young people in this book, relationships with sisters and brothers come in many forms and are characterised by a diverse range of practices and feelings. In some senses, the findings of our studies are contradictory in that there are no simplistic messages or universal rules about ‘healthy’ sibling relationships and what siblings do together or indeed how they feel about one another. However, whether sisters and brothers love, hate, or are indifferent towards each other, or feel all of these things at some time or another, there is no doubt that the complex set of interdependencies that emerge between most siblings as they grow older are crucial in the construction of a sense of self that is profoundly rooted in relations with others. An analysis of sibling relationships, from whatever perspective, would not be complete without a discussion of rivalry between siblings – a topic that psychology and psychoanalysis have been preoccupied with. Whilst Freud emphasised the inevitability of rivalrous conflict between siblings he had less to say on the desire and capacity of children and young people to repair the ‘damage’ that their aggressive feelings towards sisters and brothers might cause. In Chapter 5, our analysis showed that while there is certainly no shortage of aggression and rivalry in siblings’ relationships, this is by no means the whole story. Rather, these tendencies often (though not always) run alongside opposing feelings, of tenderness, affection and warmth for the same sister or brother with whom the child has previously been in physical

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or emotional conflict. Here we noted that conflict and aggression between siblings is not always amenable to universalistic rational solutions. Fighting and violence between them is part of the complexity of sibling relationships and can be a way of seeking connection between self and sibling as well differentiation within the sibling hierarchy. Not only this, but even the most irritating, despised or hated sister or brother can provide protection against being alone. The children’s and young people’s stories also remind us that families are dynamic units, and that sibling identifications are not static, but are subject to shifts – particularly as they grow up and move into adolescence – some of which incur losses for siblings who may feel ‘left behind’. This strand of diversity and fluidity in relationships between sisters and brothers, of no firm lessons that are static and consistent across circumstances, however, also needs to be held alongside the categorical differences that recurred throughout the book. At first sight, this may seem contradictory – how can diversity and change be held alongside ingrained social division? This is because categories of gender, age, social class, race/ethnicity, and so on, do not exist in and of themselves, but are constituted in the context of emotional and social relations, including with siblings: a lived relationship with self and other. As such, categorical divisions ranging from sister/brother and youngest/oldest, to working/middle class and Asian/ Black/White, are unstable and contestable, and so vary in their local and particular manifestations.

Difference in sibling identity and relationships There is a powerful dynamic between emotions and social divisions. Being the oldest, middle class, a sister and so on, are lived on both conscious and unconscious levels. Categorical difference joins with the psyche, informing our inner world and shaping the self as well as our relationships and experiences in the outer world. Throughout this book, therefore, it has been evident that these processes of difference are constituted and played out in how children and young people think about themselves as siblings and in their relationships with their sisters and brothers. Relations are imbued with the dynamics of difference within the sibling group and, in relation to age, we have seen how older sisters and brothers will seek to exercise their authority over younger members of the family. Age status is not just a matter of chronology, but involves the significance that is attached to birth order; how age is ‘used’ and referenced. How age status is used in how siblings think about themselves and their relationships with their sisters and brothers often involves issues of power, authority and protection that mirror generational forms of differentiation within families. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 6, sometimes the authority of older siblings is accepted by the sibling group as entirely appropriate, especially when a responsibility of care and protection towards younger siblings is a corollary

