Older siblings - their role and influence on the development of their younger siblings

When analyzing the development of children and adolescents, the most attention is usually paid to parents. Other older members of a family, however, have an important role, too. The crucial, yet often neglected person (at least in Czech literature), impacting the development of an individual, is his or her older sibling. The subject of the theoretical part of this thesis is to clarify the specifics of a sibling relationship as well as to describe the role and the sphere of influence of the older sibling considering all the factors that come into the relationship between two siblings. The empirical part consists of the description of the research project and the results of the research, whose aim is to discover the specifics of a sibling relationship with a particular focus on the upbringing styles of the older sibling; to find differences between the upbringing methods of parents and the upbringing methods of older siblings; and to find out to what extent the gender and the age difference between siblings determines their mutual relationship. The secondary aim is to create a questionnaire for determining the role of an older sibling. My rigorous work is based on the diploma thesis, which it expands mainly in the empirical part. Keywords: siblings, sibling relationships, the role of a sibling,..