Questions for Onlies & Parents of Onlies

[marydell]

Wow, thanks for all of the answers to my poll.  Very helpful. Now I have followup questions for people who either are only children, are parents of only children, or who plan on having a single child.  Input from people who don' t fit this description is also welcome, but please bear a few facts in mind.

Fact the first:   I'm the 7th (and last) child in my family, and I have a truckload of nieces and nephews, ranging in age from 27 years down to 17 months.  My husband is the 4th (and last) child in his family, and he has three nephews.  So the benefits and drawbacks of 2-or-more child families are well known to us--which is why we had initially assumed we'd have two or 3 kids. (8 years ago)

Fact the second:  I'm 40 years old, and not fabulously healthy.

Fact the third:  I work 40 to 45 hours a week, and commute 10 to 15 additional hours, and am on-call 24x7. 

The above facts are part of why I'm rethinking my initial plan (adopting two).  I'm a good mom for Charlie, and between me and Mike he gets plenty of attention and fun, and with day care he has plenty of peers to learn social skills with.  But I don't end up with a lot of time and energy to spare, and I'm not sure I'd be a good mom to either child if there were two of them.

So, questions!   Please note, none of these are meant critically; they're just things I'm thinking over in my particular situation.

For only children: 

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers?
2. did both of your parents work full-time?
3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way? 
4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents?
5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions?
6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community)
7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community)
8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen?  Do you have enough friends now?
9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up?  If so, did you enjoy that?
10.  did you have a happy childhood?
11. are you having a happy adulthood?

For parents of only children:

1. what provisions are you/have you made for retirement/old age? 
2. do you want grandchildren?  do you expect to have grandchildren?
3. do you work outside the home? If so, what is your child care arrangement? 
4. do you have a partner in parenting? If so, do you primarily spend time with your child as a couple, or solo?
5. did you decide to have an only child, or did it just work out that way?
6. does your child have special needs? 
7. is your child involved in a lot of activities (sports, extracurrics, etc)?
8. does your child have enough friends? 
9. do you think you have more-than-normal parental anxiety?
10. what does your child typically do with his/her alone time?
11.what do you like about parenting an only child?
12. what do you dislike about parenting an only child?

Thanks a whole bunch!

Comments

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

1. what provisions are you/have you made for retirement/old age?
At this point, none, due to the fabulous fact that I never did undergrad, much less lawschool, until I was 25. Graduated late for my age with massive quantities of loan debt, and I work in a geographic area of the country wherein I earn half of what I could be earning in a different city. And now I pay child support and alimony out of that. So there is no extra for saving. My plan is to remarry well or win the lottery.

2. do you want grandchildren? do you expect to have grandchildren?
Sure, and I don't know!

3. do you work outside the home? If so, what is your child care arrangement?
Yes, and how. Currently, we don't have one. In the past, we have used child care, sitters, after-school care, summer camp (but the cheap kind) and combinations of parent care to make it work. At various points either my ex or myself was a partial SAHP.

4. do you have a partner in parenting? If so, do you primarily spend time with your child as a couple, or solo?
Both, even now after separation.

5. did you decide to have an only child, or did it just work out that way?
Combination of the two; I think the only reason we didn't set out to have more is that we couldn't afford it financially, but if another would have come along (as the first did, despite BC), we would have been thrilled.

6. does your child have special needs?
No.

7. is your child involved in a lot of activities (sports, extracurrics, etc)?
Yes. He is a hockey player and has been playing "travel"-level ice hockey since he was six.

8. does your child have enough friends?
I don't know from "enough." He has friends. He didn't, really, until he started going to school. He had a hard time making friends in preschool because he was shy. Now he is just picky. He has always had fewer "friends" and more FRIENDS. I think that's worked out well because he is very independent. He has never been a social butterfly.

9. do you think you have more-than-normal parental anxiety?
I don't know. Maybe about some things, but less than normal about most of the things most of his peers' parents are always nattering on about. If I notice "crazy" anx on my part, I try to smother it. Also, I've got a lovely case of GAD and he knows. When I get silly with him, he just calls me on it. For a better answer I would need to know topics, I think. What do people anx about at normal levels?


10. what does your child typically do with his/her alone time?
Read, TV, video games, play drums, play guitar, write stories, draw, D&D planning, muck about on the intertubes. When he was younger he would also build things out of legos and play with action figures.

11.what do you like about parenting an only child?
I don't know. I'm not sure I like parenting an only, necessarily. I just like parenting HIM. We are very close, but not in a creepy way (at least, we don't think it's creepy). I like that I don't have to divide my already "spare" spare time. My schedule makes me insane and it would probably be more so if I had another. When he was younger that would have been amplified, in terms of scheduling sick child care sequentially, etc.