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of this power. Some older sisters and brothers are able to take up this position (at least some of the time) in a spirit of kindness and generosity, whilst some (at other times) feel inadequate or compromised by, or are critical and harsh towards, younger ones. Chapter 5 described how some children and young people understood conflict with sisters and brothers as a marker of the boundary between immaturity and maturity, with the older sibling seeing themselves as the grown-up one in relation to their annoying, ‘babyish’ siblings. On the one hand, conflicts such as these were manifestations of relational power struggles and connected to the desire to assert and be recognised as an autonomous subject. On the other hand, Chapter 3 illustrated that the exercise of age-based authority can also be connected to being a member of a collective within the family but also beyond it to include local and national ethnic communities. The social and cultural context in which relationships are conducted provide particular discourses and subject positions through which practices and meanings are constructed. It is clear that children’s and young people’s sense of self and their relations with others, including their sisters and brothers, is also subject to emotional and social differentiations along the lines of gender, ‘race’ and ethnic culture, and class, which are experienced in interaction. In Chapter 3’s discussion of sameness and difference in emotional relationships between siblings, generally, it was working class children and young people for whom group membership held the most significance, with individual senses of self being intimately tied up with the group, whereas middle-class sisters and brothers were more likely to see themselves as an individual who also happened to be a sibling. This is one of the ways in which social class is an aspect of self as well as a social category in sibling identity and relationships. Another was evident in Chapter 6, where class as both an emotional and social identity and a marker of particular types of neighbourhoods and the people who lived in them was at play in relationships between sisters and brothers in local communities. Chapter 4 revealed how emotional and social difference is also evident in the home, in the everyday practices of talk, play, domesticity and care between siblings, where gender emerged as a significant feature of the practice of sibling relationships, with girls focusing on talk as a feature of connection to and separation from their siblings and boys on activities. Cultural notions of femininity and masculinity and embedded gendered power relations were involved in these everyday sibling practices, as appropriate ways to behave and their transgressions. Gender is also important for siblings as they interact outside the home, in local spaces and places, where it engaged with distinctions of class, culture and ‘race’ as powerful tropes in supporting identifications and dis-identifications between siblings as well as between sibling groups and other groups of children and young people. In Chapter 6 we took a sibling’s-eye view to explore the ways in which being a sister or brother intersects with everyday interactions in

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the locality, with sibling relationships highly implicated in issues of belonging, trust, risk, safety and danger for children and young people in neighbourhoods – all crucial elements in the generation of social capital in communities. In the ways we have just overviewed, children’s and young people’s sibling identity and relationships constitute and are marked by overlapping divisions within families (hierarchical systems of generation and gender) and substantial material and cultural differences between people that run throughout society (social divisions and structural inequalities of generation, gender, social class, race/ethnicity), as well as being fluid, shifting, contested and subject to ongoing change.

Final thoughts In this book we have sought to take a journey into the special place that sisters and brothers occupy in the emotional, domestic and social lives of children and young people from a socially and ethnically diverse range of sibling groups. In doing so we have revealed just some of the many ways that sibling relationships are centrally implicated in how and what we come to know about ourselves and others, that is identity and relationality. It has been difficult to identify patterns, with regard to type and quality of relationship, practices, behaviours, feelings about one another, that are not immediately contradicted elsewhere. What we can say with confidence is that whatever the quality of the relationships between siblings, they are both characterised by diverse and shifting kinds of connections, and inscribed by difference. The overarching motifs of children’s and young people’s sibling relationships that we have identified above, we hope, are evidence in themselves of the importance of sisters and brothers for a sense of identity and feelings of relationality, and for how we can understand the social and emotional worlds. The in-depth and detailed discussions in the various chapters comprising the book underpin and reinforce this claim. We do not, however, see ourselves as having charted the full extent of the facets of sibling ties and all their nuances and implications. In this respect, this book is a contribution towards recognition of the study of sibling relationships as a significant topic beyond its previously largely narrow developmental confines, and an indication of the promise of studying them for a whole range of disciplinary, theoretical and substantive endeavours.

Notes

1 Introduction 1 A nationally representative sample of 1,112 parents was interviewed as part of a module of the NOP Parentbus survey commissioned for the ‘Resources in Parenting: Access to Capitals’ project being carried out under the Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group at London South Bank University. See Edwards and Gillies 2004 for further details. 2 Copies of the leaflets are available from the authors, as are copies of the interview tools. 2 Who is a sister and a brother? 1 ‘Skived’ means played truant. 3 Siblings in the self 1 Harry Potter is a series of books by J.K. Rowling about a boy wizard and his friends and enemies, and they have also been made into films. Lord of the Rings is also a series of books and films, about a ring and good and evil people. (Olivia Thompson Edwards, age 9) 4 Everyday practices 1 The Guides and Scouts are a world-wide youth organisation. Younger members are, respectively, Brownies and Cubs.

