Netmums' writer Stephanie Lowe discusses the dynamics of raising an only child, referencing psychologist G. Stanley Hall's 1896 stereotype.
I booked my now-eight-year-old one-to-one football coaching recently. On the drive home, a friend said three words that stopped me cold.
'Must be nice. ' She meant it warmly and I did take it that way. I smiled, nodded and changed the subject. I then spent the rest of the journey justifying myself to no one in my head.
It's not extravagant – is it? It's just easier with one, we don't have to split the cost. It makes sense. Nobody asked, but I answered anyway.
I think that's what having an only child does to you eventually – you stop waiting for the judgment and start delivering it yourself, give your defence a head start. My child's existence can look spoiled I read this thing on Instagram recently where a child psychologist was saying 'kids need friction in their life'. They need to hear no, it's critical they sit with the feeling when things don't go their way.
With one kid, sometimes I feel I have to manufacture that friction. Because, when we go on holiday, we go where he wants to go. When we eat out, we order what he likes. There are no siblings to negotiate with, no compromises to broker, no one being dragged somewhere they hate.
From the outside, I know how that looks. It looks frictionless. And maybe – in the context of one child – it looks spoiled. But it isn't frictionless, it's just smaller.
A family of three making decisions that fit for us, that's not indulgence it's just maths. My cousin jokes that my son orders steak at restaurants. The thing is, yeah he does. With three kids she would – could – never.
With one, we can. And somehow that's become a punchline. As if that's a character flaw rather than just, again, maths. The problem is that 'just maths' doesn't land well at the school gate.
One-and-done families exist in a kind of weird social space. Too common to be unusual, too unusual to be unremarkable. We're 44% of UK families with children, according to ONS data. Nearly half, and yet the eyebrows still go up.
The stereotype is 128 years old The idea that only children are spoiled, lonely and socially stunted dates to 1896. A psychologist called G. Stanley Hall declared being an only child 'a disease in itself.
' His research has since been widely discredited. One-and-done parents have been living with the hangover ever since. Professor Alice Goisis, Professor of Demography at UCL's Centre for Longitudinal Studies, has spent years studying only children using UK data spanning five decades. Speaking to the BBC, she said the facts do not support the idea that only children have a deficit in social skills compared to children with siblings.
They are, she added, comparable in terms of personality, relationships and personal development. Writing for UCL in 2023, Alice went further. Her research found that growing up in a financially disadvantaged household had a significantly greater impact on children's cognitive development than whether or not they had siblings. Put simply: it's not about whether your child has a sibling.
It's about everything else going on at home. The evidence is clear. And yet here I am, pre-apologising for dinner time steaks and 1-2-1 football coaching in my own head. I don't force my son to share – but I still cringe when he doesn't I don't force my son to share and that is a deliberate choice.
But when he exercises that choice – when he says no, this is mine – I feel it. Not because I think he's wrong. Because I know exactly what someone watching is thinking: 'oh, well he's an only child isn't he?
' I don't want him shrinking himself socially to prove a point about his family structure. I don't want him over-compromising during play because he absorbed – directly from me, from the air, from a thousand small signals – that his existence needs justifying. And I know I'm not alone in this. We tie ourselves in knots over it.
Nearly half of UK families have one child – so why are we still on the back foot? The reasons one-child families are growing are well-documented: This isn't a niche lifestyle, or a consolation prize and it isn't a red flag for future selfishness. And yet the comments keep coming. Will you have another?
He needs a sibling. It's not fair on him. Nobody asks why other parents had two, nobody seems to feel the right to question whether that was the right call. Also nobody raises sibling rivalry, or the reality that many adult siblings are estranged, or the mental load of managing two entirely different children's needs.
But somehow it's always the family with one child that needs to explain itself. I suspect it's part cultural hangover from 1896, part discomfort with a family that looks different from the default, or maybe part the human tendency to mistake 'different' for 'wrong.
' 'Must be nice,' my friend said, and she was right – it is nice... sometimes. Other times it's a decision I've turned over more times than I can count. The irony that being one-and-done mum can be lonely is not lost on me, but it doesn't need a defence. I do know that, I'm just working on believing it.
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