My husband and I have one child. It's not something I make a fuss over because, to be honest, we don't have big reasons—philosophical, environmental, medical—for holding the line at one kid. Also, when you make the decision not to do something, the story's a little thin and the scenes behind that decision feel quiet, personal, and, well, slight.
There's me, primping in front of the mirror in the hospital room, preparing to take my newborn son home. I'm frustrated. There will be pictures and my hair looks totally stupid. It needs to be fluffier, thicker, something. At this moment, my brain won't register the puffy dough face of pre-eclampsia or the inscrutable sunken raisins that are my eyes. It won't register this and it doesn't take note of the how high my blood pressure got and how it won't come back down. It's all about the hair.
There is us: My husband is running the bath water for Caleb. I hear preschooler feet running around upstairs, grown-up feet corralling said preschooler into the bathroom. Me, I'm reading a magazine, my legs slung over the armchair, a cup of hot tea on the low table next to me, refueling from a nice but long afternoon with the boy at the park. If we had another kid, I realize, I couldn't be doing this at this moment.
And later: There's a potential misfire with the birth control, and I drive to the drug store, the whole way there thinking that, hey, maybe I can pry my mind open to this. The newborn nuzzling! The tiny diapered butt! The crazy infant giggle! But I drive home, and all that's going through my mind is: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. I take the test. No.
And that, I thought, was it, in terms of drama. When you have just the one—and that's how I've always said it, "just the one," in a tone of let's-take-this-no-further—life tends to progress linearly: no Return of the First Day of Kindergarten, no Potty Training, Part II.
It's only recently, now that my baby is eight years old, that people have started feeling more certain that Caleb is, in fact, an only child. Not that he doesn't have any siblings yet. He doesn't have any siblings. And this itself has brought about a surprising new drama that's evident when people tell us things like He doesn't seem like an only child or You can tell he's an only child or That's because he's an only child.
By having an only child, did I unintentionally create an entirely different sort of person of my son? Are my husband and I different sorts of parents for the experience? Will our boy face anything in life that other people, someone's sister or brother, won't face? As his parents, will we?
Clearly, my family's not in a unique situation here. In the past thirty years, the number of only-children families has almost doubled. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn't keep stats on how these only-child families came to be—by choice or by circumstance—but it does keep records on how many children women in the U.S. have given birth to. Looking at women ages 40-44 (considered to be, I assume, the end of the line of the birthing years), the Census found that in 1976, 9.6% of these women had one child. In 2004, 17.4% of American women this age had just the one. The numbers, of course, don't take into account adoption or the occasional woman who gives birth at forty-five or later, but it's clear that the only child is not as rare a creature as she used to be.
Not rare, and according to research over the past decades, not as strange as people once thought either. The stereotype of the selfish, weird, little only child has haunted onlies for a long time. Bill McKibben, in his 1998 book Maybe One, traces the American incarnation of the stereotype to an 1896 study by the pioneer of child development and psychology G. Stanley Hall titled "A Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children." (Other sorts of peculiar and exceptional children Hall spotlighted include those who are "dainty," "loquacious," "ugly," and "nervous.") In 1972, a public opinion poll (quoted by the late Judith Blake, a family size sociologist) found that 72% of white Americans saw only children as "disadvantaged," and "more unsociable and aggressive." In American culture, only children have spanned the spectrum from peculiar (Harriet the Spy, the Brady Bunch's cousin Oliver) to the exceptional (Nancy Drew, Chelsea Clinton). Exceptional isn't bad. But it's not normal either.
I called Toni Falbo, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas, who's the preeminent researcher on only children. When I asked her if only children were different from other people, she sounded a little exasperated, as if I were a figure from the past who might next ask about the dainty or the loquacious. "Well, they're not that distinctive," she said. "I mean, they're homo sapiens.
"When you work in social science, you look at variation around the mean. And when you look at the scores of only children, they're pretty much in the pack in terms of common measures like height/weight and GPA," Falbo continued. "Only children are by and large like other people."
