One and Only

The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One

Lauren Sandler

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781451626971
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A funny, tough-minded case for being and having an only child, debunking the myths about only children and taking glory in the pleasures of singletons: "A swift and absorbing read…may change your mind and the national conversation" ( Psychology Today ). Journalist Lauren Sandler is an only child and the mother of one. After investigating what only children are really like and whether stopping at one child is an answer to reconciling motherhood and modernity, she learned a lot about herself—and a lot about our culture's assumptions. In this heartfelt work, Sandler legitimizes a discussion about the larger societal costs of having more than one, which Jessica Grose in her review in The New Republic calls, "the vital part of the conversation that's not being discussed in the chatter" surrounding parenting. Between the recession, the stresses of modern life, and the ecological dangers ahead, there are increasing pressures on parents to think seriously about singletons. Sandler considers the unique ways that singletons thrive, and why so many of their families are happier. One and Only examines these ideas, including what the rise of the single-child family means for our economies, our environment, and our freedom, leaving the reader "informed and sympathetic, " writes Nora Krug in the Washington Post.Through this journey, "Sandler delves deeply, thoughtfully, and often humorously into history, culture, politics, religion, race, economics, and of course, scientific research" writes Lori Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review. "I couldn't put it down, " says Randi Hutter Epstein in the Huffington Post. Sandler "isn't proselytizing, she's just stating it like it is. Seductively honest." At the end, Sandler has quite possibly cracked the code of happiness, demonstrating that having just one may be the way to resolve our countless struggles with adulthood in the modern age.

SIX

SAVE YOURSELF

I was trolling through Craigslist, looking for a secondhand Flexible Flyer wagon, when I idly clicked over to the vacation swaps. There it was: a loft in a garret by the Canal Saint-Martin, just a few blocks from where we had honeymooned for a week in a borrowed apartment. We knew the exquisite boulangerie on that very block. The couple—two men, one a trumpet player and one a medic who worked in a prison—were looking for a place in Brooklyn for a week. We had miles. We had wanderlust. We said yes. Some friends clucked that it would be too hard with Dahlia. (“A six-floor walk-up? Are you crazy?”) Other rolled their eyes in camped-up jealousy. It was indeed a challenge, all those flights of stairs, her lunchtime fussiness gathering storms of scorn, the relentless effort to keep every one of their dust-caked tchotchkes out of her mouth (not to mention the lube collection by the bed we had to squirrel away). But we considered this a tiny price for those days of watching her play with French kids at playgrounds, marvel at the museums, and savor the caramel ice cream at Berthillon.

The second time Dahlia went to Paris, my parents had rented an apartment, making good on a lifelong promise to each other to spend a month there after retiring. (Rather, they made good on the Paris part of the promise—neither has found it worth kicking the work habit when it affords them, well, a rental in the Marais.) Dahlia came down with a stomach flu as we were boarding the plane and threw up, sitting on my lap, for the entirety of that dark transatlantic night. Her vomiting continued as we circled the city in a van—filled with a dozen tight-lipped other passengers—en route to the apartment. The next day, rosy cheeked and demanding pâte for lunch, she pointed to a fountain with a statue spouting water from its mouth and said, “That was me on the plane.” That’s when I taught my daughter the phrase, “Funny because it’s true.”

On that trip I met a woman named Michelle at a café in the shadow of the Pompidou. She was a former computer programmer in a sleeveless batik dress and African jewelry. Michelle’s son, Pierre, now in college, went to school around the corner, where most of his classmates were only children like himself. “When Pierre was two, I spent a year thinking about it, whether to have another,” Michelle says, stirring her café crème. “Now we can choose—so it becomes a problem since you have to decide, yes? I decided it wasn’t possible for me. It was important for me to travel and take pictures. I worked, I was a mother, I had no time. I felt like I was a prisoner. A happy prisoner, but still a prisoner.”

Despite that feeling, Michelle wondered if she should have a second, in case something tragic happened to Pierre—an impulse I’ve heard many parents admit. She even discussed this with a friend, a mother of four, whose oldest had nearly died in an accident. Her friend thought she was crazy. Michelle’s husband wanted another, but he was passive about it. Eventually, she let the anxiety go. “I managed to do what I wanted to do,” she says. “I’ve lived the life I wanted in my thirties, my forties, my fifties—they’re all different lives, with different desires, which you never realize when you’re young. I worked, I had a husband, I had a child. We traveled together. I took pictures. And Francis and I are still together—a very rare thing among people I know. You learn more and more that women don’t do exactly what they want. You have to stay selfish. And it’s hard to.”

