Parental experiences and witnessing of physical and emotional sibling violence: Associations with community type, adverse childhood events, and attitudes on sibling relationships

AbstractAbstractMinimal research has been conducted examining the intergenerational connections of physical and emotional sibling violence (SV), specifically aspects from parents’ childhoods that may influence the occurrence of violent behaviors between siblings. Furthermore, research examining parental attitudes on sibling relationships and how these relate to the occurrence of SV between their children remain under-examined in the literature. This exploratory study examines the influence of community type, adverse childhood events (ACEs), parental experiences of SV in their childhood as well as parental attitudes about sibling relationships on parent-witnessed SV between their children. Results for the sample included indicate that parental ACEs, parental experiences of SV in childhood, parent-witnessed SV in their children and attitudes on sibling relationships are related. Differences in community types for ACEs, parental experiences of SV in childhood, parents-witnessed SV in their children, and parental attitudes on sibling relationships were also found. In the regression models, ACEs predicted both parental experiences of SV in childhood and parent-witnessed SV between their children. Finally, along with parental ACEs, parental attitudes on agonism in sibling relationships as well as parental experiences of SV in childhood predicted those parent-witnessed SV between their children. Implications of the findings for practice and future research are discussed.Keywords: ACEscommunity typeintergenerationalsibling relationshipssibling violence Availability of dataDue to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data are not available.