Look after number one
Only children
They make an odd bunch, my mentors: protest singer, children’s author, suffragette, sculptor, actor-turned-MP, comedienne, former US president and First Lady, and rock legend. But these giants of late 20th century helped to write what has been described as nothing less than “a new chapter in the history of the greatest shift in population demographics in the western world”.
Like me, Joan Baez, AA Milne, Sylvia Pankhurst, Henry Moore, Glenda Jackson, Dawn French, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Elvis had only one child.
What’s more, they seem to have enjoyed close relationships with their offspring. Baez, over the course of her nomadic career, conveyed her son Gabriel to many “strange places” that, as she put it recently, must have been “enriching” for him. Pankhurst, an admirer of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selasse, went to live in Addis Ababa with her son Richard.
Others appointed their children to do important work for them. When Jackson was elected to the House of Commons, she brought her son Dan with her. Hillary Clinton, elected a senator in her own right in 2001, handed over her responsibilities of White House hostess to her daughter Chelsea, albeit for only one month. The writer and activist Susan Sontag appointed her son David editor of her books. “I’m very pleased with the arrangement,” she once joked dryly. “I have great confidence in Mr. Rieff.’‘
These stories are not uncommon, and they’re becoming less unusual all the time. The percentage of women who have one child has more than doubled in the past 20 years, from 10 per cent to nearly 23 per cent. For obvious reasons, the figure for men is harder to determine, but only child families are the fastest growing families in the developed world. In Britain, more than a quarter of families have just one dependent child, up from a quarter 30 years ago. In New York, world capital of the only child, one young person in three has no siblings.
Clearly, there’s a trend going on here – you could call it the era of the only child – and I think I may be part of it. But am I really? My daughter, Nancy, is not yet two-and-a-half years old. So is she really an only child, or just the first of many to come?
To answer that question, it would be polite to ask Nancy’s mother. But I too have some say in the matter and, since the perils of pregnancy and childbirth don’t concern me directly, I can consider the options relatively dispassionately. And that’s important, because our decision has the potential to make a great impact outside our family too. It could even affect you.
BREAK
At first glance, population statistics can seem dreadfully dry. But remember that every figure conceals a moving personal story. “Demographers deal with births and deaths and marriages – the very stuff of the most highly charged literature and poetry,” notes Alaka Malwade Basu, who studies population growth at Cornell University. So bear with me while I run through some numbers.
The latest statistics for England and Wales show a birth rate of just 1.77 children per woman of childbearing age – and considerably less than at the height of the 1960s baby boom, in 1964, when the figure was 2.95. In Scotland, the rate has dropped below 1.5 per woman.
How to account for that decline? To some extent it’s because women are starting their families later – three-and-a-half years later, on average, than in 1970 – which leaves less time to have large families. And many women today will never have children – as many as one in five, a ratio not seen since the mass male fatalities of the First World War destroyed many women’s chances of starting a family.
Little attention has been paid to the social class of mothers with large and small families, but it seems the highs and lows are both substantially accounted for by the most successful women. On the one hand, it’s professionals and high achievers who can best afford to have large families (and fertility treatment). On the other hand, it’s professional and highly motivated women who leave childbirth till late. They gingerly have one child, argues Katherine Rake, of the Fawcett Society, and decide to leave it at that.
Elliot McAllister was born when his mother was 42. “The tests during pregnancy [for Down’s Syndrome and other issues] were awful,” says Jo McAllister, a graphic designer. “Rather than go through all that again we decided to have only one.”
Cathy Guthrie, an academic, was younger – just 33 – when she had Maddy. After Maddy turned two, Cathy and her husband, Andy, works in the oil business, wondered about having a second child. “We thought, ‘Shall we throw the pills away again?’” says Cathy. “And then we thought, Why? She is just right. We felt complete. I have friends who have more than one, and I’m full of admiration for them, but to be selfish about it, we have more space to be ourselves, and that’s good for her, too.”