12. what do you dislike about parenting an only child?
I thought he could have started latch-keying a full year earlier if I'd had another close in age. And there were plenty of times when he was younger that I really wished he had a sibling to play with to free me up a bit. He would like a partner in crime. When I told him I have baby-itis, he said NO, just adopt one my age. I have always loved having his friends around, for days at a time, in almost any number. So I would like having more around, more children, more noise, more games, etc. But I recognize the contradictions with the above, too.

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers?
Two

2. did both of your parents work full-time?
My father worked full time, my mother didn't work outside the home until I was 11.

3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way?
Tough one to answer: For about 4 years it just worked out that way, then they enforced the choice.

4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents?
I spent a ton of time with my mother.

5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions?
Interesting; this question never even occurred to me before. I felt fully included, and often felt like the center of attention.

6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community)
Not at all. I personally would like children, but my parents seem thoroughly content either way.

7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community)
No, although I have chosen to live near my mother because we enjoy one another's company.

8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen? Do you have enough friends now?
I had many friends as a child and even more as a teen. I still have many friends, although with many of them I'm not terribly close.

9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up? If so, did you enjoy that?
I spent a lot of time alone and I also spent a lot of time with the kids in the neighborhood (ranging from 5 years older to 3 years younger than me). Even as a child I really enjoyed my alone time.

10. did you have a happy childhood?
Mostly. My father was an alcoholic, and some of what came with that complicated things. But on the whole I was happy.

11. are you having a happy adulthood?
Very much so. I find it easy to be close to a few people at a time and easy to have a lot of more distant friends. I enjoy spending time by myself either pursuing hobbies or causes, or just relaxing. I have good relationships at work and a mostly-satisfying job. I may spend a little too much time trying to please others (but then, I may not). I am a little concerned about how things are going to be when my parents get very old, but it doesn't weigh on me. I have been in strong long term relationships, although I'm not at the moment; I'm just dating a bit.

Hope this is helpful; please feel free to ask follow-ups if you like.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you, this is very helpful!

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This is all very helpful. To clarify/follow up on a couple:

question 1 is because having 6 siblings makes looking after my elderly parents a lot easier--I do some stuff for them, others do other stuff for them. With an only, he'll have to do everything, which means we need to plan well to be self-sufficient elders so he's not unduly burdened. Which we should do anyway, I suppose :)

question 8: by "enough" friends I mean a number that's suited to his temperament. Some people need one friend and other people need 40. I'm of the sort that needs a lot of friends, and now I'm blessed to have them, but I was lonely as a kid because of poor social skills and obvious markers of Life Problems.

question 9: well, anxiety about death in particular--Mike's oldest brother died when Mike was young, so he's having a hard time wrangling his fears about Charlie. Or disabling injury, stuff like that. I don't think it's really so much about Charlie as about my vague notions of normal parenting--if something happened to him, I'd be devastated, of course, but the source of the nagging worry is more about my identity as a mother. I suspect as he gets older and is more connected to me this will take a different shape.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers?
Two.

2. did both of your parents work full-time?
Um. Tough question. My dad did. My mom worked part-time from home until I was 3, then part-time at the office until I was 12, then full-time. But until I was 8, she was also finishing her Bachelor's degree part-time.

3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way?
Definitely a choice. When I was small, the relatives and the neighbors kept pestering my mom about when she was going to have another kid, when when when WHEN, and finally she said, "I don't know, but the day I do, I'm going after my husband's surgeon with a knife." No more questions after that. (She also took me aside to tell me that while she and Daddy had chosen to have one kid, there were other people they knew who had only been able to have one and for whom these questions were very painful, so I was under no circumstances to EVER ask people anything like that.)

4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents?
Yes. There were all sorts of things that were "just Mom and me" and "just Dad and me" as well as things that were all three of us. There still are. Mom was just over for lunch.

5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions?
It didn't occur to me to ask this question. I understood from a very young age that there are some things that are for the whole family and some that are just for the parents. I wasn't part of a group labeled "the kids," but that in no way made me feel left out.

I think not conceiving of myself as part of "the kids" was one of the factors that led to me doing things like writing my first novel when I was 11: I just didn't have a concept that there was any reason for me to wait on learning and doing interesting stuff.

6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community)
More than is usual in my family's community, no. I do feel that if I decided never to have children, my grands and my folks would be terribly sad. But I've always wanted to have a kid, so it isn't really a problem--and I feel that if we run into problems with being able to for one reason or another, I will get support and sympathy from my family rather than pressure and upset.

