040: Only children: Are they as bad as advertised?

Today’s episode comes to us as a result of a listener named Sylvia who wrote to me saying she and her partner don’t want another child but are worried about the potential impact on their daughter of growing up without siblings.  But why would there be a potential impact? Turns out there’s a slew of information in the popular press about how only children grow up with no way to learn social skills, which makes them simply awful to be around.  And everybody agrees – from parents of multiples and children who grew up with siblings, to parents of only children and even only children themselves – that only children are more selfish and not as nice to spend time with as children who grew up with siblings. No wonder Sylvia is worried! Personally I don’t have this problem; my own selfishness about not wanting a second child has overridden the issue of growing up without siblings to the extent that I had actually never considered it a potential problem until I received the question.  But having pondered it and found that there is some research on it, I decided the time was ripe to find out whether only children really are as awful as popular wisdom says they are and, if so, what I could do about it before it’s too late! Listen up, my friends.  Will I be vindicated, or will I throw away that pack of birth control pills before the end of the episode?   References Bohannon, E.W. (1896). A study of peculiar and exceptional children. Pedagogical Seminary 4(1), 3-60. Falbo, T. (2012). Only children: An updated review. The Journal of Individual Psychology 68(1), 38-49. Fenton, N. (1928). The only child. Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology 35, 546-556. Mancillas, A. (2006). Challenging the stereotypes about only children: A review of the literature and implications for practice. Journal of Counseling and Development 84(3), 268-275. McKibben, B. (1998). Maybe one. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Nachman, P., & Thompson, A. (1997). You and your only child: The joys, myths, and challenges of raising an only child. New York, NY: Skylight. Newman, S. (2001). Parenting an only child: The joys and challenges of raising your one and only. New York, NY: Broadway. Polit, D.F., Nuttall, R.L., & Nuttall, E.V. (1980). The only child grows up: A look at some characteristics of adult only children. Family Relations 29(1), 99-106. Roberts, L., & Blanton, P. (2001). “I always knew mom and dad loved me best”: Experiences of only children. Journal of Individual Psychology 21, 155-160. Sandler, L. (2013). One and only: The freedom of having an only child, and the joy of being one. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Simon, R.W. (2008). The joys of parenthood, reconsidered. Contexts 7(2), 40-45.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we get going with the show today I wanted to take a minute to thank those of you who have been so generous with your time and money over the last couple of weeks.  Several of you have been kind enough to offer advice based on your personal expertise that really helped me to figure out the direction for the show, as well as how to reach some more listeners.  And a few of you have gone over to yourparentingmojo.com/support to offer either a one-time or an ongoing donation to support the costs involved with running the show. One awesome listener works for Adobe and used a discount code to get a cheap subscription to the editing software that I use and then donated the remaining amount, so I got a year of free access to the editing software – that is certainly a huge help.  Another listener sent a cool hundred bucks and when I wrote to say ‘thanks’ (as I do to everyone who sends a donation) she responded (and I do have her permission to share this with you):   You’re welcome…I listen when I can (sporadically)…usually while commuting. I always enjoy it. Honestly, though, the donation was almost entirely for the pleasure of watching my mother-in-law almost pass out when my daughter told her that the carseat buckle was “hurting her vulva.”    (I love her, but she’s quite proper and inhibited about some things.)  I was able to point to your episode on sex and walk her through the benefits of using accurate anatomical labels. She appeared to get it.  (And even if not, she now has something to think about…and I got a good chuckle.).   So whatever it is you get out of the show, I’m glad you’re along with me for the ride.  If you feel like contributing then awesome!  Thanks so much.  And even if you don’t, but you have a question or just want to say ‘hi,’ you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com as well.  I love hearing from you all.     Today’s episode is probably one I should have done a long time ago, but it was actually a question from a listener that prompted it.  Sylvia wrote to me and said “Hi – I very much enjoy your podcast.  I’m wondering if you can do an episode on the importance of siblings (or not).  We don’t want another child but are worried about the potential impact on our daughter of growing up without siblings.” Now I don’t think it’s any secret around here that I’m not planning on having any more children, although we do have some friends who just announced their second pregnancy and I’ll say for a few minutes I did wonder what it would be like to think about having a second child.  But then I thought about an interview that I’m preparing for with Sara Dean of the Shameless Mom podcast (which may well be live by the time this episode goes live).  At the end of each interview she asks several rapid-fire questions, one of which is “what superpower would you grant moms?” And the best one I could think of was the power to experience time in a different way so that instead of having to look back on those early days with a baby and remember what they were like, we could actually experience them again.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  And at the same time, wouldn’t it just be the best birth control if we could also experience the day four mama meltdown and the wake-ups every two hours throughout the night again? I never thought I’d have one child in the first place; I was quite happy to be childless.  I just didn’t have that urge that I’m told many women have that just makes them *want* children, but my husband actually did have it so I ended up having our daughter because I didn’t want to be responsible for the biggest disappointment of his life.  So far I’d say parenthood has exceeded my expectations, largely because I got a pretty easygoing kid who isn’t at all difficult to love.  But there’s really just no way that I can have a second one; I’m not at all ashamed to say that I meet one of the stereotypes of the parents of a single child – I’m too selfish to have another one.  I spent ten days hiking around Mont Blanc when my daughter was eight weeks old; it was a big part of how I reconciled my previous life with being a parent.  But how on earth would I do that with a three year old in tow?  How would I do pretty much anything except *be a parent?*  So the reason I hadn’t even thought of doing an episode on the single child was because mine was already committed to being a single child and I didn’t really figure there was a whole lot different about parenting a single child than more than one.  But when Sylvia’s question came through I realized that I hadn’t really given it the attention it probably deserves, so I have not one but two episodes coming up for you, no matter on which side of this fence you sit.  Today’s episode will focus on parenting an only child, and we’ll have one coming up in the near future on the relationships between siblings and how they impact a child’s development. So parenting single children used to be a pretty strange thing.  Large families have been common for hundreds of years mostly because of the amount of work that needed to be done on a farm – and the infant mortality rate was so high that parents *had* to keep having children just to make sure they would have enough children to keep the land producing food.  Even once western society was well into the industrial age, it was almost like we just had a habit of producing large families that we couldn’t get out of, and this was supported by a variety of pieces of advice from the popular press up to neuropsychiatrists, who had a poor opinion of only children.  I should say that in this episode I’m going to draw on three books on only children (as well as the studies they cite), and primary among these is one called “One and Only” by Lauren Sandler.  It’s very well written and seems to be fairly well sourced, although it’s hard to tell for sure because Ms. Sandler isn’t very good at citing those sources.  Sometimes she does actually describe a particular study and it’s authors well enough for me to be able to find it, but often she just makes vague mention of something like a Gallup Poll, which doesn’t give me anywhere near enough information to find it and verify that it says what she says it says.  Having come pretty close to getting burned on that front in episode 18 on the book “The Spiritual Child,” where the author did cite her sources which enabled me to find that several of them were seriously misrepresented in her...