Sibling and Parent Relationships: Building a Healthy Emotional Intelligence

“Sibling conflicts can become a vehicle for understanding social relationships” (Chandran and Nair). The relationship between siblings, whether they are biologically related, adopted siblings, or even step-siblings, all play a major role in building the emotional intelligence of a child during their adolescence. These connections are directly altered by the impression and advice given from their parental figures. Parents’ decision to make a positive or negative influence in their child’s life will be one of the main factors that modify how they will perceive all other social relationships and interactions for the rest of their lives. Even if later on in life these relationships begin to fall apart, the influence they made throughout childhood and adolescence will forever remain in the back or even forefront of their minds. The loss of these relationships would impact their whole life, which is why it is vital that these relationships stay healthy and promising from the very beginning. Nevertheless, some may believe that these familial relationships have no effect on an emotional intelligence as the adolescent is their own person and has a personality that cannot be majorly affected by outside factors. This, however, is not true as it has been proven for there to be a direct correlation between parent and sibling relationships, and the building of a healthy emotional intelligence of an adolescent. The creation of this emotional intelligence is mainly affected through family and home climates, siblings being able to maintain contact, parental treatment of siblings and the attachment of children to their parents.

Emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and use your own emotions, as well as perceive and influence the emotions of others, is built up and affected by a child’s surroundings starting from the very beginning of their lives. When children are very young, the only interactions and relationships that they view and start to truly understand are the ones they see in their family. This is when they are the most impressionable and therefore is when the creation of a happy and healthy environment should begin to take place. This process begins with their parents, the people they inherit everything from, physically and psychologically. It is their job to create a healthy family atmosphere in their home and to foster a secure and joyful relationship between their children. How they pay attention to and view their child’s mental health as they grow up is crucial as it impacts how they go about helping them in their life and the way they treat their children. “...the perception of parents about their children in some factors of EI exerts an influence on the self-reported EI of their children in the same factors, which ultimately determines their mental health” (Sanchez-Nunez et al). Since these factors are so dependent on each other it is pivotal that these two things are built well together in childhood with the help from parents and siblings. The effort needed from parents to correctly understand their children’s feelings and emotions and then subsequently take action into helping their child is a colossal responsibility. Parents' involvement sets up their children for the rest of their lives as it determines how well they will interact with other people and treat themselves. This being said, if a parent neglects their child in any form, such as substance abuse or unequal treatment between siblings, it can lead to their child having a negative mental health and low emotional intelligence which will stick by them and influence them persistently throughout their lives. These issues are why it is vital for parents to treat their child’s feelings with the utmost seriousness and prioritize building their emotional intelligence, maintaining a well-standing mental health, and foster healthy sibling relationships that will stand and be present for the rest of their lives.

One vital way that a healthy sibling relationship can contribute to building an adolescent’s emotional intelligence is through the fact that they can help with a child’s mental health issues caused by unfair parental treatment. By helping their sibling through these situations, they play a role in not letting that unfair treatment considerably drag down their emotional intelligence. These sibling relationships play a powerful and important role in a child’s life and therefore into their social and emotional development/intelligence as well. More often than it is talked about, children get unlucky with the parents that they did not get to pick but were instead forced to have as role models. These parents may treat their children unfairly because of marital problems, substance abuse, depression, etc. which has a direct impact on their child’s self-esteem and therefore their emotional intelligence development. However, having a healthy relationship with a sibling can almost directly reverse these negative effects. Having support and stability from a sibling that they may not get from their parents is what can help these children reach their full potential and a higher emotional intelligence, and therefore avoid major mental health issues altogether. “...sibling relationships characterized by positive support and intimacy predict improved child functioning…” (Stormshak et al). This direct positive correlation that has been found between social-emotional development and sibling relationships shows how when they are taken care of and fostered to be healthy from the beginning they can do a lot of good for a child’s mental health. Especially when these children are experiencing issues with their parents, having a strong relationship with their sibling which can help support them is a key way for them to not let these problems deteriorate their emotional intelligence, mental health, and self worth.

