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Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we get going with the show today I wanted to take a minute to thank those of you who have been so generous with your time and money over the last couple of weeks.  Several of you have been kind enough to offer advice based on your personal expertise that really helped me to figure out the direction for the show, as well as how to reach some more listeners.  And a few of you have gone over to yourparentingmojo.com/support to offer either a one-time or an ongoing donation to support the costs involved with running the show. One awesome listener works for Adobe and used a discount code to get a cheap subscription to the editing software that I use and then donated the remaining amount, so I got a year of free access to the editing software – that is certainly a huge help.  Another listener sent a cool hundred bucks and when I wrote to say ‘thanks’ (as I do to everyone who sends a donation) she responded (and I do have her permission to share this with you):   You’re welcome…I listen when I can (sporadically)…usually while commuting. I always enjoy it. Honestly, though, the donation was almost entirely for the pleasure of watching my mother-in-law almost pass out when my daughter told her that the carseat buckle was “hurting her vulva.”    (I love her, but she’s quite proper and inhibited about some things.)  I was able to point to your episode on sex and walk her through the benefits of using accurate anatomical labels. She appeared to get it.  (And even if not, she now has something to think about…and I got a good chuckle.).   So whatever it is you get out of the show, I’m glad you’re along with me for the ride.  If you feel like contributing then awesome!  Thanks so much.  And even if you don’t, but you have a question or just want to say ‘hi,’ you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com as well.  I love hearing from you all.     Today’s episode is probably one I should have done a long time ago, but it was actually a question from a listener that prompted it.  Sylvia wrote to me and said “Hi – I very much enjoy your podcast.  I’m wondering if you can do an episode on the importance of siblings (or not).  We don’t want another child but are worried about the potential impact on our daughter of growing up without siblings.” Now I don’t think it’s any secret around here that I’m not planning on having any more children, although we do have some friends who just announced their second pregnancy and I’ll say for a few minutes I did wonder what it would be like to think about having a second child.  But then I thought about an interview that I’m preparing for with Sara Dean of the Shameless Mom podcast (which may well be live by the time this episode goes live).  At the end of each interview she asks several rapid-fire questions, one of which is “what superpower would you grant moms?” And the best one I could think of was the power to experience time in a different way so that instead of having to look back on those early days with a baby and remember what they were like, we could actually experience them again.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  And at the same time, wouldn’t it just be the best birth control if we could also experience the day four mama meltdown and the wake-ups every two hours throughout the night again? I never thought I’d have one child in the first place; I was quite happy to be childless.  I just didn’t have that urge that I’m told many women have that just makes them *want* children, but my husband actually did have it so I ended up having our daughter because I didn’t want to be responsible for the biggest disappointment of his life.  So far I’d say parenthood has exceeded my expectations, largely because I got a pretty easygoing kid who isn’t at all difficult to love.  But there’s really just no way that I can have a second one; I’m not at all ashamed to say that I meet one of the stereotypes of the parents of a single child – I’m too selfish to have another one.  I spent ten days hiking around Mont Blanc when my daughter was eight weeks old; it was a big part of how I reconciled my previous life with being a parent.  But how on earth would I do that with a three year old in tow?  How would I do pretty much anything except *be a parent?*  So the reason I hadn’t even thought of doing an episode on the single child was because mine was already committed to being a single child and I didn’t really figure there was a whole lot different about parenting a single child than more than one.  But when Sylvia’s question came through I realized that I hadn’t really given it the attention it probably deserves, so I have not one but two episodes coming up for you, no matter on which side of this fence you sit.  Today’s episode will focus on parenting an only child, and we’ll have one coming up in the near future on the relationships between siblings and how they impact a child’s development. So parenting single children used to be a pretty strange thing.  Large families have been common for hundreds of years mostly because of the amount of work that needed to be done on a farm – and the infant mortality rate was so high that parents *had* to keep having children just to make sure they would have enough children to keep the land producing food.  