The only child stigma, debunked

This story first appeared in The Highlight, Vox’s digital magazine unpacking the big ideas changing our present and shaping our future. Become a Vox Member to read these stories first.

Jillian Woinarowicz, 35, is used to people asking her questions about being an only child. As a kid growing up in Olympia, Washington, in the 1990s, telling a new friend or classmate that she didn’t have siblings always prompted questions: Was she bored all the time? Did it mean that her family was rich? Did she feel lonely?

“I felt like I was a novelty,” she says now. “I was the only only child that a lot of people knew.”

Now, as her peers consider having children of their own, they still turn to her as a novelty, although the tone of the questions have changed. “I have so many people come up to me and say, ‘I think we’re gonna only have one kid, do you hate your life?’” says Woinarowicz, who is pregnant with what will be her only child. “They look to me for reassurance, like, ‘Are you sure you’re okay? Is my kid going to be okay?’”

Fewer Americans are having kids; the US birth rate fell 23 percent from 2007 to 2022, while the percentage of childless adults aged 55 to 64 — past their reproductive years — hit 19.6 percent in 2018. The country is on track to have more people over 65 than under 18 for the first time in history by 2034, prompting alarm from economists and politicians. The reasons for the drop in fertility are manifold: climate doom, financial precarity and inflation, and a lack of support for families and working mothers.

But while the birth rate has been dropping ever since the 1980s, the rate of having one child has stayed nearly the same: In 2022, 20 percent of US women age 44 or younger (which the US Census considers the end of reproductive age) had only one child in their lifetime, compared to 18 percent in 1982. Americans are largely choosing between having no kids or two or more.

Notably, when Americans contemplate having children, they envision bigger families. A 2023 Gallup poll asked Americans how many children were ideal: 44 percent said two, 29 percent said three, and 12 percent said four. Only 3 percent of Americans said one child was the best number for a family.

Many Americans with siblings may consider being (or having) an only child as undesirable, disadvantageous, even unnatural. But according to scientific studies and many only children themselves, that’s not true. Only children don’t grow up to be more isolated or spoiled or socially awkward.

The debates over natalism and antinatalism can sound apocalyptic: Some people fear the end of society and eventual extinction of the human race, while others argue that it’s immoral to propagate the species given our ongoing ecological destruction. Add in the costs, and many people are feeling understandable angst as they contemplate whether to have a kid — and how many.

Let’s be honest: None of us are going to decide the fate of the world on our own. These are personal decisions. But there is an obvious compromise. You don’t have to choose between abstaining from parenthood entirely or having a horde of children. You could just have one kid. They’ll be fine.

Having siblings has been more common throughout human history; children without them have always been both “only” and “other,” the literal odd kid out at the schoolyard. We all know the stereotypes.

“There’s a widespread belief in the U.S. that only children are lonely, selfish, and maladjusted,” says Toni Falbo, a social psychologist at the University of Texas who has studied only children since the 1970s.

Historically, people had bigger families for practical reasons: with high child mortality, the more kids you had, the more likely your family line would survive. Besides, in many agrarian communities, more kids meant more help living off the land.

In the late 19th century, the advantages of having multiple children started to fade, but the prejudice against only children remained. In 1907, G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association and founder of child psychology who wrote the first large-scale study of only children, declared that “being an only child is a disease in itself;” in 1922, psychologist A.A. Brill wrote that “it would naturally be best for the individual as well as the race that there should be no only children.”

A decade later, the Great Depression prompted a spike in only children as people had fewer children out of economic necessity. Yet that only contributed to the stigma: Having only one child was a sign that a family couldn’t afford to have more.

In the baby boom years after World War II, larger families became more common again, as the total fertility rate increased from 2.3 children per woman in 1940 to more than 3.7 in 1957. Throughout the 1950s, Gallup polls found that over 70 percent of Americans thought the ideal family included three or more kids. Since then, average family size has dropped, in large part due to widespread access to contraception.

Growing up in the Washington, DC suburbs in the 1950s, Falbo, an only child herself, didn’t have friends who were only children, and when she started her doctoral research in the 1970s, she decided to study the stereotypes she had grown up with. Over the decades, she has repeatedly found that evidence does not support them.