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Index

activity 59–76 adopted siblings 22 African families 22, 71 African-American families 22 African-Caribbean families 22, 43 age 3, 9–10, 19, 23, 39, 43–4; categories 121–2; conflict 78–9, 81, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 95–7, 99–100; difference 50–2, 54; everyday practices 59, 61, 68–75; local communities 103–4, 110–11, 113–14, 116–17 age status 19, 23–4, 42, 59; conflict 78, 82–4, 86–7, 89, 95–7, 99–100; diversity 121–2; everyday practices 61, 68–75 aggression 77–101, 110–11, 120–1 Akhtar, Salman 22 ambivalence 12–13, 24, 29, 42, 46–50, 94, 111, 120 anthropology 2–3 anti-social families 24 anxiety 12–15, 41, 54, 90, 94 Asian families 16, 43–4, 46, 72, 105, 108–9, 115, 121 aspirations 40 authority 68, 72–4, 76, 80, 82, 84–5, 100, 121–2 auto/biography 8 Bangladeshi families 21, 43, 109 Bank, Stephen 24, 40–1, 48, 80–1, 90, 95 belonging 102 bickering 87, 91, 111 biological relationships 1, 4, 7, 16, 18, 20–37, 46 birth order 3, 7, 12, 19, 24; conflict 78, 83–4, 86, 96–7, 99–100; diversity 121; everyday practices 59, 68–75 Black families 16, 21, 71–2, 115, 121 British families 43, 46, 71, 82, 84, 86 bullying 70–4, 91, 107, 110, 112

capitalism 43, 54, 80 care 59–76 Caribbean 5 caring 68–70, 122 Carr Steelman, Lala 21–2 castration complex 52 Census Bureau 21 challenges 70–5 changing identifications 38–58 child development 59 child-focused approach 16 children’s understanding 26–37 Christensen, Pia 1, 103 circle maps 17, 26–8, 31, 33, 55, 57, 65, 95 class 9–10, 15–16, 18–19, 102–4; aggression 78, 81–7, 90–1, 98, 100; biological/social ties 24, 26–9, 31, 33, 35–6; categories 121–3; changing identifications 38–9, 43, 47, 50–2, 54–5, 57–8; everyday practices 62, 64, 66, 69, 71–2, 74; local communities 105–7, 109, 111, 113, 116–17 clinical psychology 77, 89 co-residence 22, 26, 28, 35–6, 70 Coleman, James 23, 103 Coles, Prophecy 12, 39–40, 49 confidentiality 16–17 conflict 77–101, 110–11, 113, 120–2 connection 39–43, 47–8, 50–1, 59; conflict 92, 94–5; diversity 120–1; everyday practices 62–4, 66 conscience 40 cooling-off periods 89, 98 coping strategies 94 core siblings 22 creativity 78, 91, 95, 97, 111 crime 104, 116 culture 22, 24, 26, 42–6; diversity 122–3; everyday practices 60, 71; local communities 102–4, 108–10, 112, 114–15; sameness/difference 58

134

Index

defence mechanisms 12–13, 94, 110–16 demography 4, 21 demonisation 13, 114 dependence 46–9, 81, 84, 105–6 destructiveness 78, 93–7, 100, 111 developmental psychology 77, 79, 89 difference 37–59, 96, 118–23 differentiation 96–100, 111–12, 121–2 dis-identification 19, 37, 42, 53, 104, 122 disruptions 70–5 distinctions 20, 36–7 diversity 21, 118–23 divorce 21 Dunn, Judy 89 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 15 economics 102 education 4, 11, 23–4, 32, 54, 71, 78–80, 90 educational psychology 90 Edwards, Ros 6–7 ego-ideals 40, 44 Elgar, Marian 22 elisions 20 emigration 5 emotions 21, 25–6, 28–31, 33–7; conflict 77–8, 89–91, 93–6, 98, 100; diversity 118–23; everyday practices 63; local communities 102, 104, 106, 114, 116; sameness/difference 38–9, 42–3, 46, 49–50, 55–7 employment 24 encounter-space 110–11 English language 44 equality 71, 74–6 essentialism 9 ethics 16–17, 43–4, 107–10 ethnicity 5, 9–10, 15–16, 18–19; biological/social ties 21–2, 26; categories 121–3; everyday practices 59, 71–2, 74; local communities 102–4, 108, 114–17; sameness/difference 38–9, 46, 54 eugenics 24 European families 43 everyday practices 59–76, 122 evolutionary psychology 25 exclusion 28, 39, 43, 51, 53, 57, 103 expert discourse 9, 11, 26, 77, 79–80, 87, 91, 98–9 Faber, Adele 80, 87, 90–1 familialisation 77, 79–80, 84–5, 87, 93, 99 Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group 15

