The only child: myths, research and what really is different

“Oh, you’re an only child? Well, that explains it.” The sentence lands at a work dinner, just after you declined to share your dessert. Everyone laughs, and so do you. At home, though, it keeps nagging: what exactly does it explain? That you are spoilt? That you cannot share? That you are used to the world revolving around you? And how is it that nobody says this to the person with three brothers who does not hand over their dessert either?

Nearly everyone has an opinion about only children. Parents of one child start hearing it on the maternity ward: “So when’s the second one coming? You’re not going to leave them on their own, are you?” Only children hear it all their lives. The opinion is more than a hundred years old and surprisingly hardy, even though research largely overturned it decades ago.

In this post I would like to separate three things: what is myth, what research shows, and what really is different about growing up without siblings. Because the third does exist. It is not about character but about how a family with a single child is put together.

Where the myth of the spoilt only child comes from

The image of the lonely, spoilt and odd only child goes back to the end of the nineteenth century. The American psychologist G. Stanley Hall is credited with the remark that being an only child is “a disease in itself”. The study from his circle on which that verdict rested was weak by today’s standards: it was based on descriptions of “peculiar” children sent in by teachers and parents, with no comparison group.

The myth survived because it is handy. Any trait that bothers us in someone is easier to pin on something simple and visible. If an only child withdraws, it is because they are an only child. If someone with three sisters withdraws, that is just their nature. Psychology calls this confirmation bias: we notice what confirms what we already think.

What research shows: Falbo and Polit

The most important review in this field was published in 1986 by the American researchers Toni Falbo and Denise Polit. They gathered 115 studies that compared only children with children who had siblings and analysed them together. They looked at several areas: achievement, intelligence, character, sociability, psychological adjustment and the relationship with parents.

The result was awkward for the myth. In character, sociability and adjustment, only children did not differ from others. In achievement and intelligence they were slightly ahead of children from large families and comparable to firstborns and children from two-child families. The one area in which they stood out was the relationship with their parents, which was on average somewhat better.

The authors’ explanation was simple. An only child is not a special kind of child. They do share some experiences with firstborns and with children from small families: more adult attention, more conversation with adults, more resources per child. What is different about only children is different because of that, and not because of the absence of siblings as such.

Narcissism, sociability and other charges

More recent studies have tested the individual charges. In 2020 German psychologists led by Michael Dufner published a study with a telling title about the end of a stereotype. First they showed that people do attribute more narcissism to only children. Then they tested, in a large sample of adults, whether it is true. It was not: only children were no more narcissistic than people with siblings.

A New Zealand study by Samantha Stronge and colleagues (2019), with more than twenty thousand adults, pointed the same way. Personality differences between people with brothers and sisters and those without were so small that you would not notice them in everyday life.

On sociability the picture is a little more interesting. In 2004 Douglas Downey and Dennis Condron found that teachers in American kindergartens rated children with siblings as slightly more skilled in dealing with their peers. But when Downey, with Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, looked at adolescents and asked how many classmates named them as a friend, the difference had gone. If young children do lag behind, then, they catch up at school and among their peers.

If the post ended here, the conclusion would be simple: only children are like everyone else. Personality questionnaires do show that. But families are not made of personalities alone.

What really is different: a family of three

A family systems view does not ask what an only child is like. It asks what the family they grow up in looks like. The answer is geometric: mother, father and child make three. A triangle is the smallest shape in which two can be together and one outside.

Salvador Minuchin described the family as a system of smaller subsystems: the parents as a couple, the parents as parents, and the siblings. The sibling subsystem, in his view, is the first laboratory in which a child learns relationships with equals: negotiating, competing, forming alliances and making up without the adults. An only child does not have that laboratory at home. This does not mean they fail to learn these things; they learn them in the playground, at nursery, with cousins. It does mean that at home they are always the only child among adults.