“The assumption is that being an only child warps people for the rest of their lives, but the research suggests that they’re just like everybody else, not especially likely to be crazy or unhappy,” says Falbo. In 1986, she published a comprehensive meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children since the 1920s, finding that “across all developmental outcomes, only children were found to be indistinguishable from firstborns and people from small families.”

More recent studies have found that kindergartners with siblings have better social skills, but that by adolescence, only children experience as much friendship as their peers. Before entering the school system, only children (or kids at least five years older than their siblings) may not have as much experience around other kids, but they quickly catch up.

“Whether you have siblings or not is not a critical variable,” says Falbo. It just doesn’t matter that much.

Yet the prejudices persist — and only children encounter them all their life.

When Mary Peck was growing up on Long Island in the 1960s and 1970s, classmates at her Catholic school teased her for not having siblings. “People would say things like, ‘Were you so bad that they didn’t want any more kids?’” says Peck, who remembers praying every night for a little sister. “I hated being an only child.”

Fifty years later, she still thinks she would have been better off with siblings. Peck is neurodivergent, and describes her parents as strict and controlling. “Sometimes I think that maybe it’s better that I was an only, because if there was another child, they would have had to go through the same thing, and I don’t want that,” she says. ‘But I wish I had had a sibling to protect me.”

At 61, she still feels belittled for being an only child as an adult, although the remarks feel more insidious. At a parent-teacher conference for her younger son, one of his teachers described another child in the class as having “only-child syndrome.” At a family party, when she remarked about a sweet kid to her brother-in-law, he replied, “Yeah, he’s nice for an only child.” When her nephew was dating an only child, his mom hoped they wouldn’t end up together.

“I was at a wedding recently, and when the bride’s sister gave her maid-of-honor speech, she said, ‘A sister is worth a thousand friends,’” says Peck. “I felt like I wanted to throw up.”

She has three kids herself, and although it was challenging in terms of finances and time, she never considered only having one. “If you have one child, you can give them all your financial resources and attention, but I still think that if you balance it out, you’re better off giving them a sibling,” she says. “I would rather have a sister than 50 Barbie dolls.”

Today, parents are expected to spend more money and more time on their children than ever before. Is it better for a child to have all possible attention and resources, or to have a sibling to split it with? If you only have one child, are you depriving them? Variations of the question pop up on message boards like r/OnlyChild and Facebook groups like “One and Done” and “The Only-Child Group.” And, of course, conflicted parents-to-be ask their personal experts: adult only children.

I’m an only child myself, and over the past couple years, as I’ve spent the weekends of my early 30s at a parade of weddings and baby showers, I’ve learned to anticipate the question. It usually happens while I’m waiting in line for a cocktail or the bathroom.

A female acquaintance comes up to me, with a tell-tale glint of desperation in her eye. She has a toddler, or maybe she’s pregnant, and while she and her partner always planned to have multiple kids, it’s all turning out to be way harder than she expected. She knows I’m an only child, and — insert sheepish grin here — I seem well-adjusted. If she only has one kid, can they still grow up to be a decent, happy person?

It’s an innocuous hypothetical that implies a more incredulous, insidious question: Yes, I present well, but beneath the bridesmaid’s dress, what are the lifelong scars I carry from my only childhood?

When I share this with Jennifer Ma, an only child in Westchester, New York, she laughs and commiserates. “So many people ask me about being an only child, because if they have siblings, they always think being an only is a bad thing,” she says.

Ma enjoyed growing up as an only child, but after her son was born five years ago, she thought seriously about having a second child, largely because she’s never experienced being part of a family that includes siblings. She and her husband recently decided to stick with one child, both because of her positive experiences and the cost of raising kids in America.

“Motherhood has been wonderful, but also really hard, and I don’t have the mental and physical resources to have another child,” she says. “Besides, I don’t know that I’d be who I am today if my parents hadn’t been able to give me what they did.”

Economic downturns make it more daunting to support a growing family, which brings down the birth rate. That happened in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and during the oil crises of the 1970s. For millennials, economic challenges have twice pushed down the birth rate, leading many to delay or reconsider having children: after the 2008 recession and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The flimsy US social safety net can simultaneously make it difficult to raise kids (no universal child care) and makes parents dependent on children when they get older (poorly funded elder care). That can make having kids seem paradoxically less appealing while being more necessary. It also gives siblings a vital role. As kids, they can help take care of each other; as adults, they can offer child care as aunts and uncles, and share the burden of caring for aging parents.