The writer and comedian Jenny Éclair makes much the same point, if a little more drolly: “We are selfish. We don’t do sacrifice any more. We want children and we want a new pair of shoes as well – and the only way to do both is to have one child.” Similarly, Dawn French has said that her first child was a handful, and put her off having another.
But what suits individual families may not suit society at large. A recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research said we face a potentially disastrous “baby shortage”. Professor David Coleman, a demographer at Oxford University, is unhappy. We face “tremendous levels of unsustainable population ageing and population decline”, he says.
The rate of decline is extremely gradual, however. “Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high mortality,” the Economist recently noted. “Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low mortality. Women’s control over the number of children they have is an unqualified good.”
The greater concern these days is overpopulation. The number of people alive has already passed six billion – up from five billion in just 12 years. And that rate is unsustainable: scientific analysis suggests the planet can support, over the long term, no more than three billion.
World leaders know this, but individually few dare to broach directly the subject of population control. The exception is China, which introduced its only child directive in 1979. Since then, more than 100 million “little emperors” have been born to proud Chinese parents.
The environmental impact of a new child born in Britain is seven times that of a new Chinese child. The impact of American children is even greater, the award-winning writer Bill McKibben argues. McKibben, one of the first to draw attention to the problems of global warming in his 1989 bestseller, The End of Nature, argues in a more recent volume, Maybe One, that to have just one child is the ethical thing to do.
His message can be summarized thus: you are not likely to make a more environmentally important decision in your life than whether to add another human being to the earth.
McKibben ensured there would be no second child in his family by undergoing a vasectomy, and thoughtfully provides an account of this grisly procedure in the book. But he acknowledges that readers will reject his message if he doesn’t convince them that only children are perfectly capable of growing up happy and well adjusted. “If children are damaged by the experience of growing up without brothers or sisters, the compelling environmental arguments will go unheeded.”
BREAK
So what is the evidence? The theory that a child’s position in the family affects character first became popular a century ago. The idea was that first-borns would be domineering and successful, middle children would be non-confrontational and confused, and last children irresponsible and power hungry. Odd though it seems now, only children were used in many studies as a neutral “control group” – as if growing up without siblings had literally no effect at all – but in the 1970s they started to be the subject of studies themselves.
A glance at some of the most successful “onlies” (as they often call themselves) shows a shared aptitude for solitary occupations. The sportsmen include the world’s most successful cyclist, Lance Armstrong, and golfer, Tiger Woods. Franklin D Roosevelt was one of the greatest American presidents, while Queen Victoria presided over the British Empire at its most powerful. Only children have made notable solo musicians, from Frank Sinatra to Elvis. And there’s something remarkably singular about Ruby Wax – or Natalie Portman, who is not only one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People but also has a psychology degree from Harvard and speaks five languages fluently.
In fact, that proves little. We will never know how good Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods might have been at team sports if they’d grown up with siblings. And while Roosevelt was a great president and Victoria a great queen, most others who held those positions successfully had brothers and sisters. And if Wax does owe her achievements to being an only child, she nevertheless decided to have more than one child herself.
A study by the University of Texas found that only children’s personalities were in almost every way comparable with first-borns’. They were no more selfish, socially awkward, grandiose or needy. The most important factor is the quality of parenting. Another study, by the Institute of Population Research at Beijing University, confirmed that there is no great difference between onlies and children with siblings.
If a population skews too far towards only children, there may be wider implications. The Chinese policy has created a severe demographic imbalance, through the abortion and abandonment of girl babies. One male in every three, in urban China, is doomed never to find a partner. The long-term consequences are simply unimaginable, because nothing like that has ever happened before.
The gender bias is the other way round, in the UK, as Ros Kane discovered while researching her book, To Have an Only Child. Kane asked hundreds of parents why they had stopped at one. Mortifying though it is for me, as a man, to report this, several mothers replied that they had a girl and didn’t want to risk having a boy. Worse still was the mother who stopped at one child because she “already had a boy and didn’t want to risk having another”.
