I’ve been stumbling across a lot of articles about the pros and cons of having only one kid lately. I only sort of read those articles, because, well, I have two. But one of my two is very different, so sometimes I worry that Jonah gets some of the “only child” baggage – high expectations and all that. That’s why I sort of read those articles.
Here are some links:
The Secret to Being a Successful Writer – Have Just One Kid. And then read Jane Smiley’s response in the comment section.
Only Children — Lonely and Selfish?, New York Times
The Economic Reason for Having Just One Child, Time
Why One Child is Enough For Me, Slate
And then there’s the sibling debate.
Frank Bruni’s The Gift of Siblings
And Katie Roiphe’s uncomfortable response.
I guess my last post was my own two cents on the matter.
Apt. 11d 
Here’s another that just came out in Slate.
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Thanks. added it.
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Also probably worth pointing out that ALL of those pieces about only children are written by the same person 🙂 (I just realized that.) Lauren Sandler just came out with a new book.
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We had three, might have had more if we hadn’t been aging out of possibility. So far, it’s had the benefit that at least one of them has liked us at all times.
Our daughter in particular notices that her friends who are onlies get better service, and don’t get bullied by creepy older brothers.
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Honestly, with Autistic Youngest, two sometimes feels like twelve but I’m glad they have each other and we have them.
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Isn’t this one of those things where it’s hard to imagine things an other way than you have them? We have two, and the second was a spur of the moment, why not? one (i.e. until just before I was pregnant with the second, I would have said, one seemed like plenty). But now, of course, we couldn’t imagine it any other way. I remain convinced that the mother and the father are the best people to decide how many kids they’re going to include in their family and don’t see any need to have an opinion.
I’ve loved Frank Bruni’s two essays about his family — the one with his dad and the one about his siblings. And, in general, everything by Katie Roiphe makes me feel a little bit unhappy and sad that there’s so much unpleasantness out there. After reading the sister article (and, are we talking about Emily Carter?) and about Anne Roiphe, I always feel like they are generally unpleasant people. I don’t want to invest too much in that opinion (and, I’ve concluded I was wrong about Priscilla Gilman, who I put in the same category/class), but, in general, eeew, about all three of them. I don’t think I’d want Katie Roiphe as a sister either.
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I love Frank Bruni.
I’m in the same situation as you – one on the spectrum, the other with possibly some only-child and brother-caretaker baggage. My biggest regret is not having a third and a fourth to level the burden (and plus – fun).
Although, after sending two to college, my retirement plans are similar to yours – with four, they’d be even more dire. I do have the option of moving in with a sister, so back to more siblings is better.
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If I had one, the child would have SUCH severe psychological issues — It would have been impossible to just sit back and watch the one develop. I think the tendency to want to guide and steer every aspect of his/her life would have been just too great. I purposely had three so that I would always feel a little overwhelmed and everything wouldn’t be perfect — so that there would be days that I didn’t get around to checking everyone’s math homework.
I remember reading a book a while ago by a woman who had four, and she said that if you have one or even two, you tend to see the kids as a reflection of you, but once you have more than that, you start to see the randomness of the personalities the kids get etc. (In other words, you pay for Kumon for everybody, but only one becomes a math genius, and the three other don’t, and you stop blaming the other moms whose kids aren’t good at math, while previously you would have assumed that those moms just needed to work harder with their kids, since you worked hard with your one child and it worked out well. Ditto on the music lessons, etc. If you have one kid and they become a prodigy, then you assume that it’s because of what you did — but if you do the same thing with three kids, and only one or none of them become prodigies, then you assume there is no correlation. In other words having more kids gives you more data and keeps you from making so many false correlations between you and your activities and the way the kids turn out.)
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Jane Smiley is made of win.
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The sort of people who write professionally are often introverts and/or raging narcissists and/or have a taste for solitude (see the biography of pretty much any major writer), so it’s easy to see why they would 1) enjoy being onlies 2) prefer having onlies. Everybody else’s mileage is going to vary.
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Here’s another advantage of not being an only: having somebody to talk to about your parents.
I agree with Louisa about how having several makes it clearer that our kids are not mini-mes and that our nurture is not responsible for every quirk of their personalities. I had an unexpected example of that with our new baby. I was a very early breastfeeding dropout with our two oldest kids, going to exclusive pumping within days of their births. However, our current baby has been a dedicated little sucker since the day she was born (with a short time off on the bottle for jaundice) with no special exertion on my part. Now that I’ve had a baby who is a good sucker, my husband and I realize that our oldest were really ineffective at sucking, even on the bottle (my husband enlarged the nipple holes on their bottle–a huge no-no, but they weren’t otherwise going to eat). I still wonder if there’s something different I could have done differently with the oldest kids, but the difference in feeding ability has been quite dramatic.
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From the Roiphe piece:
“Part of the problem may be that the thing you suspect as a child—that there is not enough love to go around—is true. Attention is finite. The scramble is forever. The secretly suspected truth that you are not equally admired or adored or attractive, that there will be insoluble inequities, that one will have a more interesting career, and one will be happier in love, and one will have better adventures, and one will be more creative, and one will be more charming, and one will have more shoes is all true. The myth parents foist, with good intentions, on children—that the resources and embrace of the world will be equal—will not be borne out by life.”
That’s odd–my parents said “Life isn’t fair” on a very regular basis when I was growing up. I think I would enlarge that to something like “Life is exciting and interesting and important, but it isn’t fair.”
I also like P.J. O’Rourke’s response to his daughter’s complaint that something isn’t fair:
“I have a 13-year-old daughter And that’s all I hear, “That’s not fair,” she says. “That’s not fair! That’s not fair!” And one day I snapped, and I said, “Honey, you’re cute, that’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that’s not fair. You were born in America, that’s not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don’t start getting fair for you.”‘
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/commentary/orourke-if-1-had-less-would-99-be-better
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I have 3 siblings. One was adopted out before I was conceived (different father), and I didn’t meet him until I was 42. Then me, then just short of 2 years later my sister, and it was just the two of us for another 9 years until our youngest brother (different father) was born. I hated my sister until after I was 30, but it is so good to have someone who remembers our childhood the way I do. We’re not really close-I scrambled my way up into the middle class and she didn’t make it, has multiple kids by multiple fathers, addiction issues, illnesses, etc., but we reach out to each other several times a year nevertheless.
Another good reason to have siblings is that when our mother was ill and then died, we had each other (the 3 youngest of us-our older brother didn’t find us until after our mother died). We shared the difficult weeks between her lung cancer diagnosis and her death; we shared the grief, and all the chores of dealing with a person’s death (their belongings, the will, the estate winding up, the funeral or not-a-funeral, even what to put in the newspaper as a death notice).
I have two children. I didn’t want my children to have nobody remember their childhood, no shared experiences, and also I didn’t want them to deal with my death alone. They may still choose to do so if they can’t manage to have a relationship as adults, but at least they have a chance.
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