Furthermore, a key example of how sibling relationships affect an adolescent’s emotional intelligence is if they grow up together with an unstable, distressing relationship, it will result in a negative correlation to their emotional and social development. This can be caused by many things such as being pitted against each other by parents or simply being jealous of each other and their lives, and while this can be common in sibling relationships it is not something that should become completely normalized. These issues can lead to a declining sense of self-worth and consequently harm the ability for an adolescent to continue building their emotional intelligence because of these mental health issues. “...youth’s reports of disfavored treatment were positively correlated with depressive symptoms” (Loeser et al). The feeling a child has when they perceive their parents to favor their sibling over them is one that can lead them towards a path of considerable psychological, emotional issues and subsequently almost erase their chances of having a high and thriving emotional intelligence. If parents do not get ahead of these issues by treating their children fairly and fostering a good relationship between siblings from the very beginning, it is likely that they will never be able to make up for this time. It can result in their children losing contact and separating themselves from each other as they get older because of not wanting to relive their damaging feelings from childhood and bring it into their adulthood life. If they go through with this cutoff it can only harm them more through a decline of their emotional intelligence which will play a role in every relationship they form for the rest of their lives. This is yet another reason which displays how necessary it is for parents to foster these strong and stable relationships between their children and make it all they know so that they are able to maintain a good connection throughout their lives as they become adolescents and into adulthood. Being able to have this relationship from childhood will help them have the ability to keep building on and maintain a good emotional intelligence which they can carry with them throughout their lives and implant into the rest of their relationships.

Additionally, another way that sibling relationships and parent relationships affect the building of an adolescent's emotional intelligence is through how the parents create a healthy family climate in order to maintain a positive relationship with their children and to foster a healthy sibling relationship between their children. Their effort into completing these goals plays a direct role in how high or low of an emotional intelligence their child will grow up to have and maintain. “...when parents experience warmer relationships with their children…they also may be better able to promote children’s interpersonal skills and foster positive sibling relationships” (Chun et al). This shows how when parents are willing and able to treat their children equally and to the best of their ability, their kids are much more likely to have a higher emotional and social development and be closer with their siblings. Creating this closeness in siblings is how parents can make sure that their children always have a pillar of support to lean on as they become an adolescent and grow into their adulthood. These siblings, if they had created and have maintained a good relationship throughout their childhood, tend to hold a closer bond and therefore stay close throughout adulthood. This has a positive effect on their emotional intelligence because it allows them to have a connection to their past self with someone who also knows their current identity and personality and understands both versions of them. This creates a feeling of comfort and stability which influences a positive mental health and therefore a high emotional intelligence. A study conducted exhibited results that showed how girls’ empathy increased during their transition from childhood into adolescence but then leveled off while boys’ remained to be substantially unchanged. This result of the difference in empathy is a key example of how sibling warmth given from parents and maintained by siblings directly relates to the amount of empathy they have when they grow up and the building of their emotional intelligence.

Finally, one last reason that a parents’ relationships with their child can affect their emotional intelligence growth is through how they treat and make their child feel wanted. A significant role in how many people manage their well being once they are on their own in adulthood is how they felt about their worth and the awareness of their feelings because of the way their parents made them feel. The relationship between a child’s emotional competency and their attachment relationship to their parents is a key factor in how they decide to continue to maintain their emotions, feelings and mental health as they grow older.  “The findings of the present study confirm that emotional competencies have a mediating role in the relationship between parental attachment and well-being of adolescents” (Monaco et al). Being aware of the fact that you are wanted by your parents and knowing that their life is made better with you included in it is a feeling that helps keep a positive mindset in a child’s brain and help them develop empathy. This is why it is a crucial thing for parents to create a confident and beneficial relationship with their children when they are very young when they are impressionable so that they start off their journey with emotional intelligence and mental health on the right foot. It will make it worthwhile as what they teach their child about themselves and how they should view their emotions before they can make their own opinions about these things will most definitely be something they think about often and keep by their side for the rest of their lives. As they continue to include it in their roles and relationships for the rest of their lives it will also affect their ability to perceive and understand other emotions and will become a vital part of how they form their decisions, define their own stability and trust and communicate with other people. How a child feels an attachment to their mother and father will most likely be how they pass on relationships to their own children so it is crucial that parents make sure they are on the positive side of this effect.

