Opinion: Only-children aren’t always selfish, spoilt and antisocial

Why do only child stereotypes exist? Photo / 123RF
THREE KEY FACTS:
Tom Payne writes for The Telegraph.
OPINION
No pity or judgment here please, the research shows only-children are not so different — apart from a few benefits.
When I tell people I’m an only child, I’ve come to expect certain responses. One is “Aww, bless” — a kind of tender condolence as if I were deprived. Another, more implicit, is, “Oh, that explains it”. Was this usual?
“People’s first response is often ‘You don’t seem like one’, says my friend and fellow only-child Miranda Dowell, 58, “implying that I should be a weird, selfish brat”.
Sometimes, a life full of only-child prejudgment hits home hard. I remember going to a course on special educational needs where the instructor said, “We had one kid, a loner, didn’t mix, seemed withdrawn, and we brought him in for testing. Turned out he was an only child who grew up on a farm.” I felt a shudder of recognition. Oh my God, I thought, that was me exactly.
In that instance, it seemed like a diagnosis. It wasn’t, but in the past, even scientists have thought there’s something wrong with us: in 1892, American child psychologist Granville Stanley Hall wrote, “Being an only child is a disease in itself.”
Mercifully, a wealth of scientific research since then has not only squelched that, but has done much to show we’re not even that odd once you get to know us.
Which brings us to the many advantages of being an only child. We tend to perform better in IQ tests, probably because grown-ups interact with us more, believes Ruggeri. This is another reason I wasn’t lonely: our house was small, but full of people, some of whom were lodgers and others were hippies, who’d sometimes live in our garden with tents and a miasma of weed. Looking back, I think they had an air of “Aww, bless” in their attitude towards me, and took me under their wings. At least they were strangely relaxed in the face of my endless questions.
Alongside this was my mother’s determination to make me literate before I started primary school, with spelling tests and dictation. One result was, as Donald Trump might say, I knew the best words. Another study, cited in Bill McKibben’s book, Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families, found only-children had a vocabulary score nine points higher than children with siblings. Miranda remarks, “I recognise in other only-children I meet that they are better and more comfortable talking to grown-ups than to other children, and can use vocabulary that makes them seem a bit pompous — I see myself in that.” For me, at least, it wasn’t all bad: my mother gave me a love of crosswords that endured in both our lives, and which became a solace through her last illnesses.
Indeed, it is a parent’s illness that is the biggest problem for an only child. It’s hard for us to look after our mothers and fathers when they’re ill and dying. It’s something to consider when thinking about how many children to have.
Just before my mother died, I wrote a book about growing old in the ancient world, and learned that Greeks had a word for the honour that comes to you when you nurse the people who once nursed you: threpteria. I was blessed at these moments by my wife, and by other friends, but Miranda has advice I fully endorse: make plans for when your parents become older.
There are more minor disadvantages, too, of being an only child: in 2022, Emil Dalgaard Christensen found 1-year-olds with siblings pick up a useful range of bacteria that protects them from illnesses. Though that was still not a problem for me: we weren’t great observers of the five-second rule. I’ve seen a picture of my mother using a chest freezer as a work surface, on which she skins a lamb at the same time as washing our dog’s back legs in a bucket. I guess this shows some things escape even the biggest data.
Another disadvantage is confidence in certain settings: I never quite know when to speak in meetings (never is an attractive option). In others, I have to be tactical: at dinner parties, I learned to sit next to my friend, one of four, so that if I said something funny that went unheard, she could say it instead and get the laugh.
Lucy Cavendish, the writer and now a family therapist who wrote the recent How to Have Extraordinary Relationships (with Absolutely Everybody), takes me to the core of the problem: “Because you don’t have siblings, you probably have to make alliances and allegiances elsewhere,” she tells me. “That can be quite useful as an adult because it means you know how to have relationships with people who are not forced to have relationships with you because you are their brother or sister. But it seems exhausting and you’re always having to read the room because there’s no tribe behind you.”
So why, then, do only-child stereotypes exist at all? Why do people think we are weird? It’s because historically, being an only child used to suggest something had gone wrong. My own look at longevity in the ancient world told me that one in four Roman babies died before they were a year old, and one in three of the children who survived infancy didn’t live beyond 10. Having more, then, is a sign of health, fertility and even divine blessing (although Julius Caesar had only one — a legitimate one anyway). As a result, only-children make parents look like they were doing something wrong. Falbo, whose work has focused on the development of only-children, says their existence used to suggest issues such as poor parental health or malnutrition.
Now, though, since more reliable contraception, especially the pill, having an only child is more of a choice, and a choice that more people are making: in Europe, more than half of households with children have only one child.
When I admit to Cavendish about the “Aww, bless” tendency, she’s struck. She senses my need to apologise (why am I an only child, I wonder?), and suggests, “It’s as if you failed to be replicated in some way.
“There can be a range of interpretations,” Cavendish says, “but one is, ‘They had me and then they decided having children was so terrible and awful that they didn’t have any more’.
I could counter by saying, ‘Oh my God, how selfish are my parents that they decided to have one and didn’t give me siblings’?” She reminds me that love is infinite — as Shakespeare says, “There’s beggary in love that can be reckoned” — but children take a while to understand that.
Today, the numbers of millennials who say they don’t want children at all continue to rise, and fewer people are having big families, which should mean the prejudices against only-children should steadily dissipate. But Falbo doubts her many years of work have done much to shift opinions. Does it matter? Not to me. Like many only-children, I have few regrets about the whole experience, and if people do think, “Aww, bless”, I don’t mind that either.