Chinese Parents' Marital and Coparenting Relationships, Parental Differential Treatment of Siblings, and Adolescents' Sibling Relationships

Parents' differential treatment of siblings has been understudied among sibling research in Chinese societies where the government ended its one-child policy. This study, using a three-wave longitudinal design, explored the associations among parents' marital and coparenting relationships, parental differential treatment of siblings, and adolescents' sibling relationships within a theoretical framework of a developmental cascade model of family influence. Adolescents (M-age = 12.88 years, SD = 0.76 at Time 1; 51.2% girls) and their mothers from 260 families in China participated in this research (first data collection in January 2018). Mothers completed questionnaires that assessed marital and coparenting relationship quality, and adolescents completed questionnaires that assessed their perceptions of parental differential treatment as well as sibling intimacy and conflict. The results, based on path analyses, revealed that marital satisfaction at Time 1 was positively associated with coparenting support at Time 2. Coparenting support at Time 2 was negatively associated with adolescents' perception of parental differential treatment at Time 3. Parental differential treatment at Time 3 was negatively associated with sibling intimacy at Time 3 but positively associated with sibling conflict at Time 3. These results are consistent with the developmental cascade hypothesis in that parent-parent subsystems influenced parental differential treatment of siblings as a parent-child subsystem, which in turn spilled over to create negative family processes that exacerbated adolescents' sibling subsystem quality.