Worried about your only child being the stereotypical, selfish, lonely narcissist that your mother-in-law/nosy neighbor/co-worker/local-self-appointed-child-rearing-expert tells you they’ll turn into if you don’t give them a sibling to play with? Experts say you shouldn’t be.
“Being an only child is a neat way to grow up,” Dr. Carl E. Pickhardt, a child psychologist in Austin, Texas, and the author of “The Future of Your Only Child” tells the Wall Street Journal, and I, speaking from experience as an only child, completely agree.
When Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, analysized 115 studies of only children conducted from the 1920s to the 1980s she and her co-author found that only children were generally just as well rounded, bright and sociable as those with siblings. Other recent research has found that there are strong benefits to being an only child. They tend to have heftier vocabularies, get better grades and be closer to their parents. And, a recent article appearing in Psychology Today raises the point that sibling issues have the potential to cause just as much ongoing psychological damage as being an only child can.
“Siblings are born to compete for parental attention, and the strategies they use wind up encoded in personality. Small wonder it can take a lifetime to work out sibling relationships,” writes Hara Estroff Marano, going on to say that “parents treat young offspring unequally, giving rise to sibling resentments that can long outlast the parents themselves” and that “we tend to replicate our roles relative to them in work and even love.”
With only children on the rise, statistically, ideas for raising well balanced, healthy “only’s” are everywhere. One of the best I’ve seen is the “Friday Night Club” that several families interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for their article on the subject have instituted. It’s as simple as a standing playdate with the same children every week. The kids have fun, and they’re also forced to learn all of the independent play, conflict resolution and negotiating skills that children develop in their interactions with their siblings.