A few features follow from that. They are not destiny, but they are more likely:

• All the attention goes to one place. The parents’ pride, worry, hope and fear have a single addressee. That can be a great deal of warmth and a great deal of weight at once.
• There is no witness. When something difficult happens at home, there is no one who will later say: “Yes, I remember it too, that really is how it was.”
• There is nowhere to step out of the triangle. Where there are several children, tension between the parents is spread out. Where there is one, every tension finds that one.
• The adult world is close. Only children often master conversation with adults early, and among their peers they sometimes feel older than they are.

I write about how everything in a family touches everything else in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

Roles, loyalty and coalitions when there is one child

In a family with several children the roles are shared out: one is the good one, another the rebel, a third the clown. An only child often gets several at once. They are the one who succeeds, the one who looks after people and the one who holds the parents together. Each role on its own is bearable. What is tiring is that there is nobody to take one over.

An only child’s position is especially delicate when the parents do not get on. Murray Bowen described how two people under tension almost automatically draw in a third, and in a family of three the third is always the same person. The child becomes the messenger (“tell your father that …”), the confidant (“you’re the only one I can tell”) or the judge. This is triangulation. When the child also takes on emotional care of a parent, we speak of parentification. Both happen to children with siblings too, except that they sometimes share the burden, or at least see it in one another.

In a triangle a coalition can take only two forms. Either the parents are together and the child is outside, which is healthy for the child even if sometimes lonely. Or one parent and the child are together and the other parent is outside. The second form feels to the child like a special closeness, but it costs them freedom: whoever is their mother’s ally finds it hard to leave without feeling they have abandoned her. I describe a similar dynamic for a child who has siblings in The favourite child: a quiet inequality in the family.

The third theme is loyalty. An only child knows they are the only chance of grandchildren, of the surname or the family trade carrying on, of Sunday lunches. Nobody needs to tell them. Decisions that are personal for other people, such as moving abroad, living without children or choosing a different profession, are therefore often weighed twice: once for themselves and once for their parents.

What shows up in adulthood

None of this is a diagnosis, and only children differ a great deal from one another. Even so, some themes recur among adults who grew up without siblings often enough to be worth naming.

The first is the relationship to conflict. Someone who never had a row with a brother at home and was playing with him again an hour later may experience an argument as something final. In a couple this shows up as avoiding disputes, or as an exaggerated fear that a single argument will end the relationship.

The second is a need for solitude, which partners from large families sometimes misread. For many an only child, being alone in a room is home, not rejection.

The third is responsibility for other people’s moods. A child who was the sole audience of two adults learned to read precisely how they were. In adulthood this is a valuable sensitivity and at the same time a tiring habit: in every room, they first check how everyone else is.

The fourth is separating from parents. Leaving home is a transition for any family, but with an only child a single step leaves the parents on their own. The process by which a person stays connected to their family and at the same time becomes their own person is called differentiation. It is not necessarily harder for an only child, but there is less room for mistakes the parents would not notice.

Caring for parents when you are on your own

There is a moment when almost every only child first truly feels that they have no siblings, and that moment is not in childhood. It comes when Mum has a fall or Dad begins to forget things.

“I can’t do Friday again. I’m taking Mum to her check-up.”
“That’s the third week running. Can’t someone else do it for once?”
“Who else?”
“I don’t know … You’ve got a cousin.”
“My cousin has his own mother. For mine I’m everything: the driver, the secretary and the daughter.”
“Then I’ll take your mum, and you go to that yoga class for once.”

(The dialogue is composed; these are not real people.)

The situation has two sides. The bad one is obvious: there is nobody to share the driving, the decisions, the costs and the fear with. There is nobody to say “I’ll go this week”. And when the parents die, there is no longer anyone who remembers the same kitchen.

The good side is less obvious, but only children often mention it themselves: there are no quarrels about who does more, who was always the favourite and who will get the house. The decisions are hard, but they are yours. When it comes to caring for parents, siblings are not always a help; sometimes they are a source of additional pain.