7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community)
No. I lived half a continent away from them for four years, and six hours away for two after that. My parents moved here for my dad's job, not just for us. That said, we do enjoy living near each other, and I think if Dad's work moved them away again, we'd all miss each other quite a bit.

I think that there's more of a sense that we should spend holidays together than some families have. I know that no parent ever says, "Oh well, I've got 66.7% of my kids here for Thanksgiving; good enough." I know that the parents of multiples want to be around their kids as individuals, not just as a sort of kid-lump. (At least many of them do.) But since I'm a double-only, I don't have first cousins, so if my grands aren't with me for a holiday, they're not with their grandchildren, period.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

[continued, as I am long-winded]

8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen? Do you have enough friends now?
Heh. I have always had too many friends. I think I am very good at maintaining friendships in part because as an only (especially as a double-only), I can't take people's presence in my life for granted. I know that I need to make an effort to stay in touch with people and let them know I care about them and am interested in their lives. I don't have a sister or a brother who will always be my sister or my brother no matter what I do. I introduce greykev as my brother and refer to "going over to my brother's place" or "picking out my brother's Christmas present," but one of the key differences, aside from the fact that we didn't meet until we were 16 and 20, is that if we had not made conscious choices to be in this friendship over the last 14 years, it would have disappeared. With markgritter's siblings, we are in highly frequent close contact with one, moderate contact with a second, and pretty much never hear from the third--but they're all still markgritter's siblings.

For some people this is a bad thing. For me it's a good thing: I like being mindful of being kind and appreciative towards the people in my life, and I like knowing on a conscious level that they are around because they want to be.

9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up? If so, did you enjoy that?
Yes, both genuinely alone time and time when my parents and I were reading or playing the piano or doing other activities in the same room without speaking to each other. I love that. I hoard my alone time jealously. Many of the interesting things I do are things I picked up while solitary. (My mom did make it clear that I could have friends over quite frequently, and would sometimes set up play dates even when I would have preferred more alone time.)

10. did you have a happy childhood?
Yes.

11. are you having a happy adulthood?
Yes.

Both of those stipulate, of course, that life is never solely happiness. But mine is more happy than not.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and on the question of grandchildren: I have a friend who is one of four in her family, and they are now old enough that it's pretty clear that none of them will be having kids. There are never any guarantees in this world, particularly not on things that rely on other people's personal choices.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you; super helpful. You're actually the example I keep returning to when the notion of functional-only-child-family comes up, because you seem to have a very good relationship with your parents as an adult, which is what I hope for with Charlie. I'm friends with a fair number of only children, but they often come from families with the same issues as my F-o-O, so I doubt that any of their troubles are related to the number of kids in their families. Like, if someone isn't speaking to her mom, chances are it isn't because she never got that baby sister she always wanted.

The grandchildren thing is on my mind quite a bit because we don't know yet if Charlie's condition is genetic or just a spontaneous oddity. Because we're working with docs to determine the cause, we're very mentally involved, at the moment, in imagining hypothetical outcomes for his hypothetical future children. I hope this will pass once we get a diagnosis, or (more likely) get told there's no diagnosis other than "yep, that's an absent forearm, all right!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think we do have a very good relationship, yes. We hang out deliberately, not out of a sense of obligation.

I don't know if I've said this to you before, because I've said it so many times in so many places: I think the hardest thing about family structure for kids to deal with is parents who are not happy/comfortable with the family they have. The biggest "spoiled only child" archetypes I've met were all people whose parents had wanted more children and were trying to "make it up" to their onlies for not having siblings. And some of the biggest problems I've seen with multiple-kid families were situations where the parents had not adjusted well to having more kids than they'd expected, too.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

It's worth saying multiple times! :) And I tend to agree--I think my mom would have been a lot happier with a small brood, (or none) but she didn't feel she had that option. And Mike and I are noticing how well, overall, having one is working for us, where having more might not.

One of the advantages of adoption is you can't accidentally have too many; OTOH when it was sooo hard to have/get one it feels strange to be ambivalent about the opportunity for a second.

[bravest-unsaid.livejournal.com]

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers?

Both parents and my mother's mother.

2. did both of your parents work full-time?

They still do. When I was tiny back in the USSR my grandma was working, too, so I had a nanny. After we immigrated here she worked for a brief time before retiring--there were babysitters, neighbors with kids, etc.

3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way?

I think it mostly worked out that way. They immigrated in their mid-thirties and spent a lot of time trying to build up a good life here. I think they felt they couldn't afford to give another kid everything they wanted to be able to.

