One And Only Hundred Of Psychological Studies Find No Basis In The Popular Negative Image Of The Only Child

Only Child.

The phrase conjures up a welter of negative adjectives: spoiled, selfcentered, lonely, maladjusted. Mama’s Boy. The Bad Seed. In China, which adopted an official policy in 1979 that limits families to only one child as a populationcontrol measure, there is a special name for them: “Little Emperors.”

It’s not just popular culture that has taken a dim view of only children: For generations psychiatrists and psychologists have warned of the grave emotional risks that spring from being an only child.

So it may come as a surprise that the negative image of only children - whose ranks include Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Leonardo Da Vinci, French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, star quarterbacks Joe Montana and Roger Staubach, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Chelsea Clinton - is belied by hundreds of psychological studies.

Developmental psychologists have found that only children are not the pampered pests nor the narcissistic misfits of popular myth. In many ways they are remarkably like children raised with siblings. In other respects they are different, particularly when compared with children from large families.

University of Texas psychologist Toni Falbo has analyzed 500 studies involving only children published since the turn of the century. Falbo, who has studied only children since 1972, concludes they are similar to their peers in areas such as maturity, generosity, emotional stability and popularity. In certain respects, Falbo notes, only children stand out: Studies have found they are better educated, more intelligent and more motivated to achieve than their peers with siblings.

Although the ranks of only children are rising dramatically (attributed to a mixture of social and economic factors), the stigma surrounding only children has changed little. Following is an examination of several popular beliefs about only children, compared with the results of psychological studies, the clinical observations of child psychiatrists and the experiences of only children and their parents. Many, but not all, of the studies involve only children living in two-parent households; these results may not be applicable to only children in single-parent families, whose lives are shaped by different factors.

Only children are spoiled because they receive all their parents’ attention.

This may be the most common view of all, Falbo notes, but the notion that only children are more self-centered than others, or that excessive parental attention makes them that way, is not supported by empirical evidence.

It is a notion that Falbo, an only child, frequently confronted when she was growing up. “People often said to me, ‘You don’t act like an only child,”’ she recalled. “It was assumed that because I was an only child I would be a problem.”

It is true, Falbo and other researchers acknowledge, that only children receive their parents’ singular attention, as do first children, whom studies have repeatedly found they most resemble.

But unlike firstborns, they are never “dethroned,” in the parlance of psychology. Some studies have found that only children tend to have closer and more affectionate relationships with their parents than firstborns or subsequent children.

Because they are spoken to and read to more often, only children tend to develop better verbal skills than their peers who have siblings.

A 1980 study by H. Theodore Groat and his colleagues at Bowling Green State University in Ohio found that only children did not have higher divorce rates than people with siblings. Groat observed that if only children were, as is widely assumed, more narcissistic and less able to get along with others, one would expect them to have a higher divorce rate.

Only children are high achievers.

Studies have repeatedly found that only children, like first children, are disproportionately high achievers.

The relationship among birth order, intelligence and achievement was noted by a psychologist as early as 1904, Falbo noted. In 1970 two researchers who conducted a study of people whose faces had appeared on the cover of Time magazine found a disproportionate number of both first and only children.

Psychologists consistently have found a correlation between IQ scores and family size: Children from one- and two-child families score higher than those raised in larger families.

Other studies have found that only children as a group are better educated, in part because parents can devote their resources to a single child and because parental expectations tend to be highest for the first child.

Only children don’t like being only children.

Only children appear to be no more likely to yearn for siblings than children with siblings are to wish they were only children. In these cases the children’s wishes have been found to correspond with those of their mothers.

For only children, the burden of caring for aging parents is often lonelier and scarier than it is for people who have siblings and who, presumably, share the burden, however unequally.

Only children are anti-social.

Researchers have consistently found that while only children spend more time alone, they are not less popular than people who have siblings. They are, however, less “affiliative” than middle or youngest children. Only children are not as likely to participate in certain group activities such as team sports, and many seem to prefer solitary pursuits such as reading, writing or stamp collecting.

Some studies have found that only children have smaller circles of friends than do their peers but tend to form strong and particularly lasting bonds.

And some researchers speculate that because only children tend to receive relatively large amounts of attention and affection, they are not motivated to seek approval elsewhere.