Sibling Play in the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS)

Investigating the importance of sibling play and how it can be nurtured to support child development.

Siblings provide the main source of companionship early in childhood, and for many, they will be a child’s first and most regular playmate with whom they share games of make-believe, joke, tease, and quarrel.

Siblings’ high familiarity with one another and the involuntary nature of their relationship mean that their interactions are often uninhibited and affectively charged, making the sibling relationship a rich training ground for stimulating awareness of thoughts and feelings (Paine et al., 2025).

Many studies have shown that children who have a sibling tend to show advanced understanding of others’ mental states.

Project aims

Our current investigations focus on understanding different features of sibling play, including:

how siblings share humour in their play
conflict and cooperation between siblings as they play
siblings’ engagement in pretend play
how siblings discuss mental states (e.g., thoughts and feelings) during play
siblings’ emotional expressivity during play

Sibling relationships are often overlooked in developmental research. Our goal is to shine a light on the importance of sibling play and develop a new understanding of how sibling play can be nurtured to support child development.

Funding

In our research, we are harnessing data from the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), which was originally funded by the Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Foundation and the Waterloo Foundation.

The CCDS is a prospective longitudinal cohort study of a community sample of families in Wales, where data collection took place in pregnancy (Wave 1) and when firstborns were 6, 12, 22, 33 months, and 6.5 years old (Waves 2 – 6, respectively).

See Humour and Laughter with Siblings as a Window to Social Understanding for our latest findings.

Contacts

This project is in collaboration with Dr Salim Hashmi from King’s College London and Dr Nina Howe from Concordia University.

This research is supported by postgraduate students, including Rachel Taylor (DClin), Menna Burmingham, Dhanvee Salwan, Tahsina Tasnim, and Georgia Marklew (MSc Children’s Psychological Conditions).