Love Undiluted: A Striking Example of Rethinking Stereotypes

One and Only by Lauren Sandler

The following are excerpts taken from Lauren Sandler's One and Only. Bold and italics are mine. Everything else is Lauren's.

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As only children, we have to get used to lacking something that the majority of people have for better or for worse.As parents who choose to stop at one, we have to get used to the nagging feeling that we are choosing for our own children something they can never undo.--First children tend to be a choice parents make to fulfill their own lives and a second child tends to be a choice parents make to fulfill the life of their existing child.-- Here are some things I want: I want to do meaningful work. I want to travel. I want to eat in restaurants and drink in bars. I want to go to movies and concerts. I want to read novels. I want to marinate in solitude. I want to have friendships that regularly sustain and exhilarate me. I want a romantic relationship that involves daily communication beyond interrogatives and imperatives—I want to be known. And I want to snuggle with my daughter for as long as she’ll let me, being as present in her life as I can while giving her all the space she needs to discover life on her own terms. I want full participation: in the world, in my family, in my friendships, and in my own actualization.--As one psychologist murmured quietly to me, “It’s a very powerful way to grow up.”--If parents no longer felt they had to have second children to keep from royally screwing up their first, would the majority of them still do it? What if those of us who don’t otherwise feel compelled to have more kids opted instead for greater autonomy and self-fulfillment? If the literature tells us—in hundreds of studies, over decades of research—that my kid isn’t better off with a sibling, and it’s not something I can truly say I want for myself, then who is this choice serving?--They were usually just happy with the one child they already had.--As is the case with the cognitive social psychology behind all bias maintenance, people seek out examples that confirm their belief and ignore what refutes it.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self,”