“I have a lot of family I can lean on, but it’s definitely different than having another person who has that parent relationship with them,” says Woinarowicz, who worries about what it’ll be like to care for her aging parents as an only child. “This system isn’t built to assist old people, and when it comes down to families, it’s a lot for one person.”

When Ma was 27, her mother died; her father died two years later. She navigated caring for both of them, grieving, and sorting through their belongings without a sibling, supported by her partner and friends. “It was really hard, but I don’t think a sibling would necessarily have helped,” she says. “I’m okay now, because I’ve made my own family.”

Of course, siblings don’t necessarily share the burden equally, either: Elder care often falls disproportionately on one sibling, usually a daughter, often one who lives nearby. When Woinarowicz thinks about caring for her aging parents, she remembers what it was like for her mom, whose estranged brother was not involved. “Just because you have a sibling doesn’t mean you’re going to be super close for the rest of your life,” she says. “There’s no guarantee.”

Only children don’t have siblings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have support. Often, that means chosen family: lifelong friends, neighbors, partners. “As adults, only children are not more likely to be lonely — that’s a myth,” says Falbo, citing her own research. “You can have close friends, or cousins, or stay in close contact with old friends from many years that become like family.”

Woinarowicz sees her lack of siblings as an opportunity to create her own deep friendships. “I get pity from people, that their sister is their best friend and it makes them sad that I don’t have that,” she says. “But I cherish my friendships above anything else.”

That’s certainly been my experience. From a young age, I’ve been explicit with close friends — including several lifelong friends who are also only children — about how I really do view them as family. We may change and grow apart, but our friendship will endure: I’ll be there for them for life, and I expect the same from them.

Besides, being an only child often brings a different rewarding relationship: Falbo has found that only children are often closer to their parents. “We’ve been friends for almost 36 years, my whole life,” says Woinarowicz, who jokes with her husband about how he’s a fourth wheel in her family friend group.

It’s a closeness that she values enough to re-create: She’s eight months pregnant, and she looks forward to being part of another only-child family.

An only child’s relationship with their parents isn’t better or worse than closeness with siblings; it’s just different. I don’t take offense when people love the way that they grew up, but I do take offense when they imagine an only childhood as a hardship.

I’m sure that if I had a sibling, I wouldn’t be able to imagine life without them. But as it is, I can’t imagine who I’d be without the experiences afforded to me as an only child: seeing the world on a shoestring budget from a backpack as a little kid, holding my own in conversations with adults from a young age, asking my parents how we would celebrate “our wedding anniversary” every year. (Usually, they’d have champagne and I’d pop a bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling cider.)

Having a sibling can be a blessing or a challenge, or both; the same is true for having divorced parents or living with extended family or having a single parent. We’ve grown more accepting of different family structures — in 2010, 61 percent of American adults felt that a child needs a home with a mother and a father to grow up happily, and in 2023, 78 percent of Americans found a single parent raising a child on their own acceptable. But we still value family relationships over chosen family, and see only children as more likely to be “selfish, lonely, and maladjusted,” as Falbo describes it, although she stresses that “the things that lead to loneliness are very different than whether you had a sibling.”

The answer to the loneliness epidemic isn’t for everyone to have a bigger nuclear family; it’s to create more meaningful social connection, whether through biological family or otherwise.

But lately, it can feel as if people are more polarized than ever between having many children or having none. One side believes the plummeting birth rate is a harbinger of societal collapse, and the only reasonable response is to do their part by having many children. The other side looks around at the ongoing climate catastrophe and decides that it would be immoral to bring another child into this world.

This is a false choice. “Having one child is a reasonable alternative,” says Falbo, who is an only child, the mother of an only child, the grandmother of an only child, and the preeminent researcher of only children for the past 50 years. Plenty of people end up having only kids, and so plenty of people grow up as only kids. Most of us turn out just fine, just like everybody else.

Whether to have children, and how many, should ultimately be a personal decision, not one about saving the planet or the population. There isn’t one right answer.

But there isn’t a wrong one either.