They do have a slight advantage in some areas over their siblinged peers (only children are slightly higher achieving and have slightly higher self esteem) but these are functions, Falbo claims, of the parents being able to focus more attention and resources on their one child.
Happily, the stereotypes seem to be loosening their hold, according to Carolyn White, editor of Only Child, a web-based magazine that she and husband founded in 1996. Back then, her family had felt pretty isolated and stereotyped. "Our intention [in starting Only Child] was to normalize having an only child or being an only child," she says. Their only daughter is now twenty-six, and, White points out, "In her generation, twenty percent are only children." They don't seem to be any more selfish, maladjusted, or lonely than anyone else, she notes. One thing that's changed from her early days of editing Only Child? Now most kids go to preschool and are socialized long before kindergarten: "From a very early age, they learn how to resolve conflict, learn how to be conciliatory, and learn how to share."
Toni Falbo has studied only children in China, which implemented a one-child policy in 1979 and, as a result, has more only children than anywhere else in the world. In 1990, Falbo studied schoolchildren who were born just before and just after the policy went into place—only children and those with siblings. They measured the kids physically, academically, and through a questionnaire about the child filled out by his parents, his teachers, his peers, and the child himself. "By and large, only children's advantages exist [in China] similar to the West," Falbo told me. "They do better in school. In their personalities and so on, they're like other people. The differences are certainly not of the magnitude to support the 'little emperor' stereotype."
In fact, Falbo looked specifically at the little emperor stereotype—the Chinese only child who's fat, bratty, badly behaved, and does not play well with others—and found it didn't stand up. Chinese parents of only children were more likely to "push," she found, though not "indulge." In those questionnaires, the parents of only children tended to give their children lower scores [evaluate their kids [lower] more critically?] than the teachers, peers, and the kids themselves did. A Chinese only child, Falbo told me, was more likely to get piano lessons or English lessons than a child with siblings. "But they're not more likely to get their way."
Which brings us to the parents of only children.
For better or worse—but, okay, for better—I tend to not be on the receiving end of harangues about my family size. My parents and in-laws have not said word one about our family size, and strangers don't approach me about it, either.
But I have friends—who were, in fact, trying without luck for a second child—who tell me they were often accosted with the painful Look, she needs a sibling! and Better get working on number two! when their daughter reached toddlerhood. My sister—also a mother of one—was once informed by another mother attending a soccer game that she wasn't a real mother until she had another. I've heard of women dreading family holiday gatherings; certain relatives seem to believe that if a grandparent just campaigns enough, a baby will be born. Even though I haven't really experienced it, there is such a thing as pressure to have two.
There is also such a thing, though, as small talk, and lately I've been listening carefully when people ask me if Caleb is my only child. Is it small talk? Or something else? And when I reveal the answer, is there some judgment there, too—a stereotype of the parent of the only child?
Back in the day—the day being before good birth control—people assumed that if a married woman had just the one, it wasn't for lack of trying. Secondary infertility was the de facto, if unsaid, explanation. These days, in polite company, I suspect there are two explanations battling for primacy in the is-he-your-only questioner's mind. Secondary infertility is still a possible explanation, but there's something else, something suspect, about a mother who stops at one.
"The stereotype stems from something deep down inside," Toni Falbo told me. "If you have only one, that one might die." She points out that although child mortality is down in the West, a child has represented many things for a long time, above and beyond a companion for the parent: help with work, a reassurance that she won't starve in old age, her very biological line. "In general, across the globe, people had a lot of children, but it wasn't really unusual for a parent to end up with nobody." Thomas Jefferson and wife, she pointed out, had many children, but only one made it to adulthood.
If there is a reptilian part of the brain that considers the evolutionary consequences of having just the one, the inner cavemen might well be assessing people like me with a sort of disbelief. Just the one, huh? Isn't that kind of arrogant? Reckless? Maybe a little stupid?
