Uncategorized 25 May 2007 12:39 am
Only child
No more only children! I, too, have known more than one man who is an only child, and the essential selfishness is insurmountable. They can’t help it, it’s who they are and what they know. Sharing and compromise are unknowns in their landscape.
– anonymous letter in response to a Cary Tennis column
Reading this reminded me of being on a crowded bus a couple of months ago, where a couple of loudmouthed college kids in the aisle next to me were hollering at each other about some mutual acquaintance whom they felt to be terribly inferior to them. (Apparently she had… dropped out of a class! And wasn’t sorry! Oh!) They informed each other, and all the rest of us on that bus, that she is an only child and therefore incapable of sharing, compromise, and common courtesy. Her character is irredeemably flawed. Gosh, don’t we feel good that we’re normal people with siblings so we know how to be good people. We hate her even more now! Squee, we’re bonding over it! We aren’t selfish! Yes, people with siblings have learned how to be polite!
“Go ahead and keep telling yourselves that, cretins,” I did not say. At first I gritted my teeth and stared straight ahead, and then I had some fun spotting the other people who were gritting their teeth and staring straight ahead: the Invisible Non-Brotherhood of Only Children.
on 25 May 2007 at 1:31 am 1.Surlyben said …
No more women with siblings! They’re always trying to take my stuff and telling me I should “share”. They can’t help their thieving ways. All they know is a sort of Lord of the Flies style sibling rivalry hell, and that’s who they are…
on 25 May 2007 at 4:40 am 2.Mris said …
People with siblings are terrible about sharing, because they always had someone in their face when they were small, and it’s made them defensive. Also they are too loud, and they think that their siblings represent the entire spectrum of human personality. Also they are selfish because they know they’ll always be able to ditch their sick, elderly Mom and Dad for a couple of weeks and run off to Bermuda for a break while their sister takes care of things.
I don’t actually believe that, but it’s something I’d like to say fairly often when people start going on about only children. Occasionally I will murmur, “Thank you.” If it’s someone I know well — like when my cousin was moaning about how terrible it would be if they couldn’t adopt a second child, because then her son would be an only — I will even more rarely say, “I love you, too,” in the same quiet voice.
I have been meaning for awhile to write a brief essay to the effect that you shouldn’t have a child if you can’t face the idea that he/she might turn out to be an only child.
on 25 May 2007 at 6:18 am 3.Mia said …
I had no idea that “only” and “spoiled” meant the same thing. My thesaurus is sorely lacking, it seems. Isn’t essentialism fun?
on 25 May 2007 at 6:58 am 4.jake said …
The quote you have cited seems par for the new mentality, in which people cease to have choices about who they are, how they grow, and what they do. Instead, they are all now irrevokably tied to their genetics or upbringing in such a way that they are forever freed from actually being accountable for their behavior.
I know I have regularly “stepped in it” in my life, but I suspect it has nothing to do with me having siblings.
on 25 May 2007 at 8:57 am 5.Karen said …
If not for the fact that I’ve overheard this same rant — I mean the one you’re rebutting, not your rebuttal itself! — as often as I had, I’d be tempted to write it off as unworthy of a response.
But I have heard it. Not as often as the similar rant about how Americans can’t help being arrogant imperialists, but often enough to grate, especially as the besiblinged Canadian parent of an only American child.
What weirds me out every time is that I, like every other oldest child in the universe, used to be an only. I survived more than two years of it before suddenly transmogrifying into an oldest. If it’s true that only children are incapable of change or flexibility in peer relationships as adults, at what age does this set in? Two? Eight? Twenty-six? Surely such mechanicals were just as incapable of change or flexibility when their first sibling was born, and they ceased to be only.
Which means, of course, that oldest children should be shunned under the same rubric. Only younger children have the skills necessary to survive in the outside world. Perhaps we should slaughter all firstborn children when they reach maturity, to make the world a safer place for younger children to live in? I’m sure many of them would be thrilled to come into their own…
on 25 May 2007 at 10:03 am 6.Ted said …
Karen raises a good point above. Clearly, all first births must be twins (or other multiple-births) so that there is immediately a sibling. After that, single-child births would be permissible.
on 25 May 2007 at 10:47 am 7.Cam Sculpin said …
I propose a modest and humane alternative: adoption. Whenever a child is born to a family with no other children, his or her parents enter a lottery. Either they give up the child to another family, or they come home with a second infant.
Of course, in the United States, we would not wish to interfere with the free market. So perhaps the lottery would be necessary only for parents who have not made other arrangements. For instance, a poor couple might wish to donate their infant to a wealthier couple for a reasonable fee.
There may be a few small problems to overcome, but what’s important here, of course, is the mental health of our children. Only children are inevitably damaged. Won’t someone think of the children?
on 25 May 2007 at 6:11 pm 8.Sarah said …
I recently thanked James for being an only child. My brother is 4 years younger than I, and my sister is 2 years younger than he is. My job was to take care of them when neither parent was around, and later make sure they weren’t doing anything wrong. That plus the Catholicism guilt routine made me incapable of having opinions that weren’t built on someone else’s idea of what was okay. Even my opinions (fashion sense, religious ideas, daily behaviors) that went against the grain were merely reactions against the grain itself. Nothing original in my brain, just figments bounced against everyone else in the world’s opinions.
James’s single-mindedness, and moderate, not-in-a-bad-way solipsism grounds me every day. When in doubt, ask James. He’ll no doubt tell you what he thinks. As an oldest sibling child, I have to dig to find out what I really think.
Go Cam! Go Only Children! Yay for having Opinions!!
on 26 May 2007 at 6:10 pm 9.Devon said …
My guess is the writer of the above quote was using “only child” as a vehicle to vent some other vague bitterness.
An example of sibling sharing:
One time when I was a kid, maybe 11 or 12, I got a whole watermelon as a birthday present. I’ve always loved watermelon, so I was delighted. My little sister wanted some, and said “You have to give me some.” There was no way I could eat most of it myself but I decided rashly that what she said wasn’t true at all — I didn’t “have” to give her some at all because it was a present. I kept telling her “I don’t ‘have’ to give you any!” and she kept saying “Yes you do! You have to give me some!” I wanted her to say “can I have some” but she wouldn’t relent. And I wouldn’t relent either. So of course it turned into a huge screaming fight. And of course eventually we ate watermelon together.
I wonder if the labels “only child” or “first child” or “last child” have any predictive value at all. For example when you say “she wouldn’t let me have a bite of her cake because she’s an only child,” it has no scientific value. You might as well say “She wouldn’t let me have a bite of her cake because she’s a Virgo.” If on, the other hand, you could accurately guess that someone was an only-child or first-child, etc, then it’d be interesting. Or if you could use it to predict their behavior.