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Supporting Siblings
Siblings are a central part of family life. For most children, a sibling is one of the most constant presences in their world — a companion through childhood, a witness to the everyday moments that make up a shared life, and a relationship that is unlike any other in its combination of closeness, complexity, and longevity.
Sibling relationships offer something irreplaceable: the experience of being known by someone who is also living the same family life, navigating the same home, and growing up alongside you. They are a source of shared experience, emotional connection, learning, support, and belonging — even when they are also, at times, a source of frustration and negotiation. The full range of that experience is what makes sibling relationships real, and worth taking seriously.
Sibling relationships are unique to the people in them. They are shaped by personality and temperament, by age and developmental stage, by shared history and the particular circumstances of each family. And they change — sometimes gradually and sometimes dramatically — as children grow and family life evolves. Supporting sibling relationships means understanding them in all their individual, dynamic complexity, rather than expecting them to follow a single pattern.
Why Sibling Relationships Matter
Sibling relationships are among the most developmentally significant relationships of childhood. They are not simply a feature of family structure — they are an active force in how children grow, learn, and participate in the world.
Shared Experiences
Siblings share a history that no one else in the world shares in quite the same way — the same family, the same home, the same particular version of childhood. The shared experiences that accumulate across years of living alongside one another create a bond of reference and understanding that is unlike any other relationship. These shared experiences are a form of participation in themselves, and they form the substrate of a relationship that often lasts a lifetime.
Learning Together
Siblings learn from and with one another in ways that are different from how they learn in any other relationship. Younger children observe older siblings and absorb enormous amounts about how the world works, how people communicate, and what is possible. Older children develop patience, flexibility, and a more nuanced understanding of people through the experience of navigating a relationship with someone younger. These are not accidental by-products of sibling life — they are some of its most important developmental gifts.
Emotional Connections
The emotional dimension of sibling relationships is rich and complex — encompassing deep affection, occasional frustration, fierce loyalty, and everything in between. This range is not a problem to be managed; it is the nature of close, genuine human connection. The experience of navigating real emotions in a real relationship with a sibling who is also navigating real emotions is one of the most important preparations for emotional life that childhood offers.
Family Participation
Siblings shape the texture of family participation in fundamental ways. They are present for the everyday moments — mealtimes, car journeys, weekend mornings, school holidays — that make up the majority of a child's family experience. They are companions in play, partners in adventure, and witnesses to one another's daily lives. A family's participation in the world is shaped not just by individual members but by the relationships between them, and sibling relationships are among the most significant of those.
Every Sibling Relationship Is Different
There is no single template for what a sibling relationship looks like or how it should work. The relationship between any two siblings is shaped by a unique combination of factors — some that are about who they each are, some that are about the family around them, and some that simply emerge from the particular chemistry of two specific people living a shared life.
Personality and temperament play a significant role. Two children with very similar personalities may clash regularly because they want the same things in the same space. Two children with very different personalities may complement one another in ways that neither would have predicted. Neither pattern is more or less healthy than the other — they are simply different expressions of how particular people relate to one another, and they each offer their own kinds of learning and connection.
Interests shape how siblings connect. Children who share a strong interest — in a particular game, a creative activity, a sport, a topic — have a ready-made context for connection that makes spending time together feel easy and natural. Children whose interests diverge significantly may need more intentional support to find the activities and experiences where their worlds can comfortably overlap. Both situations are common and workable, and neither defines the depth or quality of the relationship.
Age difference matters in ways that shift over time. The dynamic between a four-year-old and a seven-year-old is very different from the dynamic between the same two children at twelve and fifteen. Relationships that were difficult at one stage can become easier and richer at another. Relationships that were close and easy in childhood may become more complicated during adolescence. The relationship is not fixed — it is a living thing that continues to develop as both people do.
Different ways of connecting are all valid. Some sibling pairs are physically affectionate and communicative; others express their connection through proximity and shared activity without a great deal of explicit emotional expression. Some siblings are each other's closest confidants; others maintain a warm but more comfortable distance. The form the relationship takes is less important than the quality of what exists between the people within it.
Respecting individuality within the sibling relationship means resisting the urge to compare siblings to one another or to expect them to relate in ways that do not fit who they actually are. Each child has their own experience of the family and of the sibling relationship, and that experience deserves to be seen and taken seriously on its own terms.
Supporting Positive Sibling Relationships
Sibling relationships develop most naturally when families create the conditions for connection — time, opportunity, safety, and the kind of adult presence that supports without directing. These four approaches reflect what tends to help most in real family life.