Still, Falbo maintains that unlike in China, most Western parents who have one kid do so by default. "On average, parents who have just one kid … they never planned it that way." Life happens. Couples split up. Careers mushroom. Money gets tight. The body doesn't do what you want it to. The urge for a second just never presents itself.
If you'd asked me when I was in college how many kids I would someday have, I would have told you two. (I also would have informed you that they would be girls and that they would look like me. See? I was insufferable and I have three siblings!) But at some point my husband and I made the active decision to have the one. Only Child's Carolyn White says that from what she knows from her readers, this probably means that I have a different only-child parenting experience than a parent who has had that decision made for her.
"People who can't [give birth to a sibling] feel more guilty," she told me. "And they blame themselves if they don't try everything [to provide a sibling]." When White was trying for her second, there wasn't the whole gamut of fertility treatments available that there is today, but she says she doesn't think she would have gone to great lengths. They didn't explore adoption. "After the third miscarriage, it was so enormously distressing. It was interfering with my relationships with my husband and child." White made peace with and seems to revel in the size of her family. But she says she gets thousands of letters and emails from readers with the theme of guilt: "They feel guilty because they think they're depriving [the child] of a special relationship."
In addition to editing Only Child, White has also written a parenting manual for parents of only children, The Seven Common Sins of Parenting an Only Child. According to White, this guilt—along with other factors like the simple fact of not having other children to turn your attention to—can bring child-rearing issues to a head. You have to be willing to let your only child fail, White says. You should to be careful not to overindulge, even if it's no trouble to you. You have to let go of the fear that your kid will hate you if you discipline him.
Wait, I said. This sounds a lot like what sociologist Sharon Hays has called "intensive mothering," the modern-day mothering ideal in which a woman loses herself in keeping track of playdates, library books, the baby's bowel movements: the minutia of childhood. Aren't these pitfalls that could befall anyone, even those with more than just the one?
"If you can be a helicopter parent with two," White told me, "you can land your helicopter on a kid's head when you have one."
And according to White, the stakes are heightened with an only child. In the nature/nurture balance, White stands firmly on the nurture end of the spectrum. When I ask her whether the stereotypes of only child were at all true, White says, "It's all about the parenting, not about the kid." In a bigger family, a child has more role models in her brothers and sisters, and, as a result, she says, "Things are more random." But in a one-child family, the parents are the front-and-center role models, and the parental influence on the child is more pure.
Falbo concurs, sort of. She tells me about the research on abusive parents that suggests that an only child gets the brunt of the abusive parent's abuse. With more children, she says, "There's at least someone else to take some of the punches." On the other hand, in multi-child families with abuse, often one child gets designated as the "whipping boy." And siblings, Falbo imagines, aren't of great comfort if you're the whipping boy. Still, she says, "An only child might suffer disproportionately."
I asked Falbo if it worked in reverse, or converse, or inverse. Does good parenting affect an only child more strongly than it affects a child with siblings? I didn't phrase the question intelligibly, but she offered this: "Parents of only children sometimes assume their parenting is causing their child to be a certain way. When people have more than one child, they realize that children come with their own baggage when they're born." Some kids are cheery, some more reserved, more rambunctious, more something. So, in the nature/nurture balance, I asked, parents of only children are … what? "You're more likely to ignore [nature] if you just have one kid," Falbo said.
Let me admit something here: I'm in a really bad position to receive Carolyn's White's message. I'm the oldest of four sisters and all of us have been, from the get-go, different from each other, and I don't think it's because of inter-sibling influence. I tend to put a goodly sized portion of my faith in nature; if not our DNA, then our individual human natures. The soul, if you will.
Also: I'm not a big fan of any idea that suggests my parenting is the make-or-break factor for my boy. Do it wrong and he's peculiar. Do it right and he's exceptional. That kind of pressure can make me crazy.
