Today must have been a slow news day. the Wall Street Journal decided to regurgitate a topic that hasn’t had any new information or opinions in years. Welcome to “Only Children v. Siblings” Rev 2,000,000 zillion.
What’s so different about kids going to playgroups and parents of only children taking their kids to playgroups? Nothing. Except spin. Apparently, there are some parents who are creating playgroups specifically to create sibling rivalry- to offer “what your only child is missing.”
Ho Hum. The article ends with the declaration only children are as well adjusted as siblings.
Childhood poverty, environmental time bombs, even a good travel piece seems worthier of the column inches.
More on ParentCity.
A Dose of Sibling Rivalry
For Only Child Families, New Thinking Pushes Kid-Time, Sharing and Squabbling
By ANDREA PETERSEN
Every Friday night, 8-year-old Maeve Morgan Phoa gets together with three other children for dinner, movies and general kid mayhem. The purpose isn’t just fun. At the “Friday Night Club” the parents created, Maeve, an only child, is forced to learn to take turns riding a coveted scooter, negotiate who gets which super powers in make-believe games, and accept that squabbles are a natural part of life.
Creating this kind of close relationship is one of many strategies parents of only children are employing in their attempts to raise happy, social kids. Others are purposefully spending less time with their child to better mimic what happens in a family with siblings. And some are policing gift-proffering grandparents to fight that old stereotype that an only child is a spoiled child.
The Center of Attention
There’s a surge in interest in new ways to parent an only child. That’s partly because more people are having them. Then there’s the onslaught of advice from neighborhood message boards, online support groups and Mommy-bloggers that has fueled anxiety about raising kids in general.
It’s hard to gauge how many only children there are because an only child can easily become an eldest child. But by looking at 50-year-old women, who are presumably finished having children, 18.3% of them had a single child in 2006, up from 11.4% in 1990, according to numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. The growth is being spurred by more later-in-life marriage and child-bearing. Financial concerns are also at play. As the cost of diapers, child-care and college degrees keep their steady march northward, some parents are deciding it’s just too expensive to have that second kid.
“ My wife and I are both only children. As an only child I feel I lacked a crucial part of a traditional healthy development. My wife feels the opposite and believes she missed nothing due to the lack of a sibling. ”
—Richard Skalski
Every type of childhood, of course, has its challenges. And psychologists who work with only children and their parents say that growing up without siblings doesn’t handicap a kid any more than other family configurations. Still, parenting styles can affect whether you end up with a happy and secure kid—or an anxious basket-case. So for those of us who, whether by choice or by circumstance, have an only child: What is the best way to raise one? And what are the pitfalls?
“Think in terms of what your only child is missing,” says Carl E. Pickhardt, a child psychologist in Austin, Texas, and the author of “The Future of Your Only Child.” “They’re missing the opportunity to get into the push and shove of sibling relationships, where you just kind of naturally learn there is going to be a give and take and resources have to be shared.”
Creating that kind of opportunity is part of the goal of the five-year-old Friday Night Club, says Margaret Morgan, Maeve’s mother. “I’m hoping it offsets the kind of center-of-the-universe perspective—everyone adores me and dotes on me—that the kids who don’t have siblings have,” says Ms. Morgan, 52, an artist in Los Angeles. The weekly meetings have also helped her daughter learn to handle conflict. “They have their little spats and their disagreements and they do have to work it out because they have to deal with each other the next week,” Ms. Morgan says.
The kids seem blissfully unaware of any aim beyond fun. “You get to have sleepovers,” says Carina Kroff, 7, one of the only-child Friday Night Club members. “It’s just fun to be with friends.”
Parents say it’s important to rein in the impulse to be an only child’s constant companion. When Sarah McDonald’s son, Toby, was 4, she started to feel that family life was centered too much on his desires and that the undivided attention was resulting in tantrums. So Ms. McDonald, 45, a stay-at-home mother in South Riding, Va., instituted this plan: Every afternoon for two hours, Toby is expected to knock on a neighbor’s door and find friends to play with or entertain himself in his room.