A 2007 Pew survey found that at a rate of nearly three to one, people believe the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.” Pew also found that only forty-one percent of today’s adults see parenthood as very important to a successful marriage, down from sixty-two percent in 1990. If anything, it can be a detriment. The University of Chicago’s Linda Waite, whose research focuses on how to make marriages last, tells me, “You’re better off to ignore your kids and focus on your relationship than to focus on your kids and ignore your relationship,” which she says few people have the courage to do. Instead, she says, we do the opposite. “Kids, kids, kids. That’s how we forget about our own needs—it’s all about them. And no one is happy like that.”

What my mother needed to be a happy person is not what all mothers need. She needed to feel she was making a significant contribution through her work, and not just her family, working for more than the necessary paycheck. She needed to live somewhere where she could walk a few blocks to buy a really good cookie when she got the craving after dinner. She needed to travel, to make her marriage as significant as her motherhood, to be able to go supermarketing and pick up the dry cleaning without being outnumbered by her kids, plural, who were performing the theater of rivalry in the produce section. I remember errands without another kid to help me make my case that carob was not the same as chocolate. I had no yard to play in. Was I a happy kid? Sure. Was she a happy mother? I think so.

• • •

Dahlia is home sick from school. She’s dancing in a tutu from my second grade recital, its orange, green, and pink ruffles now rediscovered and tugged over her monkey pajamas. At her insistence (and my pleasure), I too am wearing a tutu—a can-can skirt I saved from junior high, pulled up over my jeans. She twirls and jumps between the pocket doors to our bedroom. This is what I imagined when I first saw our house, that these doors would make a perfect proscenium for living room performances. We spin together and wave our hands like the mice in the video of the Baryshnikov Nutcracker that is her longtime obsession. I tell myself to remember this. Then I look at the clock, remember the workday is in full swing, and scramble up to check my email.

There I see a note from a demographer; if I can call him now, he’s free for an interview. I bellow downstairs for Justin to abandon the paperwork he’s doing in favor of the next installment of Nutcracker mice and scurry out to my office clutching my frilled skirt around me. I dial up Philip Morgan at the Carolina Population Center, eager to hear his analysis of the recent study he conducted on our cultural notions of ideal family size. He parses a bevy of numbers that all add up to his summary that nobody wants just one kid, not anywhere, not even in Europe, where fertility rates have plummeted. Morgan is clinical and abrupt, circling back to the numbers whenever I attempt to talk about our cultural biases, our politics, what we see on TV. I explain to him that I am an only child by design and that the small child prancing in a tutu in my house may well be one too.

“Listen, no offense to your mother or to yourself,” he says, “but I had three sons and I’m glad they have brothers. One of the most enjoyable things I did as a parent was to watch my kids interact with one another, hanging out, seeing them as adults interacting.” I am silent. He continues, “I can’t imagine having just one child. What would that be like? Their relationships with each other have been the greatest joy of my life.” I get it. I do. All I have to do is see our friends’ kids—plural—playing together, caring for each other, sharing a secret language. All I have to do is watch Dahlia’s joy and tenderness when she gets to hold their baby brothers and sisters. Justin sees it too, and he knows what she’s missing. But he reminds me often how the sacrifices we’d need to make to raise another child would impact Dahlia’s happiness—not to mention our own.

Robin Simon of Wake Forest University surveyed well-being data from 13,000 respondents and, in a 2005 issue of The Journal of Health and Social Behavior, published her findings that adults with children experience depression and unhappiness in greater numbers than non-parents. That’s regardless of class, race, or gender. Simon understands this phenomenon as a ruthless combination of social isolation, lack of outside support, and the anticipation of the overflow of bliss that we believe is the certain outcome of every birth. “Our expectations that children guarantee a life filled with happiness, joy, excitement, contentment, satisfaction, and pride—are an additional, though hidden, source of stress for all parents,” she wrote in Contexts magazine, adding, “negative emotions may also lead parents with children of all ages, especially mothers, to perceive themselves as inadequate since their feelings aren’t consistent with our cultural ideal.” Right on, sister.

