The case against having only one child

By Elizabeth Gehrman

Some might say that since I’ve never had
kids I have no standing to give advice to those who do, or plan to. But in a
way, having no family of my own — no children, no siblings, parents gone —
actually makes me uniquely qualified to opine on one aspect of yours: whether
to have an only child. My unsought advice is, don’t.

In the mid-1970s, when I was entering my
teens, 40 percent of women nearing the end of their childbearing years had
given birth four or more times. Almost everyone I knew had at least one brother
or sister, and most of my friends and cousins had several. Today, the
percentage of mothers who have only one child has doubled, from 11 percent in
1976 to 22 percent. Some data suggest city living encourages singletons; the
Census shows that Boston’s average household size dropped from 3.39 in 1970 to
a minuscule 2.26 in 2010.

It makes sense: Having children is
expensive, and so is living in cities; more couples are dual-career, making
full-time child rearing challenging; and in today’s competitive and kid-centric
world, parents who want to give their offspring every advantage have a lot more
work to do than in the more economically egalitarian days of disco and Gerald
Ford. The pendulum has swung far from the pejorative stereotype that onlies are
spoiled, selfish, and socially awkward. Nowadays we hear almost exclusively
that singletons actually have, according to a 2014 California State University
study, “higher achievement motivation, higher self-esteem, and higher
abilities, especially in verbal skills,” than their middle- and youngest-child
peers.

“Onlies aren’t lonely after all!” shout the
cheerleaders for single-child families. But if you ask adults who grew up with
no siblings, that rosy picture clouds a bit.

I wouldn’t say I was lonely as a kid. When
no one was around, I enjoyed my solitude, exploring the Niagara River, which
ran past my backyard, or losing myself in books like Treasure Island and The
Outsiders. I had a lot of friends and cousins — one cousin in particular whom I
saw almost every weekend and most of each summer. But when we played “Let’s
pretend,” I always conjured up a bestie twin sister. I constantly heard from my
mother, the youngest of eight kids separated by only nine years, how much fun
it was to grow up amid the chaos, and witnessed almost daily the adamantine
bond between my friend Catherine and her older brothers Pat and Tony. Being the
third wheel in my own house left me with no reality check when my somewhat
difficult mother lost her temper and my reticent father retreated; I sought
comfort from my pets, who were sympathetic but not terribly insightful.

I understand that not all sibling
relationships are without peril. But for everyone I know who has a fraught
liaison with a brother or sister, I know many, many people who don’t. In any
case, you have a much higher chance of getting along with your adult siblings
than I do with mine, since my chance is zero. My friend Linda doesn’t consider
herself particularly close to her sisters in terms of time spent together but says,
“I can relax with them in a historical way. I know they’ve got my back no
matter what our disagreements are or how we see life.”

Google “adult only child” and you’ll find
headlines such as “Does Anyone Know Any Adults Who Are Happy to Be Only Children?”
A romantic relationship can’t provide the kind of no-matter-what confidante
Linda finds in her sisters, and those who say they’ve made their friends their
families have been lucky so far, because the fact is, friendships, no matter
how close, come and go. Even the ones that turn out to be lifelong can change
significantly when one friend marries and the other doesn’t, or someone moves
far away. “I could call my sister tomorrow and say, ‘I need to leave my husband
and would you cosign on a house with me,’ and she’d say yes,” Linda tells me.
“What friend can you call and say, ‘You need to lend me $2,500 right now’?”

And speaking of money, while the cost of
raising a child to age 18 has reached an average of $286,050, caring for an
elderly parent can be at least that much — often times 2, if you’re really
unlucky — over the span of a much shorter period, even without a nursing home
or assisted living. Imagine handling that as an only child. GenWorks says
median monthly cost for home health aides is $3,861, and it’s $1,473 for adult
day care. I’ve written before about the costs these numbers don’t reveal,
including the average of $254,000 in lost wages and Social Security benefits
for an adult child caring for a parent at home, not to mention the stress of doing
so by yourself.

My Aunt Joan, seven years younger than my
father, Art, once told me about the time she competed, as a chubby 8-year-old,
in a half-mile footrace for the neighborhood kids at Edgewater, an amusement
park near their house. “Artie ran right beside me the whole way,” she said of
her cross-country-star big brother. “He kept saying, ‘Come on, Joan, you can do
it. You can finish.’ And I did. He was such a good brother.”

All I’m saying is, sometimes it’s hard to
keep running on your own.