Only children still develop social skills

   No brothers or sisters? No problem, according to a U.S. study that found growing up without siblings did not diminish teenagers' social skills.

   A study of more than 13,000 middle and high school students found that only children were selected as friends by schoolmates as often as youngsters with brothers and sisters.

   "I don't think anyone has to be concerned that if you don't have siblings, you won't learn the social skills you need to get along with other students in high school," said researcher Donna Bobbitt-Zeher of Ohio State University.

   Bobbitt-Zeher, who conducted the study with Douglas Downey, said a trend towards smaller families in industrialized nations had raised concerns in recent years that a lack of siblings might hurt children's social skills.

   "The fear is that they may be losing something by not learning social skills through interacting with siblings," she said.

   An earlier study by Downey showed that children without siblings showed poorer social skills in kindergarten compared with those who had at least one sibling.

   This new study, which was presented at the 105th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on Monday, was designed to see if that advantage to having siblings persisted as children become teens.

   The study used data from the National Study of Adolescent Health, which interviewed students in grades 7 through 12 at more than 100 schools nationwide during the 1994-95 academic year.

   Each student asked to identify up to five male and five female friends at their school. Bobbitt-Zeher said this allowed the researchers to measure the popularity of students by counting how many times peers identified him or her as a friend.

   On average students in the study were nominated by five other schoolmates as a friend with no significant differences between those who had siblings and those who did not.

  The researchers also looked at a variety of situations and still found no difference depending in the number of siblings, the gender of siblings or if they were half- or adopted siblings.

   "In every combination we tested, siblings had no impact on how popular a student was among peers," she said.

   Bobbitt-Zeher said she believed children learned a lot about getting along with others between kindergarten and high school.

   "Kids interact in school, they're participating in extracurricular activities, and they're socializing in and out of school," she said.

   "Anyone who didn't have that peer interaction at home with siblings gets a lot of opportunities to develop social skills as they go through school."

Source Reuters