Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [60]
Here is a selection from the world’s gallery of only children—proffered for their various levels of inspiration, consolation or remonstration. Here is Lance Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Indira Gandhi, Isaac Newton and Frank Sinatra—plus one US president (FDR), two US first ladies (Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush) and one almost-one (Tipper Gore). Take solace, too, one-off progeny, from the fact that you are more likely to appear on the cover of Time magazine than your siblinged friends.
And here is an alternative phrase that could ameliorate the downsides of that English ‘only’. Step into French, and an only child becomes une enfant unique instead—redolent with drum rolls and acclamation.
I am eighteen years old, a few days out of home, starting university, starting the next part of my life. On this late summer morning, my mother’s phone rings, and it’s someone suggesting that my parents might like to host an exchange student now that I’ve gone. The silence in the house without its one available young person—they must want someone else around to fill that gap.
My mother declines: they’re not really looking to replace me. They’re not really wishing they had someone else around. They’re happy I’m off doing what I want to do; they’ll look forward to the holidays when I come home. They stand firm in the face of more than one of these suggestions. My mother, as the years pass, gets busier and busier—there’s no way she’d have had time for an exchange student.
Later, when I move overseas, it happens that they sell my bed, change the locks on their front door, buy a car that only seats two. We make jokes about this—not only did they not need to replace me with an exchange student, now they’re excising me from their space completely. Some people, when I tell this story, take it seriously, which makes me wonder if this is the sort of sneaky behaviour parents-of-several do get up to when their houses finally empty.
And later again, when I’m pregnant, I ask my mother for the first time about being an only child, about whether they ever thought I might not be—or should not be. It’s never occurred to me to ask before.
‘I always wondered,’ she says, playful, ‘what I’d do if I had another small person and didn’t like the second one as much as I liked the first . . .’
Here are some statistics; here are some correlations. The work finally done on only children that offered alternatives to G. Stanley Hall showed that they tended to speak earlier and gain their vocabulary faster, gain higher marks in aptitude tests and in school, and not only progress to tertiary education but follow through and graduate. They tended to have better self-esteem, to be more patient, to be more sharing. In terms of happiness, politics and career choices, they were indistinguishable from any member of a larger family.
As countries prosper, families tend towards fewer children. Similarly as women’s education levels rise. And as levels of personal faith decline, people tend towards fewer children too. By late 2008, single-child families outnumbered two-child families in America for the first time—although the number of Americans who thought one child was the ideal number was still a miniscule three per cent.
Here are some theories about the benefits of being or having a single child. Fewer children in a family mean the resources that family has available have to be divided fewer ways—whether that’s time for reading together, money for tertiary education, or the availability of frog and mouse suits. There’s no way even a master French-knitter could whip up Charlotte’s webs for five offspring on short notice.
Imaginary friends are now seen not as a dangerous tendency that should be curbed as quickly as possible, but as a hallmark of creativity—if your child doesn’t have a Mrs SeeWee, some say, you’d do well to invent one to impress their teachers. And fewer children mean women are freer sooner to do other things, whether that’s