However, some people may believe that the connection between parent relationships and sibling relationships and the building of a healthy emotional intelligence of an adolescent does not exist. They may believe that each adolescent is grown enough to be their own individual person and not let other outside factors and influences affect how they view their emotions and carry themselves through their life. Nevertheless, this would not be true as professionals have stated and studies have been conducted that illustrate how the relationship between the emotional intelligence of an adolescent being built is affected by familial relationships. In a study that was performed in order to study sibling relationships and their effects and relation to emotional intelligence, their major finding was how emotional intelligence was positively correlated with contacts, emotional closeness, confiding and overall relationships between siblings. The ability for someone to have empathy and be able to understand people's emotions stems from the experience of doing it with siblings since childhood and feeling the support on the other side from your siblings being able to do this. “It can be said that sibling relationships and emotional intelligence are bi-directional in nature, one influencing the other” (Shourya and Balda). They prove that these two things do have a very statistically significant and direct correlation to each other. This source also discusses how these strong and mutually beneficial sibling relationships are more likely to have an effect on their life in middle adulthood because as they have changed since being children and adolescents, their siblings remain one of the major commitments of their lives and as the connection to their past self as well as a part of their current life. Therefore, the idea that these relationships and emotional intelligence building are not related is far from the truth as supported by this study.

To conclude, the correlation between parent relationships and sibling relationships and the building of an adolescent's emotional intelligence have a direct relationship with each other. This alliance is impacted by creating a healthy family climate in the home, siblings staying in touch as they grow into adulthood, parents treating their children equally, and children’s feeling of being wanted in their relationships with parents and siblings. It is extremely important for all of these things to be met in order to give a child the best chance of building and maintaining throughout their life a high emotional intelligence and a positive mental health. Siblings are one of the most important factors of anybody’s life so it is crucial to maintain a good relationship with them which can be done through many ways. “Recognizing that each sibling has their own personality, interests, and life path helps in appreciating their uniqueness rather than viewing these differences as barriers” (Chae). Sibling connections can be tough to navigate, these relationships can range from comforting and resilient to very complicated through things such as competition, jealousy, and difference in personality. However, if they are paid attention to and given the effort and care they need, they can be one of the best outlets and influences for someone’s emotional intelligence. If this relationship falls between the cracks it would take a serious toll on all of the people involved and result in declining emotional intelligence, mental health, and self-worth. The potential to achieve this lies in each person's own hands, so it is vital that people take that opportunity and use it to better their sibling relationships and continue to build their emotional intelligence throughout their life. All you have to start with in order to obtain this goal of keeping these relationships healthy is to value everybody and appreciate that they are their own person who can benefit you just as much as you to them. Maintaining these healthy relationships can help offer a buffer against depression, anxiety, and loneliness in someone and therefore help maintain an exceptional emotional intelligence.

Works Cited

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Negi, Shourya, and Shanti Balda. "Sibling relationship during middle adulthood in relation to emotional intelligence." Brightpoint Community College, ProQuest, Sept. 2019, www.proquest.com/docview/2316723520?accountid=27724&parentSessionId=HG6xEDZXk0fpUkr8HtFHR%2FpBRGie8zG5oixdFhnRV6A%3D&pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=sibling%20relationships%20in%20relation%20to%20building%20of%20emotional%20intelligence&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

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