And yet even if I believe Falbo's research that only children are just normal, not peculiar, not exceptional, almost undistinguishable from people with siblings—and, truly, I don't doubt her findings—I still can't shake the feeling (prodded by the recurring Is he your only?) that there is something to the experience of being an only child that's different. It's certainly different from my own childhood, and I think that when people ask about our family size, the question—for all my blasé attitude—plunks at some chord in me.
What I'm asking, I think, is impossible. I would like to compare my son's only-child childhood with the childhood I know: my own siblinged one. What's it like to have the entire backseat of the car to yourself? Do you miss something when you don't spend a portion of your early years with one sister sharing your bicycle's banana seat, another balanced on the handlebars? What does the dynamic feel like when the grown-ups outnumber the kids? And, when you grow up, are spouses and cousins and friends sufficient? With whom do you laugh about the hand-me-down wrap-around skirt that fell down in a public place at each stop in the handing down? Who cares about your mother and father as much as you do?
I don't just want reported answers to these questions. If I did, I could ask my husband, who's an only child himself. (For record, he points out that he's always been an only child and doesn't know any different, although he believes it worked out for him just fine. Also, when he married me, he got three sisters-in-law.) I want to know, deep in my bones, beyond sociological measures, what both experiences—siblinged and not—are like.
(Let's ignore for the moment that I ask these questions as if the the sibling issue is the only variant here, which it is not. Caleb is growing up a generation after me. He's a boy. Our childhoods occurred in different regions of the country. We have different parents. We have different strengths, weaknesses, hair colors, tastes, hobbies, preferences for pizza toppings, favorite colors. We have different tolerances for scary movies, roller coasters, rodents, root vegetables, and the phrase "these days," the last of which sets the boy's teeth on edge. Let's stick with the sibling questions, shall we?)
I'm not the only one wondering, either.
Writers and editors Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller are both adult only children. They noticed that, as their friends got older and started families, there would come a point when they'd be approached for the inside scoop on only-hood. " 'You turned out okay …' " Siegel laughs. "We realized they were looking at us as some sort of test cases."
The pair put together an anthology of essays, due out at the end of December from Harmony Books, titled Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. In it, they attempt to answer the question, "Okay, but what's it like?" There isn't a clear answer even between the editors; Uviller thinks fondly of the experience and Siegel does not.
"When Deborah first suggested it," Uviller said, "I thought, 'Oh my God, what an only child thing to do!' " But she reports that the stereotypes of the only child—those self-centered, difficult people who are not used to sharing—didn't hold up, either in their partnership or their interactions with the twenty-one writers whose work they included. (The book has essays by Rebecca Walker, John Hodgman, Amy Richards, Kathryn Harrison, Teller, and others). It was tricky finding out which writers were in fact only children, but once they identified a few, those writers were helpful (read: not selfish) in rustling up other only children to contribute.
Even if the stereotypes aren't true, though, Siegel and Uviller assert that there is something different about being an only child. The writers may or may not have liked the experience, depending, but Siegel says that there are some "commonalities," like comfort with adults and having no "reality check"—no big sister to put you in your place. Uviller says, "I don't really see regret … " and Siegel adds, "But I think there's a lot of longing."
"We sometimes joke that this is an impossible book: there are no control studies," Uviller says. Some of the onlies have yearned for a sibling; others feel being an only child was a pretty sweet deal and even apologize to their kids for depriving them of the experience.
This longing, I think, maybe it's the flip side of what I'm also looking for: to simultaneously know all the different ways families can work.
Does being an only child make you different? Uviller and Siegel say yes. "All of the milestones you hit in life seem, at least from the outside, different—friendships, how you enter a relationship, the decision to have children," Uviller says. "It is a different experience when your parents are dying."
And that's an issue that gives me pause. "The issues of eldercare will come into play," Siegel says of the growing only child population. "The sandwich generation becomes even more sandwiched."
