Sibling rivalry.  The very phrase conjures up images of children fighting for the front seat, or teens shouting “I always knew she was your favourite”. With countless examples, from Cain and Abel to the Milibands, sibling rivalry is portrayed as natural, expected. Yet how healthy is sibling rivalry when it continues post-childhood?
As the eldest of four sisters, such competition is a daily conversation. My mother loves to bring out the home video showing my much sweeter-looking sister doing a funny little dance and on realising my parents’ amusement, it then captures me trying to embarrassingly copy her. While not a treasured memory, this competitiveness is universal. In 1941 David Levy defined this behaviour as sibling rivalry, “the aggressive response to the new baby is so typical that it is safe to say it is a common feature of family life.”
Ed's decision to contest David’s bid to lead the Labour Party, stirred a debate amongst my family. Was his running for labour candidacy just a blatant case of sibling rivalry? An “if he has it, I want it too” compulsion? This view is contradicted by Ed, who stated that “the biggest obstacle to me standing was that undoubtedly I knew David would be against me. [But I can’t] really say I’m not going to stand, just because my brother is standing”.
By winning, Ed Miliband usurped the older generation and defied the tradition that extends from the playground to the throne. My sister, Tamara, disagrees with this. “Just because David is the elder, why does that mean he gets to do everything first? It’s great that the second child came out on top for once.” This is evidently biased by Tamara’s position as the second child, but it does make some sense. Just because Ed is four years David’s junior, does not mean he has to stay in the shadows behind his brother for the rest of his life. Despite this, even in his moment of victory, Ed was reportedly troubled and asking his campaign manager, Sadiq Khan, “What have I done to David?” It seems that even at the forefront of national politics, competition between siblings has not faded with age or maturity.
Sibling rivalry in adults is common. A recent story in Psychology Today suggests that more than a third of grown-ups have a rivalrous or distant relationship with their brothers or sisters due to unresolved childhood rivalry. So does this mean once leaving home for University, sibling rivalry is still going to be a problem? Are University admissions, degree results and extra-curricular activities just more subjects to compete about?
Various famous figures have gone to the same Universities as their siblings: Gordon, John and Andrew Brown (Edinburgh), John, Robert and Edward Kennedy (Harvard) and the two Milibands (Corpus Christi College, Oxford), to name just a few. This  trend seems eerily reminiscent of the childhood positional conflict of the elder child demanding the younger child to “stop copying me”.  Alexander Lewis, a University of Edinburgh student whose brother also recently joined, contests that sibling rivalry at University is still an issue. “Our robust and still hotly contested sibling rivalry has, as far as I can tell, pushed me towards the contented indolence and laurel-resting of the eldest son and my brother to increasingly obnoxious feats of academic success. Definitely a good thing.”
This demonstrates the idea that sibling rivalry, in its mildest forms, can even be beneficial. Positive and productive competition can drive siblings to take on new challenges. Mayli, a Psychology student at Edinburgh agrees: “People learn so much from their siblings. How to respect others, how to defend themselves, how to argue. Healthy competition can be positive for one’s social development and push siblings later on in life. Experts also believe sibling arguments can represent love.”
Yet while a little light-hearted bickering may be advantageous, sibling relationships can also deteriorate post-childhood. Twins Chris and Vincent Young said sibling rivalry “drove them to Universities at separate ends of the UK.” Chris, a University of Edinburgh student, explains that “we were fed up of being compared by everyone. Competing to be better than each other also became tedious. Relationships were a big problem as well. We could go for the same girl; or if a girl fancied me, I’d wonder why she didn’t fancy Vincent”.  Their childhood was described as a “tournament, which we regress to when we see each other again.” This is a common feature of adult sibling rivalry, with old conflicts reducing adults to their childhood roles that never worked in the first place. Psychology Today supports this idea, stating that “siblings are locked into old patterns which prevent them from seeing one another in a different light”.
These “old patterns” are caused by a plethora of factors. Sigmund Freud saw sibling rivalry as an extension of the Oedipius complex, with brothers in competition for their mother’s attention and sisters for their father’s. Alexander agrees that parental attention and the strive for significance plays a principal role: “in our scrappy pre-pubescent years we might as well have been rival princes vying for their ailing father’s throne.”
Age order and sibling genders has also been found to have a great impact on the extent that siblings argue. Studies have shown that of the three sibling pairs, sister/sister pairs are the closest and brother/brother pairs are the most rivalrous. Edinburgh student Darragh Kellam agrees with this: “there is no competition between me and my three younger brothers, because we’re just way too different to compete. However between those three, it is a different matter all together.” Different sibling positions in the family have also been found to have an effect. The psychologist Alfred Adler pioneered the research between birth order and personality. He found that first-born children have a greater chance of developing inferiority issues due to the birth of a later sibling. The removal of the focal attention from them can thus cause intense feelings of rivalry towards the later-born.
However, sibling relationships are not pre-determined and key events can dramatically change the dynamics. Adult sibling rivalry may be common, but Psychology Today also found that 80 percent of siblings over 60 enjoyed close ties with their brothers and sisters. Does this mean we might outgrow sibling rivalry eventually? Maybe, maybe not, but now that you're an adult just try to not run home crying to mummy.