I find that parenting offers an untold bounty of happiness, joy, excitement, contentment, satisfaction, and pride—just not all the time. Each child is an additional source of pride, sure, but also an additional infringement on freedom, privacy, and patience. I can understand why Jean Twenge, in a study on parenthood and marital satisfaction, found that happiness in a marriage tumbles with each additional child. This finding bears out worldwide and not just in the United States. Demographer Mikko Myrskylä discovered that in some regions, like southern Europe, happiness was also significantly higher among parents with one child. At a demographic conference, Myrskylä tells me about the immense pleasure he takes in his two children—though he’s known to put in longer hours at work these days, he says, since it feels “like a holiday” after being at home.

At that conference, a young researcher named Anna Baranowska presents a paper giving additional heft to the finding that one child may maximize personal happiness. The first child tends to spike happiness in a parent, she declared, while every subsequent child lowers it. In fact, social scientists have surmised since the 1970s that singletons offer the rich experience of parenting without the consuming efforts that multiple children add: all the miracles and shampoo mohawks but with leftover energy for sex and conversation. The research of Hans-Peter Kohler, a professor of demography at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jere Berman, a professor of economics, gives weight to that idea. In their much-discussed analysis of a survey of 35,000 Danish twins, women with one child said they were more satisfied with their lives than women with none or more than one. As Kohler tells me, “At face value, you should stop at one child to maximize your subjective well-being.”

Then again, Kohler’s wife was pregnant with his third child when he conducted his study, and he says his family is very happy. Of course, it all depends on what constructs your subjective well-being. That’s, well, as subjective as it comes. When University of Pennsylvania demography professor Samuel Preston was conducting research to help him predict the future of fertility, the discovery that surprised him most was that parents fell so madly in love with their first child that they wanted a second. I am not someone who spent my first three decades imagining a glowing pregnancy followed by maternal bliss. In fact, I used to suspect that mothers who talked about their children with such unbridled awe didn’t have much else going on in their lives. Then I had my daughter. Now I pull out my iPhone to show off pictures like the rest of them.

I don’t believe that Kohler’s research will tell me how to be happy any more than it told him. And I don’t think Philip Morgan should be anything but thrilled with his three boys any more than I think Hillary Clinton should have been baking cookies at the White House—or giving Chelsea a sibling—when her subjective well-being depended on so many extra-domestic factors. We can’t do much more than know ourselves.

Even though Robin Simon found that people with kids report higher levels of depression than those without, they also “derive more purpose and meaning in life than adults who have never had children.” Is happiness a result of finding purpose and meaning? Is it the absence of depression? I’d contend it has a lot to do with having the freedom to live the life you want to live, whether that means five kids, or one, or none at all. To broaden out even more, Mikko Myrskylä discovered that the lower the overall fertility of the society, the happier are those who have children compared to those without. In a working paper for the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, he offered the following analysis: in lower fertility cultures, the people who most want to have a child do—and they have only as many as they want—whereas in higher fertility societies, “Social pressure forces a less select group of people to have children.” In other words, when people can make choices based on their own desires rather than what the world is telling them to do, the entire well-being of a society floats a little higher.

• • •

“What’s so great about work anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old. Work won’t drive you to get a mammogram and take you out after for soup. It’s too much pressure on my one kid to expect her to shoulder all those duties alone. Also, what if she turns on me? I am pretty hard to like. I need a backup.” So wrote Tina Fey in the final chapter of her book Bossypants, titled “What Should I Do with My Last Five Minutes?” The chapter is about, as she puts it, how her “last five minutes of being famous are timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a [second] baby.” After she submitted her final draft to her editor, Fey opted to breed again, but not until providing us with a rare glimpse into the inner monologue of fertility ambivalence. It goes something like this, she wrote: “Should I? No. I want to. I can’t. I must. Of course not. I should try immediately.”

It’s those “Last Five Minutes” that are key. As people increasingly put off child rearing—searching for the right relationship, satisfying work, a sense of readiness, none of which is guaranteed to be found—the relative freedom of preparenting adulthood contrasts even more madly with what Justin and I call the “new normal” of life under lockdown with a kid. We used to joke about how great it would be if we could get one of those cat feeders on a timer and fill it with applesauce, or find a baby monitor with a range that would stretch to the nearest bar. He and I are lucky to share both a sense of humor about parenting and a desire not to stretch ourselves to a fragile membrane just to provide a sibling for Dahlia. Not every couple is so aligned in these choices, even if they’re ambivalent ones.