This, er, may be the place to bring in two other iconic women who had only children, somewhat less inspirational than the others. Brigitte Bardot once described her son as “a tumour”, while Dr Marie Stopes, the family planning pioneer, fed her boy Harry on nothing but carrots for breakfast, and obliged him to wear knitted frocks “so as not to interfere with the growth of his genitals”.
BREAK
And while we’re focusing on the downside, it may be worth mentioning here that one of the most common explanations for women having an only child is that relationships fall apart under the strain of the first child appearing. Not only Bardot and Stopes split up early from the fathers of their offspring. Baez, Pankhurst, Sontag and Jackson did so too.
If couples do stay together, says Kane, they soon get used to being asked when they intend to have another. The journalist Amy Raphael was quizzed when her daughter Bonny was only a month old. “I was stunned.” An only child herself, Raphael said she didn’t want another. But 18 months later people are still asking. “I’m as sure as anyone can be. I feel happy. I have fulfilled my maternal longings.”
The impertinent questions tend to stop around the time the first child reaches seven, according to Ann Richardson, a London-based psychotherapist who runs workshops for families with only children, many of whom have no idea that their own experiences are common.
Parents are also commonly informed, no less rudely, that it is selfish to have just one and unfair on the child. But is that true? Parents who are not particularly child-centred may find it hard to play their only child, which could cause loneliness. But siblings don’t always provide the remedy. One mother told Kane anonymously, “My relationship with my brother coloured my decision not to have more children. I thought, ‘What’s the point?’” A third looked back on her own childhood and recalled: “Having siblings was in every way a bad thing.”
Like these mothers, I grew up with siblings myself. So did my wife. I never thought having siblings was “a bad thing”, though naturally we argued and fought at times. In fact, I always felt, when visiting my only-child cousin, that something was missing. But as a parent myself I now understand what these mothers are talking about. We recently took Nancy to see a friend with three children. The boys were tired, but refused to go up to bed. The oldest and the youngest had tantrums. So their parents split up to take one each upstairs and left us with the third, who sullenly watched a video till his turn came.
Nancy gets tired and stroppy too, at times, but when that happens she has both parents to put her to bed together, with plenty of time to read her stories. Stories about only children, perhaps, always been disproportionately common: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Oedipus, King Arthur, Mowgli, Peter Pan, Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Pip, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Enid Blyton’s George, Roald Dahl’s Danny, Charlie, George, James and Sophie, Philip Pullman’s Lyra, and Harry Potter.
One reason only children are so common in literature may be that they make narrative simpler, but Kane argues that there’s another purpose: they give young readers unfortunate enough to have siblings “a taste of what it is like, or could be like, to receive undiluted attention from adults”.
The fact is that having an only child can be a real luxury. You enjoy the experience of parenthood without absolutely saying goodbye to the life you led before. Like Baez and Pankhurst, the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy took her daughter everywhere: when Rachel turned five they went off to India, and they carried on traveling together for many years after.
Others, slightly less adventurous, routinely take their children into adult-only company, or to places such as restaurants, where a solitary child is welcomed but where children in the plural might be regarded as a menace. “We can do more,” confirms McAllister, the designer. “And when we go out, or on holidays, Elliot always makes friends with adults. He joins in.” Cathy Guthrie agrees.
People say that only children are spoiled. Even only children say it: the stylist Katie Grand declares that she was “always the centre of attention” when she was growing up.
But surely they don’t have to be spoiled. If Nancy doesn’t learn to share and negotiate with siblings, she learns similar social skills at nursery. And she doesn’t get her own way home either, because she has to accommodate her parents’ wishes. Despite this, I’m delighted to discover, only children have been shown to hold parents in greater affection than other children do.
So that’s a lot of reasons to feel happy with just one child. But I’m not sure that I’m willing to follow McKibben, just yet, and submit to a vasectomy for the sake of the planet. Again and again we hear from friends announcing the birth of a second or third child. It’s a drumbeat at once terrifying and compelling – and all the more so, I daresay, for women, who hear an echo in the ticking clock of their ovaries. So we may still decide, one day, to give Nancy a playmate.
7 May 06