• May Sarton

--Onlies score no higher on loneliness than anyone else. Furthermore, only children report less of a need for social affiliation than others.--One of the “gifts” of only childhood is being “a good companion for yourself.”--I need time to simply be left alone in what Carl Pickhardt would call my primary relationship. (“You’re a disappearer,” an only-child friend said to me recently. “I understand. I’m a disappearer too. I think it’s one of those things we tend to have in common.”)--“A source of loneliness is when you don’t have a shared collective identity, and most families don’t actually have shared collective identities,” he points out.--Only children, lacking siblings of their own, tend to build a chosen family.--My parents address my unspoken anxiety with monthly payments into a long-term health care insurance plan. Many are not so fortunate as to be able to afford such expensive planning.--We all function in terms of egocentric empathy. Narcissism is another thing. Perhaps W. H. Auden summed it up best when he wrote, “We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I can’t figure out.”--Instead of operating in terms of 'that’s mine,' as siblings tend to do, onlies learn from mothers and fathers how to develop mature and ethical behavior in relationships. Singletons mimic how their parents share and take responsibility, rather than brawl over the remote. From parents’ influence, rather than an immature sibling’s, Cacioppo says, “You know you can’t exploit other kids, you know you have to attend to other people, and you tend to take a greater responsibility within those relationships.”--Attentiveness, she writes, has the tendency to “deeply influence the child’s self confidence and feelings of self worth,”--The undiluted resources of the only-child family, Judith Blake found—and others have rediscovered—give singletons a better shot at success.--Not only do parents speak—and read—less to their kids, but the entire family becomes more “babyish,” operating at the level of its youngest member. Instead of challenging the older child, interactions are dragged backward developmentally to accommodate the younger one. Or, as Blake put it, with a literalism that threatens to rankle, the family “becomes weighted with infantile minds.”--Success of singletons can be credited most often to the special relationships we have with our parents.--The typical positive relationship between only children and their parents tends to temper pressure with encouragement.--“She stood behind me all the way. If I wanted to be a dancer, and actress—that was what I would be if she could do anything about it. She would help me, encourage me, while the rest of the family thought that she was mad.”--There’s a double edge to that special relationship between onlies and their parents.--...the filial undertones of a legacy tarnished by the only person who will carry it on.--“Only children are scrutinized all the time.”--Singletons of both sexes, familiar with the richness of solitude, report far deeper interest in white collar, scientific, and cerebral career paths.--“You aren’t influenced by the sibling order that shapes other people. You’re freer to be influenced by other forces. You’re freer to end up being who you want to be.”--Only children tend to develop unusually multifaceted notions of themselves.--“You claim more parts of yourself,” Sulloway tells me, because we aren’t habitually defining ourselves against a sibling.--The emotional lives of our families are amplified.The love undiluted.--It’s not the loneliness, or selfishness, or maladjustment that we worry about. It’s the amplification, the intensity. It’s the reason some adult only children have told me they were entirely committed to making sure their first child had a sibling, and the reason others have told me they’d never have more than one kid.--I nod, thinking about the myriad studies I’ve read about how every parent admits to having a favorite, and how parents and kids often pair off one favorite to a parent, creating familial divisions.--“It’s not so complicated at her age,” Justin continues. “There’s a certain purity to loving a four-year-old. But you and I both have to prepare for the fact that the intensity of our love will become complicated for her.”--You have this feeling—and I really do relate to it—that you can’t get quite enough. But I know you know how that turns out. We need to accept that eventually that isn’t going to be reciprocated. That’s the trick, I think, of having an only child.--In households of two parents and one child, the relationship between parents determines the culture of that household, and the child needs to figure out what role to play in that relationship.--But while I was embroiled in my own issues growing up, I was never called up to the bench to participate in theirs.--Make her marriage as significant as her motherhood.--All I have to do is watch Dahlia’s joy and tenderness when she gets to hold their baby brothers and sisters. Justin sees it too, and he knows what she’s missing. But he reminds me often how the sacrifices we’d need to make to raise another child would impact Dahlia’s happiness—not to mention our own.--I find that parenting offers an untold bounty of happiness, joy, excitement, contentment, satisfaction, and pride—just not all the time. Each child is an additional source of pride, sure, but also an additional infringement on freedom, privacy, and patience.--When people can make choices based on their own desires rather than what the world is telling them to do, the entire well-being of a society floats a little higher.--If we could eradicate the social stigma that stubbornly clings to the parents of only children, this defensiveness would disappear as well.--(My mind prompts the Dead Poets Society chant, “Gotta do more, gotta be more.")--“Do I want another baby? Or do I just want to turn back time and have my daughter be a baby again?”--Each child adds no less than 120 hours of housework a year.--There exists a direct link between long drives to work and low well-being.--A majority of mothers under thirty without college degrees have children and no partner.--He learned that family happiness falls on a curvilinear graph, where none or one may rank high, but so do families with five or more children. “That fathers and mothers of large families are partly happier because they find more meaning in life, receive more support from friends who share their faith, and have a stronger religious faith than their peers with smaller families,” he says.--Without that faith, his graphs tell us, bigger families actually aren’t happier at all.--It follows that only children are likely to repeat their parents’ choices.--As a sibling, “you will be freer to fail.”--On some level, surely Hodgman and I are both buying into a fantasy of how liberating siblings would be, eradicating pressure and existential fears by dint of their mere birth. Justin doesn’t feel free to fail, though he has a younger sister.--My purposes are secular: to work hard, to play hard, to think hard, to love hard.--While my motherhood is fluid as well—sometimes consuming, other times more hands-off—it is my most constant permanent purpose.--That is the reality I chose for myself. I’m being a good mother not just when I’m running around the playground or making dinner but also when I’m staring at the ocean or yelling at a newspaper editorial. By thriving as the person I want to be, I’m teaching Dahlia that she can too.--Men have the power to set the terms of their participation in child rearing and women don’t.--We complain to our spouses and friends instead of our policy makers. Instead of lobbying for a new system, one that addresses the incompatibility of our work lives and our family lives, we set the alarm an hour early to make cookies for the bake sale before rushing in to the office. Furthermore, this is the behavior we model for our sons and daughters—not to imagine change and work for it, but to simply make it through the exhaustion of another day.--If you find yourself raising an only child, there are a few simple things you can do. Provide some diversity in the form of plenty of social opportunities. Keep an eye on your own cocooning habits; breaking out of them will be freeing to you and to your kid. Engage in a much larger world and encourage your child to participate alongside you. Think twice about exurban living. Let go a little. Ask yourself if you lean on your kid as a pawn in your partnership, or as a partner if your partnership has dissolved. But, mainly, don’t parent by fear or by guilt. Don’t live by fear or by guilt either. I know that’s easy to say and hard to do, believe me. But there’s great power in behavior modeling. Making a home where parents live life according to their own mores is worth a thousand tiger mothers.--“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”--You can buy the book here. :) The Future of Your Only Child: How to Guide Your Child to a Happy and Successful Life,A Danish newspaper published an article entitled “Children Should Have One Hundred Parents,”Maybe One,John Hodgman, the comic writer, wrote an essay for the book Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo called “Apologia to My Second Child.”