The practice of making a mutual life of both adventure and cozy domesticity has soldered us together over all these years. We know how parenting unavoidably shifts the balance of that equation, and we feel it acutely—if often pleasurably—having spent years that were weighted in the other direction. Jean Twenge believes that the sudden and ongoing loss of control over one’s life, after we’ve had so much of it for so many years, underscores the uptick in dissatisfaction with parenting. “It’s all about delayed fertility,” Twenge tells me. “You had this time to live your life; you know what you’re missing. When you’ve traveled the world or been in the boardroom, or even just had a regular job and had the freedom to eat lunch when you want to—it’s an acute shock, and many people never get over it.”

Having waited until my midthirties to have a kid, I know this well. To be sure, motherhood hasn’t magically cured me of my desire to go to parties and rock shows. But Twenge says the very same culture that is insisting we have more babies is also delivering some crazy doublespeak. “You’re supposed to be able to have it all—all the kids, all the freedom, and no compromises,” she says. “Like, when I talk to people about reality”—the reality that you can’t devote your entire life to a career, as well as parenting, as well as leisure; something’s gotta give—“they say, ‘you’re telling us to give up on our dreams; you want us to settle.’ People say, ‘I will never compromise’—that’s the essence of the problem.”

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had in which people tell me they didn’t “choose” to have an only child, though they did choose to try to conceive for the first time after their fortieth birthday. Delaying one’s fertility usually means making the choice to have fewer children. I’m all for self-actualization. I’m all for the achievement of women in the marketplace. I’m all for signing on for this madness with the right partner. I’m all for putting it off until you think it’s the right time. But in most cases, if you haven’t tried to have a second child before your body timed out, that’s a choice you’ve made. A tough one, and one you might feel something akin to regret about. But life choices tend to be made sequentially, this one as much as any other.

As long as the parent of a singleton is branded as selfish, people will have reason to take the defensive tack that it wasn’t a choice they made. If we could eradicate the social stigma that stubbornly clings to the parents of only children, this defensiveness would disappear as well. So might the anxiety-laden behaviors that it yields. Carol Graham, who researches happiness and the family at the Brookings Institution, tells me, “The later people postpone fertility, the more they dive in hook, line, and sinker. They’ve got to do everything for their kids.” Guilt, she reminds me, is a powerful motor. And at the same time, the farther we advance in our careers, the tougher it is on us to devote our energies elsewhere. No wonder psychologist Mathew White at the University of Plymouth has found higher levels of depressive symptoms among women who feel they have sacrificed their work for their families.

All of this adds up to a new level of angst, especially within the demographic that delays fertility the longest, the people who are higher achieving than ever: white American women. They are far more miserable than their mothers were, according to Andrew Oswald, an economist who studies happiness at the University of Warwick. “Highly educated American women are supposed to do it all—they’re supposed to have all the virtues and accomplishments of their grandmothers but be an editor at a fashion magazine or run their own successful advertising companies,” he tells me. (My mind prompts the Dead Poets Society chant, “Gotta do more, gotta be more.”) Our expectations for success and happiness have become so supersized, as Twenge says, “it’s gotten to a level of delusion.”

Workaday achievement is insufficient; we aim for Fortune 500 achievement. And in our “pursuit of happiness,” perhaps the greatest marketing slogan ever penned, written right into our Declaration of Independence, even happiness isn’t enough; we expect euphoria. Anything less is compromise, which is anathema to Americans in particular. “This unwillingness to compromise is built into our individualism,” says Twenge. Oswald, who is English, says that just because other countries aren’t quite as single-mindedly triumphalist as we are, it doesn’t mean European women have found the secret to bliss. They’re increasingly more miserable as well, he points out, just not in big American portions of unhappiness. “We’re all in this together in Western society,” he says.

When I ask Oswald about Kohler’s study that suggests stopping at one kid might provide a cure to some of this angst, he says it makes sense to him, not that it’s the choice he and his wife made. Clinically, statistically, he says there’s nothing but support for singletons as the way to balance the profound pleasures of parenting with some semblance of a liberated adulthood. “No one’s going to tell you otherwise,” he tells me. But who is making fertility choices based on statistics? As Alaka Malwade Basu noted in Population and Development Review, demographers have “overstated rationality at the expense of emotions.” Instead, we lie awake at night thinking, as Tina Fey did, “Do I want another baby? Or do I just want to turn back time and have my daughter be a baby again?” I think this often. Many people I’ve interviewed admit the same.

We yearn for more parenting, for less parenting, for more work, for less work, for more pleasure—well, never for less pleasure. As a mother named Diana says reflectively when w...