
A crowded house may not be the best for the mental health of a family’s kids, a new study has found. Teens from larger families tend to have poorer mental health than those with fewer siblings, according to a large-scale analysis of children in the United States and China. In the United States, children with no or one sibling had the best mental health, while in China well-being was best among only children, says the report published Jan. 9 in the Journal of Family Issues. Having older siblings and siblings closely spaced in age tended to have the worst impact on kids’ mental health, the U.S. data revealed. The strongest negative associations with mental health were observed among siblings born within a year of each other, results show. The results likely are best explained by “resource dilution,” said lead researcher Doug Downey, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University. “If you think of parental resources like a pie, one child means that they get all the pie — all the attention and resources of the parents,” Downey said in a university news release. “But when you add more siblings, each child gets fewer resources and attention from the parents, and that may have an impact on their mental health.” That explanation is given more weight by the fact that closely spaced siblings have the… read on > read on >