Contra Costa Preschool Directory & Kindergartens
Raising an Only Child
by
Dr. Lawrence Kutner
The decision to become a parent begs the obvious next question: How many children? For many, especially those parents unsure about whether to have one or two children, it is a question not easily answered. A growing number of parents in North America and Europe are consciously choosing to have only one child. The number of women who are having their first children in their thirties and the increasing rate of divorce after only a few years of marriage are also leading to more families with only children. Are these parents making a mistake?
Common knowledge holds that only children are at a serious disadvantage when compared with children who have brothers and sisters. They are allegedly more lonely, selfish, spoiled, and maladjusted. Their parents are sometimes given similar labels. The preeminent American psychologist at the turn of the 20th century Dr. G. Stanley Hall stated emphatically, "Being an only child is a disease in itself."
The parents of only children are constantly asked when they will have another child and told how much better that would be for both children’s development. After all, how else will their child learn to share? How will he or she learn to relate to other children? Indeed, a study conducted during the height of the baby boom in 1956 found that the most common reason parents gave for having a second child was to prevent their first from being an only child!
"But wait," cry the supporters of only children. Franklin Roosevelt was an only child. So were Hans Christian Andersen, Indira Gandhi, Elvis Presley, and Jean-Paul Sartre. (It may, in fact, by the only list in which those five names appear together.) Doesn’t this mean that only children have an advantage? Aren’t only children more likely to achieve greatness than their friends who have brothers and sisters?
In fact, say psychologists at the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, Californian, and at the University of Texas at Austin who have been comparing only children with children who have siblings, it’s all a myth. The differences between "onlies" and other children are too trivial even to consider, especially when compared with differences like gender and economic status. While some studies show statistically significant differences between groups of only children and groups of children with, many of those differences may be accounted for by problems with the designs of those studies.
A disproportionate number of only children, for example, live with single or divorced mothers. Because of this, differences in family income or social status may have influenced some results more than the number of siblings. Even when such factors are controlled and the differences between the two groups of children are still statistically significant, they may not reveal any practical difference. For example, one group may have, on average, a fraction of a year more education or slightly higher self-esteem than the other. If the groups being compared are large enough, the differences may be statistically significant but, from a practical standpoint, trivial.
Still, a child with brothers and sisters has experiences that an only child may not get at home. The child from a larger family must learn to share more of the attention his parents pay and may gain some maturity and sense of responsibility by helping care for younger brothers and sisters. That’s why it’s especially important to get an only child involved with a regular playgroup of other children before he starts school. For many only children, group day care allows them to build their skills at dealing with other children from an early age.