Since there is no sharing by the natural route, an only child has to build it, ideally before it becomes urgent. I write about the feeling that you never do enough in Caregiver guilt: when it never feels like enough, and about the practical routes in Where to find help as a carer: who to turn to when you can’t cope alone any more.

Exercise: a circle of people who are not siblings

The exercise is meant for adult only children, but it is useful for anyone who feels they face everything alone. You need a sheet of paper and fifteen minutes.

1. Draw three circles, one inside the other. Write your name in the centre.
2. In the inner circle, write the people you would ring at three in the morning. It does not matter whether they are relatives. If the circle is empty, or holds only your partner, take note of that without judging yourself.
3. In the middle circle, write the people who know your story. These are the ones who knew your parents, your childhood bedroom, your old address: a cousin, a friend from primary school, a neighbour. They are your witnesses.
4. In the outer circle, write the people who would help if you asked. Next to each name, write one thing you could ask them for.
5. Choose one name and get in touch this week. Not because you need something. A relationship you tend when things are calm is still there when they are not.

If you are curious how relationships were arranged in the generations before you, and whether there were other only children in the family, How to draw your own genogram: symbols, three generations and the right questions can help.

Where this story does not hold

I owe three objections, one to the research and two to myself.

First, the research is not entirely unanimous. In 2013 Lisa Cameron and colleagues published a study from China in the journal Science. They compared adults born just before the one-child policy was introduced with those born just after. In economic games, those who grew up as only children because of the policy were less trusting, less competitive and less willing to take risks. But this is a particular circumstance: being an only child by state decree, in a society where nearly all your peers were only children too. To draw conclusions from that about an only child from a small Slovenian town would be going too far. It does show that “no difference” holds for the average in certain settings and is not a law of nature.

Second, “only child” is not one experience. The only child of parents who wanted one child grows up differently from the only child of parents who wanted more and could not have them. A child who became the only one after losing a brother or sister grows up differently again, and so does a child of separated parents who lives by turns in two small triangles. What your being the only one meant to your parents says more than the fact that there is one of you. I write about the second of these stories in Secondary infertility: when a second child doesn’t come.

Third, the systemic description I gave above is a map of possibilities, not a forecast. Many couples with one child have a solid partnership, clear boundaries and a home full of cousins and friends. A child like that is not caught in any triangle that squeezes them. And many a child with four siblings was more alone than any only child.

If you are raising an only child

You do not need to have a second child so that the first will not be alone. The research does not support that. A few more practical things do follow from it.

Look after your relationship with your partner and your own friendships, so that your child is not your only conversation partner and only source of joy. Do not confide adult worries in them. Give them plenty of time with their peers, including unsupervised time in which children have to work things out for themselves. Let them disagree with you. And when they grow up, tell them out loud that their life is not a repayment: that they may leave, that they may live differently, and that you and your partner will do what you can for your old age yourselves.

When it makes sense to look for help

Being an only child is not a problem that needs treating. Talking to a therapist makes sense when you notice that around your parents you still feel like a messenger or a judge, when the thought of their old age paralyses you, when every disagreement with your partner feels like the end, or when you are worn out by care you cannot share with anyone.

In relational family therapy we look at what a child carried in the family and whom they were being loyal to by doing so, not at what kind of character they have. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work with individuals, couples and families, in person in Ljubljana, and also in English. If you would first like to lay your family picture out on paper, you can do that in the longer genogram session A Look into the Past.

What to remember

• The myth of the spoilt, selfish only child is more than a hundred years old and does not rest on good data.
• In a review of 115 studies, Falbo and Polit showed that only children do not differ from others in character, sociability or adjustment; newer research confirms the same for narcissism.
• What differs is the structure of the family: three members, all attention on one child, no witness at home and no sibling subsystem.
• An only child more easily becomes a confidant or go-between for their parents and more often carries expectations alone, and in adulthood the care for them as well.
• The support others are given through siblings can be built by an only child; ideally before it is urgently needed.