Even once western society was well into the industrial age, it was almost like we just had a habit of producing large families that we couldn’t get out of, and this was supported by a variety of pieces of advice from the popular press up to neuropsychiatrists, who had a poor opinion of only children.  I should say that in this episode I’m going to draw on three books on only children (as well as the studies they cite), and primary among these is one called “One and Only” by Lauren Sandler.  It’s very well written and seems to be fairly well sourced, although it’s hard to tell for sure because Ms. Sandler isn’t very good at citing those sources.  Sometimes she does actually describe a particular study and it’s authors well enough for me to be able to find it, but often she just makes vague mention of something like a Gallup Poll, which doesn’t give me anywhere near enough information to find it and verify that it says what she says it says.  Having come pretty close to getting burned on that front in episode 18 on the book “The Spiritual Child,” where the author did cite her sources which enabled me to find that several of them were seriously misrepresented in her book, I didn’t want to get burned again on this one.  It did seem rather rude to email Ms. Sanders and say “could you please send me a list of your references so I can make sure you’re legit before I ask you to interview with me,” so I verified the sources I could, and was able to cross-reference many of them because there haven’t been *that many* studies done of only children, and the other two books I read as well referenced many of them. Lauren Sandler gives passing mention to a study that was published in 1895 conducted by one E.W. Bohannon that I think lays such an incredible foundation for what seems to be a pervasive myth of the deficiencies of only children that I want to tell you quite a bit more about it than she did.  So our Professor Bohannon posted a notice somewhere, he doesn’t say where, for respondents to think about peculiar and exceptional children they might have known in childhood, whether any of their friends fit the bill, if they’re teachers or professors then to ask their students what kind of peculiar and exceptional children they know, and finally recount the characteristics of any exceptional children “you ever read of, whether fact or fiction.”  Professor Bohannon received descriptions of 1,045 children, fully 850 of them from a teacher at a state school in Trenton.  Categories of peculiar or exceptional children include the heavy, the tall, the small, the strong, the weak, the silent, the loquacious, and, of course, the only child.  45 of the cases are explicitly stated to be of this class, and I’ll quote the description of one of them which is representative of the whole: “Male, 10 years old. Light (we assume they mean light-skinned.) Selfish, spoiled, and ill-natured. Is so selfish that children of his own age will not play with him. Always wants his own way and plays with children much younger than himself.  Very ugly to them unless they allow him his own play in everything.  Children at school will very seldom play with him.  Is delicate.  Father’s mother not selfish.”  The commentary goes on to say that “46 of the 1045 cases are explicitly stated to be of this class, while there are a number of others that obviously are (although professor Bohannon doesn’t say how he knows this).  Thus one out of twenty of the entire number is an “only child” – a number entirely out of proportion to that found among children generally.  The only child in a family is therefore very likely to be “peculiar and exceptional.” Now I suppose it goes without saying that the quality of this study was pretty low; the recruitment methodology was suspect in the extreme, since it relies on what individuals know and/or remember about the characteristics of other individuals as well as fictional characters.  Professor Bohannon made no attempt at all to obtain a sample that even came anywhere close to being representative, so the idea I want to leave you with here could be boiled down to the new title that we’re going to bestow on this article: “Crappy study finds only children suck.”  Unfortunately, once applied, the label stuck.  Lauren Sandler goes on to quote a variety of publications that I wasn’t able to get my hands on, including The Guide to Good Manners for Kids, published in 1926, which said that a parents’ chief concern is that an only child is bound to be a “spoiled child” with apparently shameful behavior.  The 1927 book “Child Guidance” says that “the only child is greatly handicapped.  He cannot be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that the child reared in the family with other children has.”  The book says that only children are handicapped because of their lack of contact with other children and because they have to constantly compete with adults.  “The only way in which he can exceed these adults is in infantile behavior.  He can scream, louder than they can.  He can throw himself on the floor.”  Needless to say, none of these works could be described as rigorous or scientific or even referenced in any way, shape, or form. The best early study was conducted by Norman Fenton of the Whittier State School in California in 1928, who cites Bohannon’s work as well as both of the other books that Lauren Sandler quotes (she actually lifts Fenton’s quotes from these books), as well as an assortment of other articles and books which all have essentially the same message.  