Sibling Experiences of Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Scoping Review

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events during childhood known to affect health and wellbeing across the life-span. The purpose of this scoping review was to understand what we currently know about the experiences of siblings living with ACEs. Sibling relationships are unique, and for some the most enduring we experience. These relationships can be categorised by love and warmth, however, can also be a point of escalating conflict and problems. This scoping review was conducted following Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) methodological framework, complemented by the PAGER framework (Bradbury-Jones et al , 2021), offering a structured approach to the review’s analysis and reporting through presenting the P atterns, A dvances, G aps, and E vidence for practice and R esearch. In June 2020 we searched 12 databases, with 11,469 results. Articles were screened for eligibility by the review team leaving a total of 148 articles meeting the inclusion criteria. Findings highlighted five main patterns: (1) the influence of birth order (older siblings shielding younger); (2) the influence of sibling relationships (lack of research exploring sibling types outside of biological siblings); (3) identifying siblings experiencing ACEs (when one sibling experiences adversity, it is likely that their other siblings also do, or experience vicariously); (4) siblings who cause harm (siblings harming other siblings is often normalised and minimised, especially by parents); (5) focus on individual ACEs (the majority of studies explore ACEs in isolation). Our findings suggest future research would benefit from an increase in theoretical understanding and exploration of different types of sibling relationships (full, step, half).