But she also points out that the only-child-with-the-aging-parents situation can go a lot of different ways. Looking at the twenty-one different essays about being an only child, Siegel concludes, "Your parents' attitudes about onliness can shape your attitude about onliness." Siegel reports in her essay of feeling herself sort of stunted in her ability to be a grown-up because, as she puts it, she was "loved only too well." She also points out that she's just one person, not a spokesmodel for onlies everywhere.
Uviller is at a crossroads, wondering how big her own family should be. "Having the first kid was an easy decision," she says. "I'm terrified I would screw up two. I love my first so much."
I know what Daphne Uviller's saying. There was a period in my life when I was actually open to the second child, specifically open to adopting a toddler. My husband and I went round and round talking about it in hushed voices after Caleb went to bed, and I spent a good while immersed in books with titles like Adopting the Hurt Child. I trolled the Internet for information and happened on the profile of a little boy, a "waiting child" in the foster care system. He had big brown eyes shaped like my son's and my father's name, a family name. He belongs with us, I thought with surprising, sudden conviction. I should be his mother. Then, after a week, the little boy disappeared from the site—a happy ending for him, I hoped—but with him went my sudden urge for two. Without his picture, I had trouble envisioning another person in the mix. I could only see Caleb and his reactions to the new situation. It would, I realize, at least start as a loss for everyone involved, including the unseen toddler and the known quantity that is my Caleb boy. And it is, of course, the losses that my Caleb boy would experience—of time, of attention, of the cutting of slack—that made the door click shut and stay shut.
It's true … but on the other hand, how precious is this? Haven't parents been transforming their only child into a siblinged one since, oh, the beginning of time?
So here's the other new drama that, I'm sorry to say, takes place entirely in my head: the battling identifications I feel for only-child families (the one I helped make) and for bigger families (the one I'm from). When I read a book or listen to an interviewee talk about how special and unique only children are, part of me thinks, "Yep—that child of mine sure is special."
But the other part of me bristles. The flip side of bigger families being normal is that none of the siblings is special and unique. I can remember sitting with two of my sisters watching an only child we knew dance. We were bossed into it and expected to be as delighted with her performance as her parents were, as if we weren't also children with our own talents. We were supposed to be the audience, the bland mass of the undifferentiated. There was some surreptitious eye rolling among us. This was not the only time we'd been treated as one mass of Niesslein Girls.
More and more, I'm thinking that the stereotype of the only child can exist because there is such a thing as stereotypes of bigger families. Specifically, that bigger families are made up of homogenous clumps of DNA with the same interests, talents, modus operandi in life.
I floated my theory to Carolyn White (who has a brother), and she agreed the stereotype of the bigger family exists and that it's bunk. "It's not Little House on the Prairie," where everyone always gets along beautifully. She points out that even in families with siblings, often one sibling gets the lion's share of the work when the parents need eldercare. Worse, she says, sometimes the other siblings can just complicate matters by adding a layer of hysteria or second-guessing the other sibling's decisions without contributing any help.
Toni Falbo says that in countries where poverty is a larger problem than it is here, people see bigger families as hungry families—more kids equals "resource depletion." Here, she says, we have the Cheaper By the Dozen mentality. More kids make for a better story. "With twelve, ten kids, you have more plots. It's more entertaining," she says.
It is more entertaining, at least in my case. I go to my mom's house for holidays where we all gather, and it's huge, loud, crowded fun. We play games and sing with the karaoke machine and laugh and cook and watch Caleb and his cousins (all three only children) who dress up and play guitar and dance. There is some resource depletion—some of us will end up on the couches to sleep—but I love being part of this group of people, both siblings and onlies, who are each exceptional, normal, and maybe a little peculiar in a good way.
I also love when the three of us go home—the relative quiet of the house, the vast room for introspection, the feeling that we're nimble, able to load the whole family into the car at a moment's notice. I love this neat little triangle of private jokes, small dinners, and resource surplus.
I'm making it sound like a contest. It's not at all. As it turns out, a particular family size doesn't guarantee any particular sort of life or any sort of person. That's the way this story goes, anyway.