So Fenton decided to try to test whether only children really are different from children with siblings by studying a group of children aged between the kindergarten and sixth grade years, and two groups of university students, with both only children and children with siblings in each group.  Two teachers who had known each child for at least one semester rated each child on a series of twelve scales including self-confidence, generosity, sociability, obedience, and truthfulness.  Fenton’s conclusions are striking enough that I’m going to quote him: “It is noted that there is considerable overlapping in the teacher’s ratings of the two groups of the children studied, ranging from 73.1% to 90% or more (and, as a side note, when Fenton says “overlapping” he means that “the two groups are essentially the same.”).  In generosity and sociability, two traits in which in ordinary accounts only children are supposed to be especially inferior, the overlapping is considerable – 90% or more.”  On the other characteristics that he studied, the overlap between only children and children with siblings varied between 80% and 90%, with only children being very slightly more likely to be more self-confident, more aggressive and insist upon having their own way, be more optimistic, be more self-assured, higher in originality, and be slightly less obedient.  But again, the idea I want you to take away from this is that the overall differences between children with siblings and children without are very small. Now keep in mind that Fenton’s research was published in 1928, just a year before the Great Depression began, and just a few years later only children went from being something of an oddity to being 30% of the total number of homes with children.  Despite the sudden “normalcy” of only children, the dual narratives had been established – study after study after study found very few differences between only children and children with siblings, while the popular press reported – and the general public opinion believed – that only children faced a serious disadvantage in life, that the “the usual overattention of a single child” was responsible for leading an English man to shoot 31 people before killing himself in 1987 and, of course, that the entire generation of only children born under China’s one-child policy were “indulgent, selfish, introverted, unconcerned, and unable to care for themselves.” So what’s the status of the research right now?  Well, it turns out that research on only children was quite a hot topic in the 1980s and interest has rather cooled off since then, so the data isn’t the freshest, but the story remains much the same.   Professor Toni Falbo has conducted and analyzed much of the research on this topic; her first paper appeared in the Journal of Individual Psychology in 1977 and in 2012 she revisited the topic with an update.  She reports that the clearest findings are related to intellectual abilities, with preadolescent only children scoring higher on academic tests than children with siblings, the difference being greatest when you’re looking at only children contrasted with children with many siblings.  But apparently this difference evens out somewhat by the time the children reach adolescence, with only children still out-scoring children from many families, but about the same as children from two-child families. A variety of studies have reported conflicting findings on interpersonal skills, with only children scoring better on likeability in some studies, worse in others, and the same as children with siblings in still others. Professor Falbo conducted three meta analyses of other studies on only children.  The technique she used combines the quantitative data that are generated by many other researchers into a single statistic called an “effect size,” which can be evaluated in terms of its size, statistical significance, and direction.  She combined the data from 39 studies that looked at a child’s adjustment (so, characteristics like self-esteem and anxiety), 30 studies on sociability, and 30 studies on character (things like leadership), comparing only children to children with siblings.  The differences in adjustment and sociability were (and I quote) “not statistically different from zero,” which means that when you add up all these studies with conflicting findings the overall result is that there is no difference between the adjustment and sociability of only children from children with siblings.  Professor Falbo found this finding to be pretty remarkable because we assume that growing up with siblings is essential for children to acquire the skills they need for successful adjustment and social interactions with others outside the home.  On the topic of character, only children had an advantage, particularly when compared to children from large families. When Professor Falbo looked at 16 characteristics related to achievement and intelligence, only children were essentially the same as children with siblings on 14 of the 16 characteristics they studied.  The only two that were different were achievement motivation and self-esteem, and the only children came out ahead on both counts, although the difference was small.  Only children also had greater verbal abilities when compared with peers from larger families, and particularly the younger members of those families.  Two professors who conducted a study on this topic hypothesized that the early intellectual capacity of only children is a result of the increased amount of time the children spend