Are only children selfish, spoiled and lonely? Duh, no, a piece in the New Scientist recently concluded and unpicked all these stereotypes.
There are now many more only children: in 2022, 44% of UK families with dependent children will have only one child. According to researchers at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society, they are doing well. Dismissing the “outdated preconceptions and stereotypes about only children”, they found “an overall reassuring picture of the lives and outcomes of only children in the UK”.
Other research has shown that only children are not more narcissisticreport less loneliness and is as happy as or happier than those with siblings. Did those findings shift our biases? No. Speaking to New Scientist, Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and long-time only child researcher, said her long-standing reporting of no difference or small benefits for only children “didn’t do much to improve the stereotype”.
This is also true of our beliefs about birth order, the persistent idea that oldest children are dutiful and controlling, middle ones rebellious (but also peacemakers) and youngest children sociable and self-centered. We instinctively feel that this is true, but empirically it is not: “birth order has little or no substantive effect on personality”. according to on various studies. There is just too much going on in every family – yes, fortunately or unhappily, Tolstoy – for something that is simplistically true.
These indestructible assumptions are not only unreliable, they are old. The seminal study on only children was published in 1898 (and based on 46 only children out of 1,000 studied); Alfred Adler, who devised the birth order theory, was a contemporary of Freud.
But we like them anyway, like this year’s piece “eldest daughter syndrome” memes show. We identify as neurotically conscientious elders or maligned remedies; we are concerned only children are maladjusted. Why?
We all love a story that makes sense about the asylum (sorry, “multifactorial context of family environment”) where they raised us, I suppose. But even Adler thought birth order was in our heads. “Of course, it is not the child’s number … that affects his character, but the situation he is born into and the way he interprets it,” he said. wrote. Growing up with a big-age-gap brother, I’ve always attributed my various neuroses to an unholy eldest/only child bastard, but maybe it’s time to give science a shot and accept it’s probably just dumb (or “multifactorial”) luck.