family policy agenda 3–4 family studies 54 favourites 13 femininity 19, 51, 58–9, 61–9, 75, 112, 122 feminism 8, 37, 40 flow charts 18 fluidity 61, 121, 123 foster siblings 22 Freud, Anna 95 Freud, Sigmund 7–8, 11–12, 39–40, 44, 48, 90, 93, 120 friends 20, 27, 30–1, 33–4; biological/social ties 36–7; conflict 81, 84, 86, 90–1; everyday practices 68, 71; local communities 105–6, 108, 111–14; sameness/difference 46–7, 50–4 full siblings 16, 21–2, 24, 28, 35–6 gangs 110, 113, 116 gender 3, 8–10, 15, 18–19, 26, 30; categories 121–3; everyday practices 59, 61–2, 64–70, 72, 75–6; local communities 103–4, 107–9, 111–12, 114–17; sameness/difference 38–9, 42–6, 50–1, 55, 58 generation 59, 99, 123 genetics 21, 25 group affiliation 54–5, 58, 113–14, 116, 122 Guides 74–5 Hadfield, Lucy 6–7 half-siblings 16, 21–2, 24–5; biological/social ties 27–8, 31, 33, 35–6; local communities 106; sameness/difference 51 Harvard 7 Head, Ann 22 health 4, 11 history 38, 102 hostile dependence 48 housing estates 34, 107–8, 111–14 humiliation 94 id 44 identification 38–58, 102 identity 2–3, 5, 8–9, 14–15; biological/social ties 20, 30, 37; conflict 80, 101; difference 118–23; diversity 119–21; embedded 103–4, 108, 116, 122; everyday practices 60, 75–6; formation 38–42, 57, 59, 102, 118–19; local communities 107–8, 110, 112, 114, 117; understanding 18–19 inclusion 28, 47 Indian families 21

Index individualisation 55–7, 77, 79–81, 84, 86–7, 93–4, 99–101 institutionalisation 77, 79–80, 84, 87, 89, 99 interdependence 2, 5, 43, 46, 58; diversity 120; everyday practices 74, 76; local communities 106, 108 intervention 87, 89, 91 interviews 17–18, 27–30, 47, 64–73, 85, 92, 95–6, 98, 105 intimacy 4–5, 8, 25 introjection 40

135

nuclear families 16, 33, 90–1 object-relations theory 11–12, 39–40, 90, 93, 119 Oedipus complex 11–12, 39, 52, 93 older siblings 10, 24, 35–6; conflict 81–4, 86–7, 92, 95–7, 100; diversity 121–2; everyday practices 60, 62–73, 75; local communities 105–9, 111; sameness/difference 42–5, 47–54 ontological security 43, 49 Other 114–15 ownership 81–2

Joseph Rowntree Foundation 15 Kahn, Michael 24, 40–1, 48, 80–1, 90, 95 kin siblings 22 Klein, Melanie 11–12, 14, 41, 93, 119–20 Kosonen, Marjut 22 Kramer, Selma 22 law 1, 120 Lawson, Mary 1 leaflets 17 liminality 78 living together 35–6 local communities 34, 54, 101–17, 122–3 location 15, 18, 70, 102–4, 107, 115 London South Bank University 15 Lucey, Helen 7–8 masculinity 19, 31, 51, 56–7; diversity 122; everyday practices 59, 61–9, 73, 75; local communities 112–14 Matthews, Hugh 110 Mauthner, Melanie 5–6, 8 Mazlish, Elaine 80, 87, 90–1 media 110, 116 middle siblings 10, 24, 44, 53, 69–70, 75–6, 97 mimesis 52 Mitchell, Juliet 6, 12–13, 24, 39–40, 44, 52–3 mobility 105 morals see ethics Morgan, David 60 Morrow, Ginny 104 multi-disciplinary approach 5–15, 39, 118–19 Muslims 43, 46, 58, 109 National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI) 21 negativity 50–1, 55, 94–6, 111, 113–14 neo-Darwinism 25 not-needing 94

