The most long‎-lasting and enduring relationship an individual can develop is with a sibling‎.‎ Considering the closeness in age and early association of siblings‎,‎ they can bond for a lifetime‎.‎ Psychologists are beginning to appreciate the sibling link and its dynamic role in a child‎'‎s social development‎.‎ Beyond the mother‎-child dyad‎,‎ sibling associations are now attributed with determining cognitive faculties‎,‎ emotional balance‎,‎ self‎-sufficiency‎,‎ and peer interactions‎.‎ Clarifying the complex processes of these relationships and the benefit of parental involvement‎,‎ Avidan Milevsky provides a foundational text for a growing area of study‎.‎ Deploying personal narrative‎,‎ theoretical examinations‎,‎ and empirical data‎,‎ he unravels the intricacies of the sibling exchange and their function in overall family structures‎.‎ He identifies the factors that make such bonds successful ‎(‎or harmful‎)‎ and the influence of parents in shaping these outcomes‎.‎ He also evaluates the compensatory possibilities of the sibling bond when faced with the absence of a parent or friend‎.‎ Variables such as age‎,‎ birth order‎,‎ gender‎,‎ and family size are tremendous considerations‎,‎ and parents hoping to enhance the sibling bond gain immensely from understanding these predictors‎.‎ Milevsky shows practitioners how to educate parents and help them apply their knowledge in practice‎.‎ He particularly supplies crucial perspective on ‎"‎deidentification‎,‎‎"‎ or conscious differentiation‎,‎ in which parents encourage different life paths to minimize sibling comparison and competition‎.‎ A major tool for clinicians‎,‎ social service providers‎,‎ and educators‎,‎ this book clarifies the next frontier in child development research‎.‎