Study: More Siblings Linked to Worse Mental Health for Teens

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Facts

• A study released in the Journal of Family Issues reports that its findings suggest teenagers with more siblings have slightly worse mental health compared to adolescents who had one or zero siblings.¹
• Douglas Downey of Ohio State University and his colleagues studied 9.4K eighth-grade students from China and 9.1K Americans of the same age to examine the relationship between the number of siblings and mental health.²
• The US data shows that teens with older siblings or siblings close in age exhibited worsened mental health, with the strongest negative factors correlated to siblings born within one year of each other.³
• Downey said that prior studies showed that 'having more siblings is associated with some positive effects, so our results were not a given.' He added that despite different factors yielding different results, the overall pattern found in both the Chinese and the American sample groups was striking.⁴
• Downey speculated that more siblings, especially those close in age, compete for their parents’ resources. Furthermore, children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had the best mental health, and in the US families with one or two children fared the best compared to one-child families in China.⁵
• However, other studies have reported that kindergartners with more siblings had better social skills, and adults from larger families had lower divorce rates. Family sizes in both the US and China have shrunk in recent decades, and experts say more research is needed to determine the relationship between the number of siblings and mental health.⁵

Sources: ¹Guardian, ²Sage Journals, ³Healthday, ⁴OSU and ⁵PhillyVoice.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Medium. There are many reasons that people across developed countries are having fewer children, and this inevitable decline in birth rates brings some positive effects, as this study shows. In addition to the health and economic benefits of smaller families, having fewer children can help the world in its fight against climate change. The fact is that people are starting families much later than they did in the past, and the focus should be on the health and happiness of families, not on their size.
• Narrative B, as provided by The American Mind. People across the Western world, particularly in the US, have been misled into believing that having fewer children is a positive development. However, considerable research shows that large and robust families are most conducive to mental and physical health. Low birthrates present an existential crisis, and society must prioritize creating the next generation of happy and healthy children.

Predictions