Ms. McDonald said the change—which her son, now 6, resisted at first—is a good counterweight to all the hours he spends around adults.
Experts say giving only kids space is also important to avoid an under-the-microscope type scrutiny. “Growing children should really have the opportunity to contain their thoughts and not always have someone … picking their ideas apart,” says Lawrence Balter, a child psychologist and professor emeritus at New York University.
Having a single child is still often considered a radical choice, though it is not always a choice. Neighbors, total strangers and many a mother-in-law may continue to push procreation, saying that, without a sibling, a child will be lonely, selfish, or a bit of a misfit.
Research, however, shows that generally isn’t the case. In a meta-analysis covering 115 studies of only children conducted from the 1920s to the 1980s, Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and her co-author, found that only children were generally as well-adjusted, intelligent, accomplished and sociable as those with siblings. Dr. Falbo, who has researched only children since the early 1970s, also conducted a study of schoolchildren in China that challenged the idea that the country’s one-child policy was producing a generation of narcissistic “little emperors.”
Other research has found that there are benefits to being an only child: They tend to have stronger vocabularies, do better in school and are closer to their parents, says Dr. Falbo. “Only children get all their parents have to give without them having to divvy it up among the various siblings,” she explains.
Some experts say only kids like Maeve Morgan Phoa may need help with lessons that siblings come to naturally.
No More Kids, Please
A study asked parents who did not plan to have more children why. Here are factors they cited as very important.
• More time for children I already have: 64%
• Cost of raising children: 48
• Stress of raising children: 29
• Spouse or partner’s wishes: 27
• Age: 24
• Time to pursue own interests: 19
Source: Pew Research Center
It can be easy to spoil an only child. When there’s more than one child, each kid is naturally going to have fewer dolls, video games and Juicy Couture hoodies. But even when parents of only children are diligent in limiting treats, they may have to police family members. Four-year-old Andrew Jacobsen isn’t just an only child, he’s an only grandchild as well. Christmas “was just unreal,” says his mother, Kendra Jacobsen, a 35-year-old systems engineer in Verona, Wis. “We were literally opening presents non-stop all day long.” So last Christmas, Ms. Jacobsen and her husband made an attempt to shrink the pile under the tree. They didn’t buy Andrew any gifts themselves and instituted an “approval process” for toys given by relatives. (Ms. Jacobsen says the new policy hasn’t been totally successful: “My mom still brings extra stuff.”)
With fewer competing voices and no sibling rivalry to complicate matters, it can be easier to give an only child a vote in family decisions. For years, Rob Grindstaff, his wife, Cynthia, and their now 17-year-old daughter, Megan, took turns choosing where they would take their annual summer vacation. “Making her a part of these decisions has helped her mature a little bit faster than other kids,” says Mr. Grindstaff, 46, a digital publishing executive in Franklin, Tenn., who is an only child himself.
But Mr. Grindstaff says giving Megan such a powerful role in family matters has brought difficulties, too. When the family moved from Oklahoma City to Ann Arbor, Mich., when Megan was 10, “she didn’t understand that she didn’t have an equal say in whether we were moving to Michigan or not.” The outspokenness the Grindstaffs have encouraged in their daughter has also caused tension with teachers and coaches. He and his wife have had to advise Megan that “not everyone is as open to suggestions as her mother and me,” he says.
More
* The Juggle: New Strategies for Raising an Only Child
Psychologists say that the normal conflicts of adolescence can be a particularly trying for small families. Since parents and their only child are often very close, limits-testing and rebelling can come as more of a shock.
Only children also tend to be self-confident, making them “very worthy adversaries” during disputes, Dr. Pickhardt says.
But if there’s one message for parents of only children, it is this: Relax, the kids are going to turn out fine. “Being an only child is a neat way to grow up,” Dr. Pickhardt says.
Adult only children note their comfort with being alone and the creativity and self-esteem that can foster. “You learn to trust your instincts,” says Stephanie Spencer Lee, a 43-year-old mother of two in Closter, N.J., who says she spent many hours reading and playing make-believe games in her backyard when she was young. “I have a pretty strong sense of what my gut is and who I think I am.”
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