Pakistani families 5, 21, 31, 72, 82, 84, 86, 109 pedagogy 73, 85–7, 89, 97, 100 Percy-Smith, Barry 110 personality 21, 24–5 perspectives 60 place 102–4, 106, 108–9, 111, 122 play fights 33, 87, 91–4 policing 80 politics 22, 37, 114 post-industrialisation 77–8, 84 post-structuralism 8–10, 12, 14 power relations 5, 7, 10; conflict 81–4, 87, 89, 95–7, 99–100; diversity 120, 122; everyday practices 59–76; local communities 110; sameness/difference 39, 53; understanding 15–16, 19 practices 60–75 private sphere 79 privileges 105 projection 12–15, 19, 30, 39; conflict 93, 96; diversity 120; local communities 114; sameness/difference 41–2, 49, 51–2 projective identification 12–14, 19, 41–2, 114, 120 property prices 115 Prout, Alan 103 psyche 21, 24–5, 41, 54, 60; conflict 78, 83, 93–4, 96, 98–101; diversity 118–21; local communities 114, 116–17 psychoanalysis 2–3, 5–7, 11–14; conflict 79, 89–91; diversity 119–20; local communities 114; sameness/difference 39, 42, 52–3, 57 psychodynamics 2, 5–6, 8, 11–15; biological/social ties 25; conflict 78, 87–93, 96, 99–100; diversity 118–20; everyday practices 60; relationships 18–19; sameness/difference 39 psychology 2–3, 7, 9, 11, 13; biological/social ties 25, 35; conflict 77, 79, 89, 91; diversity 119–20; everyday

136

Index

practices 59–60; local communities 114, 116; sameness/difference 39–40, 42, 49, 55 punch-bags 98–9 race see ethnicity racism 72, 108, 115–16 rage 78, 93–6, 98, 100 reciprocity 103 rejection 54–5, 58 relationality 2–3, 5, 8–9, 12; biological/social ties 20, 35, 37; conflict 78, 80, 84, 96, 101; difference 121–3; diversity 118–23; everyday practices 59, 75–6; local communities 104, 106, 117; sameness/difference 58; understanding 15, 18–19 religion 19, 22, 44, 46, 108, 114 reparation 90, 96–100 repartnering 21, 31 reputation 107–10 resentment 105 resolution tactics 80 respectability 108–9 responsibilities 78–81, 84–7, 93, 98–9, 109 reward systems 73 rivalry 1, 3, 7–8, 10–11, 13; biological/social ties 25; conflict 77, 79, 87, 90; diversity 120; relationships 19 role-play 66 rules 74, 81 rural locations 15, 50 sameness 37–59, 96 samples 15–18 sanctions 73, 103 Saunders, R. 23 Scouts 74–5 self 38–58, 80, 93, 95, 97; conflict 100; discipline 80, 99; diversity 121–2; local communities 103, 114; sufficiency 93–6 separation 39–43, 50, 55–7, 59, 62, 66, 89, 94 seriality 5, 39 sexuality 9, 24, 109 sharing 74 shifting identifications 42–3 sibling practices 19, 60–75 Skeggs, Beverley 108 social capital 103–4, 107, 116, 123 social construction; biological/social ties 20, 22, 25–6, 29, 31–2, 34, 37; conflict 77–8, 99, 101; diversity 118–20; everyday practices 60–1, 70; local communities 102–3, 112, 114;

relationships 15, 18–19; sameness/difference 58; understanding 5–6, 8–11 social function 21, 23–4 social relationships 1–2, 18–37 social services 4, 7 social siblings 22 socialisation 4, 24, 60, 79–80, 103 socialism 37 sociology 2–3, 5–9, 13, 19, 39, 42, 104, 119 sorting mechanisms 114 space 102–5, 107–11, 115, 122 spider diagrams 18 statistics 21–3 step-siblings 4, 16, 21–2, 24–5, 28, 30, 51, 70 stranger danger 110 Strathern, Marilyn 25 super-ego 44 talk 59–76, 122 trade unions 37 traffic 110–11 Treffers, P.D.A. 22 twins 26, 31–2, 51, 57, 115 typologies 21–3 unconscious 11–13, 42, 77–8, 87, 90, 98, 119, 121 underclass 24 understanding relationships 1–19 United States (US) 21–2 urban locations 15 vignettes 18 websites 79 welfare 4, 11 White families 16, 21, 26–9; biological/social ties 31, 33, 35–6; conflict 81–7, 90–1; diversity 121; everyday practices 62, 64, 66, 69, 71–2, 74; local communities 106–9, 111, 113, 115; sameness/difference 43, 46, 50–2, 55, 57 Winnicott, Donald 11 Women’s Studies 8 young people’s understanding 26–37 younger siblings 10, 24, 35; conflict 81–6, 90–3, 95–7, 100; diversity 121–2; everyday practices 60, 64, 66, 68–73, 75–6; local communities 105–7, 109, 112–13; sameness/difference 42, 44–5, 47–8, 51–3 youth culture 103