Child abuse & neglect
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Child abuse & neglect · Jun 2006
Similarities in siblings' experiences of neglectful parenting behaviors.
Researchers and policymakers typically assume that within families, individual children are at an equivalent risk of neglectful behaviors. There is evidence that siblings experience differential parental treatment, and some research suggests that parents may maltreat their children to differing degrees. However, because neglect is typically a family-level construct, there may be a high correlation between siblings for this type of parental behavior. Therefore, our objectives were to investigate the extent to which siblings reported similar parental neglectful behaviors, whether sibling correlations for family-level types of neglectful behaviors were greater than those for child-specific forms of neglectful behaviors, whether high-risk groups differed from lower-risk groups in similarity for sibling reports for neglectful behaviors, and factors predicting differences in sibling reports of parental neglectful behaviors. ⋯ Siblings report similar neglectful parenting behaviors, regardless of whether the family is high-risk or not, and whether neglectful behaviors are measured as a family-level or child-specific phenomenon.