Spending Time Together
The foundation of any sibling relationship is time — shared, unhurried time that is not organised around a task or a goal but simply around being together. This might be unstructured play, a shared activity that both children enjoy, or simply the ordinary companionship of being in the same space. Families do not need to engineer elaborate shared experiences; they need to protect the ordinary time in which relationships can develop naturally.
Respecting Individual Needs
Each sibling has their own needs, preferences, and ways of engaging — and supporting the sibling relationship means taking those individual needs seriously for every child, not only for the child with the most visible support requirements. A sibling who feels that their own needs are seen and valued is in a much better position to offer genuine, sustained support and connection than one whose experience is consistently subordinated to others in the family.
Encouraging Communication
Sibling relationships benefit from adults who help children develop the language and the permission to talk about their experience with one another — to say when something is hard, to ask for what they need, and to express affection as well as frustration. This does not require structured conversations or formal check-ins. It requires a family culture where honest, kind communication is modelled by the adults and made safe for the children.
Creating Shared Opportunities
Family activities that offer something genuinely engaging for all the children involved — not just the child who requires the most adaptation — create the shared experiences that sibling relationships are built on. When activities are chosen with all siblings in mind, everyone participates with investment and enjoyment, and the shared experience belongs to all of them equally. These moments of genuine shared participation are among the most important things families can create.
Common Challenges Families May Experience
Every family that includes siblings encounters challenges — moments of friction, periods of imbalance, and situations where the needs of one child are in tension with the needs of another. These experiences are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are part of the ordinary, complicated reality of raising more than one child in the same household.
Changes in Family Routines
When one child in a family has additional appointments, therapy sessions, or support needs that require time and attention from parents, the rhythms of family life shift — sometimes significantly. Other children in the family may notice these shifts and have their own feelings about them. Acknowledging this honestly, rather than expecting siblings to accept changes without comment, is more respectful of their real experience and more likely to preserve their sense of security within the family.
Different Needs Among Siblings
Children have different needs, and those needs change over time. When siblings have significantly different needs — whether related to development, health, learning, or emotional wellbeing — families must make ongoing decisions about how to allocate time, energy, and attention in ways that are fair to everyone. There is rarely a perfect answer to these questions, and the best a family can do is stay attentive, stay communicative, and adjust when they notice that the balance has shifted too far in one direction.
Feelings of Frustration
Siblings sometimes feel frustrated — with one another, with the family situation, with the demands that are placed on them, or with the ways in which their own needs sometimes feel less visible than someone else's. This frustration is valid, and it deserves to be named and received without judgement. A child who can say “I feel frustrated about this” to a parent who receives it calmly is in a much better position than one who learns that this feeling is unwelcome and finds other, less constructive ways to express it.
Feelings of Worry
Children who have a sibling with additional needs sometimes develop their own worries — about their sibling's wellbeing, about what the future holds, about whether they are allowed to need things too. These worries may not always be expressed directly, and parents may not always know they are present. Creating regular, low-pressure opportunities for all children in the family to share what is on their mind — and responding to what they share with honesty, warmth, and age-appropriate information — goes a long way toward preventing worry from growing in silence.
Balancing Family Time
Finding the balance between meeting individual needs and creating shared family experiences is an ongoing challenge for any family, and one that is particularly complex when children have different requirements. There is no formula that works for everyone, and the balance that feels right will shift over time. What remains constant is the value of staying attentive — noticing when one child has been consistently in the background, when the shared family time has dwindled, or when a particular sibling's individual needs have not been attended to in a while — and making small corrections as those needs become visible.
Supporting Participation for the Whole Family
Participation in family life is not something that happens to individuals independently of one another — it happens in relationship, in shared space and shared activity and shared experience. Supporting participation for the whole family means looking at what the family does together, and creating conditions where all family members — including all siblings — have genuine access to the experiences that matter.
Family Activities
Activities that the whole family can engage in — however differently each member engages — create shared memories and reinforce the sense that every family member belongs equally to the family's story. These do not need to be elaborate or expensive. A regular walk, a family game, a cooking project, an evening routine that brings everyone together — these ordinary repeated experiences are the fabric of family life. The most important quality they need to have is that everyone in the family can be genuinely present in them.
Community Participation
The activities a family participates in together in the wider community — sports, cultural events, faith communities, neighbourhood life — extend the sense of belonging beyond the home and offer siblings shared experiences of being part of something larger. When these community activities are accessible to all family members, they become part of the shared story that siblings carry with them into adulthood. When particular family members are consistently unable to access them, the gap in shared experience can become a gap in shared identity.
