According to a study, older sisters benefit siblings greatly. However, older brothers do not so much.
A new study suggests that big sisters can make a huge difference and can affect their younger siblings.
The study
Pamela Jakiela, one of the authors of the study said that they were prompted to do the study after reading that many parents in Kenya give their daughters a huge amount of duty when they are still very young.
She also added that by age 6 to 8, older sisters are spending much of their free time looking after younger children. In which, that is much less common for older brothers.
Experts have also been recording the difference between older sisters and older brothers. They have been looking into such for decades.
However, Jakiela says that there is not a lot of research that has been done into what effect these older sisters have on the toddlers for whom they are caring.
Because of this, Jakiela said that they thought that it would be interesting to compare young children who have older sisters as compared to older brothers.
The subjects of the study
Owen Ozier and Pamela Jakiela, the authors of the study, studied around 700 toddlers in a rural part of western Kenya to check how well they were doing on measures of the words they know, as well as how fine their motor skills are. Their finding said that on average, the toddlers with older sisters did better than those with older brothers.
Aside from these, Jakiela notes that experts also have long known that one factor in a child's growth is how much education their mother has.
She also found out that for those toddlers that they have observed with older sisters, it translates into about the same difference that people see when they compare young children whose mothers finish high school to those whose mothers only finished elementary school.
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Older sisters compared to older brothers
The things that older sisters do that are so helpful to their younger siblings are when they read stories to them, when they sing to and with them when they practice writing letters or counting with them, or simply being active and playing together.
They checked how often someone was doing those things for the toddlers and who was doing it to them.
Authors of the study found out that across all the families, the mothers engaged the toddlers this way about the same amount.
Older sisters were more likely to do so than older brothers. Older sisters engaged the toddlers in playing more and doing those activities more than any other family member.
The explanation
Aside from these, Jakiela said that this does not prove the extra reason why kids with older sisters perform better on those measures of early growth. She said that it suggests that it is a likely explanation.
The larger point of all these findings, the authors of the study said that officials need to be a lot more mindful about the bad effects of such work that so many older girls in poorer countries are doing, and for them to look for solutions.