NCJ Number
214888
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 30 Issue: 6 Dated: June 2006 Pages: 619-637
Date Published
June 2006
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This study examined the extent to which siblings reported similar parental neglectful behaviors, whether sibling correlations for family-level types of neglectful behaviors were greater than neglectful behaviors toward specific children, whether high-risk families differed from lower risk families in similarity for sibling reports of neglectful behaviors, and factors that predicted differences in sibling reports of parental neglectful behaviors.
Abstract
With a few exceptions, the study found that for all types of neglectful behaviors, sibling correlations were typically high for both a clinical (maltreatment concerns in the family) sample and a community sample (convenience sample recruited from after-school programs in urban areas of New Hampshire). Opposite sex sibling pairs showed greater differences in the reporting of neglectful parental behavior, with boys reporting more neglectful behavior than girls. Overall, however, neglectful parental behaviors were perceived similarly by siblings, suggesting that neglect was a characteristic of the family environment and parental functioning. This finding did not vary according to types of neglectful behavior. This suggests that if one child in a family is reported to be neglected, it is important to assess the other children for neglect as well. There were 217 children in the clinical sample and 84 children in the community sample. There were 59 sibling pairs covering both groups. All children completed the Multidimensional Neglectful Behaviors Scale, which measures both child-specific and family-level neglectful parenting behaviors. 5 tables and 45 references