Don’t knock only children
As a new scientific study calls single children selfish, Candida Crewe says ‘only-ness’ helped her become a writer
They call them Little Emperors in China: the pampered only children so fondly indulged by devoted parents who procreated during the one-child policy. Now, a study of the benefits or otherwise of such undivided parental attention goes so far as to suggest that growing up without siblings could even leave children wired differently.
Writing in Brain Imaging and Behaviour, scientists at Southwest University in Chongqin concluded that there wasn’t just a clear rise in creativity and a clear fall in agreeableness among those who grew up alone, but corresponding changes in brain structure, cementing “undesirable personality traits… such as dependency, selfishness and social ineptitude”. It is, says the study, the “socialising effects” of having siblings that bestow upon most people “the earlier realisation that they are not the centre of the world”.
Cast an eye over a list of famous only children and you might be tempted to agree that there is something, shall we say, special about them: from John Lennon to Robert De Niro, Elvis Presley to Enoch Powell, it could be argued that there is – or was – some intangible sense of “only-ness” about them that made them themselves. They all want, or wanted, you to notice them.
I only realised this week that Theresa May is among their number. And she is, by her own admission, a “bloody difficult woman”; not a person one would say was socially at ease. Armchair psychology it might be, but her want of exposure to the rough and tumble of family life growing up, the quick-fire repartee around the kitchen table, the wit and the put-downs, banter and rivalries of sibling intimacy, seem evident. Her BBC One Show performance with her (only child) husband on Monday evening only confirmed our suspicion: she is on the one hand deeply ordinary, but on the other really quite weird.
Yet having grown up sans siblings myself, I can’t help but feel that only children don’t half get a bad rap. Are we all, really, that odd? Although I think of myself as insufferably bourgeois and straight, I have constantly been told I am eccentric. If this is the case, I can only assume it’s my scorching need for solitude that makes me so.
So what is it like growing up in such solitude? For my own part I was an “only” by nurture, if not quite nature, until the age of 16. My parents were married three times each and, although I have five half-brothers and sisters, I have, alas, no full siblings. While
I love the children of my parents’ other marriages, our relationships are perhaps more like that of special first cousins – all the love and fondness but none of the jealousies and arguments.
Until my parents divorced when I was five, they both worked full-time, and for a while I didn’t go to school but had a governess. I spent hours, days, weeks on my own, a nanny hovering in the background. If I never felt alone, it was because I summoned up in my mind imaginary friends. I wrote stories populated with vast families, and drew pictures with 16 siblings standing all in a row. There was a constant clamour of conversation and debate in my head. It can be no coincidence that I went on to write fiction. I yearned for brothers and sisters, and when I saw my half-siblings I thought I was the luckiest person alive to have them; if only I could see more of them. I vowed I would have at least six children of my own so they would not know that confusing sibling-yearning I sometimes felt in my childhood.
As an adult, I am gregarious. But between the fierce socialising, I do depend for my survival on time alone to read, to think, to re-boot. To my regret, I only managed three sons, but I observe with wistfulness, shock and awe their visceral fondness and fights. I tell them with tedious regularity how blessed they are to have each other and they roll their eyes and go, “Yeah, right, Mama, change the record.” Their joshing is what I missed, and attests to the fact they adore each other.
Onlies, however, are no longer anything like such an exception: nearly half of British families today have “just the one”. And it’s not all negative. Parents can take comfort in the fact that only children score higher at making friends, according to Bill Mckibben in his book Maybe One.a study of 13,000 children by Ohio State University backs this up.
Certainly, I have been spoilt by the number and quality of my friends throughout my life. I feel as close to them as if they were family. Would I have been so lucky if I had had the automatic companionship of sisters and brothers? Would I have made the effort to forge such valuable relationships with people not blood-related to me?
One statistic maintains that we only children are, moreover, 98 per cent more likely “to succeed”. A 2010 study by the Institute for Social and Economic Research surveyed 2,500 children and concluded the onlies among them were “happier because they don’t have to compete for their parents’ affection”. Then again, a 2013 study found we are more likely to get divorced. Well, I can tick that box.
I would have loved not to have been an only child. I also recognise that I would not be me had I had full brothers and sisters. Many a time and oft I think that would be a very good thing. But there is also something to be said for the devil I know.