School Involvement
Siblings often share school communities — sometimes the same school, sometimes nearby schools with overlapping networks. Supporting each child's school participation, and being attentive to how siblings experience one another's school lives, is part of supporting the sibling relationship. A sibling who feels proud of their brother or sister at school, or who is warmly connected to that school community, has a different relationship with their sibling's education than one who feels peripheral to it or confused about what it involves.
Leisure Opportunities
Each child in a family needs their own leisure opportunities — activities they pursue for their own enjoyment and development, independently of the family's shared schedule. When siblings each have access to activities they love, they bring something of their own back into the family relationship — a different set of experiences, skills, and enthusiasms that can become the basis for new kinds of connection. Individual flourishing and shared family life are not in competition; they feed one another.
Creating Opportunities for Connection
Connection between siblings does not always happen spontaneously. Sometimes it needs to be gently facilitated — a shared activity that both children can access, a private ritual between two siblings, a regular moment of one-to-one time that belongs to just the two of them. Families who think deliberately about creating these opportunities — rather than assuming connection will develop without intentional support — tend to see sibling relationships that are richer and more resilient over time.
Recognising Sibling Strengths
Siblings who grow up alongside a brother or sister with additional needs often develop capacities that are worth recognising explicitly — not as compensation for difficulty, but as genuine strengths that have been built through the particular experience of their family life. These are not things that have been required of them; they are things that have grown in them. Naming them matters.
Empathy
Children who have grown up alongside a sibling with different needs often develop a finely tuned capacity for noticing and responding to how others are feeling. They have had regular, real practice in attending to someone whose experience may be different from their own, and in adapting their behaviour in response. This is not something they have been taught as much as something they have lived — and it is a genuine and valuable capacity that will serve them well throughout their lives.
Problem-Solving
Navigating the complexity of a family life that includes children with different needs — figuring out how to play together when the rules need adapting, how to communicate in ways that work for everyone, how to manage situations that do not have easy answers — develops a practical creativity and problem-solving capacity that is genuinely useful. Siblings who have practised this kind of lateral thinking from an early age often bring it to other challenging situations with a confidence and resourcefulness that is not always easily explained by their age.
Creativity
Finding ways to connect, to play, and to share experiences with someone who may engage with the world differently requires genuine creativity. Siblings who have developed this capacity — who have learned to find the activities and approaches that work for both of them, who have invented their own games and their own ways of being together — have been doing some of the most imaginative thinking that childhood allows. That creativity does not stay in the family; it travels with them.
Flexibility
Growing up in a family where routines sometimes change, where plans need to be adapted, and where flexibility is regularly required develops a genuine ease with the unexpected. Siblings who have practised adjusting without resentment, waiting without complaint, and going with a changed plan without losing their own equilibrium have developed a capacity for adaptability that is genuinely difficult to teach and genuinely valuable to have.
Relationships
Perhaps most significantly, siblings who have grown up in close relationship with someone who is different from them — and who have done so in an environment where difference is treated with respect and curiosity rather than avoidance — often bring an unusual quality of openness to the relationships they form throughout their lives. They are more likely to seek out diverse friendships, more comfortable with difference, and more practised in the patient, curious, generous quality of attention that good relationships require. These are gifts that begin at home.
The Soul Movers Perspective on Supporting Siblings
At Soul Movers, we understand siblings as important participation partners — not peripheral figures in a family's story, but central ones. When we work with a child and their family, we are aware that every other child in that family is also part of the picture. Their experiences, their needs, and their relationships with the child we are supporting all matter, and they all shape the context in which our work takes place.
Family participation includes all family members. When we think about what participation looks like for a child we are working with, we try to think about what that participation looks like within the family as a whole — in the shared activities, the sibling relationships, and the everyday life of the household. Goals that support a child's participation in family life are goals that serve the whole family, not just the individual.
Physiotherapy and occupational therapy can support participation within real family life — including the activities, routines, and relationships that siblings share. This might mean thinking about how a therapy goal connects to a sibling activity, or how a home program can be structured in a way that does not consistently exclude other children in the family. Good therapy planning takes the whole family into account.
Strong relationships support belonging and wellbeing — for every child in a family, not only the one receiving the most explicit support. The sibling relationship is one of the most enduring and significant relationships a person will ever have, and investing in it — in whatever way fits this particular family and these particular children — is investing in something that will carry forward long after the formal support has ended.
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