Only Children and Other Parenting Ideas The Media Love

At least that’s the parenting myth supposedly debunked by TIME Magazine with help of a small boy with a knowing smile named Bryar. No, not Bryan as I first read. B-R-A-Y-A-R. The text above his strawberry blond head on the July 19th cover tells us he and other children without brothers and sisters, contrary to the popular belief, are “just fine”. In fact we go on to learn they’re darn smart and successful. 

The cover story makes a passable attempt at refuting the stereotype, at least the bad parts – onlies are selfish, socially-inept, spoiled. Turns out, much of the so-called evidence of The Misfit Only comes from antiquated work, most famously G. Stanley Hall’s 1896 study -”Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children”.  A historical gem not to be taken too seriously these days in light of our infinitely tighter methodologies and analyses. Though he founded the American Psychological Association and hung with Freud and Jung, G also harbored a strong authoritarian streak tossed with equal parts racism, elitism and religiosity – thought America was headed straight down the crapper with all the talk of individual freedoms and dignity. Children and no doubt most adults were savages who’d stay out of prison not to mention hell only through a generous use of the rod. Children without siblings? Somewhere slightly above the devil’s spawn. Not that G had any particular research biases…

Nor do any other researchers, hmmm, like those studying only children (my two cents):

No one has done more to disprove Hall’s stereotype (I bet!!!) than Toni Falbo*, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. An only child herself and the mother of one (you don’t say! how rare in academia, uh, not!), Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China (and what a great control pool there in China – how many kids with siblings? Chinese onlies compared to who?), drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago (ancient research, ancient methods), she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies (conducted even earlier!!!!) of only children from 1925 onward (including G. Stanley’s Victorian gem) that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence. Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren’t measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement (ahem,correlational data, not always well controlled).