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SYDNEY: Only children make up for their lack of social skills in early childhood by the time they reach adolescence, American researchers have found.

Analysing 13,500 youths from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, they found only children were nominated as friends just as often as peers with siblings, indicating that only children do not enjoy less popularity in adolescence.

“Given that family sizes in industrialised societies have been getting smaller, more children will be growing up with fewer or no siblings. There has been concern that this may be detrimental to children's social development,” said co-author Donna Bobbitt-Zeher from The Ohio State University.

Siblings good for nothing

The bulk of social science research has previously found that siblings are of no particular benefit because they act like a competitor for access to the finite resources of parents such as time, attention and finances.

Due to this lack of competition, only children regularly outperform their peers in cognitive and performance tests.

Despite this, siblings were still thought to provide a benefit by aiding the development of social skills through early experiences of learning to understand other people’s emotions and how to resolve conflicts.

This was bolstered by a study in 2004 which found that only children had poorer social skills in kindergarten compared to their peers.

Overcoming early deficit in social skills

Bobbitt-Zeher and her colleague extended this earlier research into adolescence and found that by this age only children have had sufficient peer interactions at school to overcome their deficit in social skills exhibited in early childhood.

During this study students were asked to name five male and five female friends in their cohort and these peer evaluations were used as a marker of popularity and social skills.

Their results were reported in a paper presented by the researchers this week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Small families, small effects

When evaluations were compiled and compared to sibling measures from in-home interviews, adolescents with no siblings had around the same number of friends as those with at least one sibling, indicating similar levels of social skills.