4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents?

Hm, I definitely spent a lot of time with both of them, but I honestly couldn't tell you how much of it was one on one.

5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions?

I think I sometimes felt left out, but I don't think it was a huge issue that shaped my whole childhood or anything.

6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community)

Not yet, but possibly I am still young for it to have set in.

7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community)

I think slightly more.

8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen? Do you have enough friends now?

Yes and yes.

9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up? If so, did you enjoy that?

Maybe more than average, and I did.

10. did you have a happy childhood?

Mostly.

11. are you having a happy adulthood?

Mostly.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

For only children:

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers? Two
2. did both of your parents work full-time? On-and-off, yes. For a while my dad was the primary caretaker, while my mom worked full-time, then they switched, and my dad worked full time and my mom worked part-time (when I was older)
3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way? Just worked out that way.
4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents? Absolutely.
5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions? Included.
6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community) Nope.
7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community) Nope.
8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen? Do you have enough friends now? As a child/teen, not really, but that was more because of moving around. Now, yes.
9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up? If so, did you enjoy that? Yes, I spent a lot of time alone, and I did enjoy that.
10. did you have a happy childhood? Except for a few unpleasant years around adolescence!
11. are you having a happy adulthood? Yes, I am.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Excellent, thank you.

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

Something that occurs to me, on re-reading this (I'm trying to catch up on comment threads I missed before they scroll off my FL and into oblivion):

Access to other children. I'm not an only, but my brother is 4 years younger than I am, so he was a playmate for some values of play, but not others (for example, a four-year gap in cognitive skills is pretty near insurmountable when you're trying to play board games at, say, ages 8 and 4). However, we grew up in a neighborhood with a scarcity of children (the next oldest children babysat for me; the next youngest, I babysat for). To add to that, my brother and I both went to private school. All of our friends lived in different towns.

All together, this made for a pretty lonely childhood, in terms of contact with other children - we were pretty much on our own unless a play date was arranged with a classmate (which required inter-parental negotiations for transportation back and forth, notes for the school and the bus driver if you were going home with someone after school, etc., etc.) The stereotypical, "Hey, Mom, I'm going over to $name's house to play." "OK, be back by 6 for dinner" never was a possibility.

I don't know anything about number of children in the area where you are, but it's something to think about that I don't often see mentioned.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

There are only a couple of other babies Charlie's age in the neighborhood, although there are older kids who like him a lot. But he spends a fairly long day in daycare. We chose a school-style daycare, that goes from 6 weeks up thru 13 years (before & after school programs, summer, etc) so that he can make friends there and see them regularly. So far he really likes it--there are 10 babies in his class and 12 in the class next to him.

I wish the neighborhood had more kids his age--it is, fortunately, the sort of street where kids just run around to each others houses--but most of the people in my age group had their kids in their early 30's or late 20s, so they're older. But new families are still moving in as the older residents move out or pass on, so there probably will be a few more eventually.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Late to the party, but if you're still interested in hearing from only children...

1. how many parents did you grow up with as regular caretakers?
One, my mom.

2. did both of your parents work full-time?
I was raised by a single parent. My mom worked more than full-time (about twelve hours a day), but did so at home (she ran a daycare). So she was home when I got home from school and if I was home sick, she didn't have to take time off work or anything (I just stayed away from the babies).

3. did your parents choose to have only one child, or did it just work out that way?
I have no idea. My parents officially divorced when I was in jr. high and were separated since I was in pre-school. My mom was 27 when she had me, so theoretically she could have had more kids, but I never asked her if she wanted any more.

4. did you spend a lot of one-on-one time with either or both parents?
Well, it was just me and my mom and I was very independent from a young age. I'm not sure what exactly qualifies as one-on-one time when there's only two people in the house. We did generally watch TV together in the evenings, but other than that I pretty much did my own thing.

5. when you spent time together as a family, did you feel fully included or did you feel left out of your parents' interactions?
Doesn't apply for my parents, but for family gatherings, I did feel included even though I was the only grandchild. I also spent a lot of time alone at family gatherings by choice (usually bringing my Nintendo to my grandparents' to play in the back room, or playing with toys in another room, or just reading/drawing in the same room the adults were in), but I never felt excluded.

6. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to produce grandchildren? (more than is usual in your family's community)
No one in my family has ever once asked me if I'm going to have kids. I'm 32, so I figure if I were going to get that sort of pressure, I would have already. My aunt adopted a ten-year-old girl from Russia last year, so now I'm no longer the only grandchild, but "carrying on the family line" or whatever doesn't seem to be a big concern in my family.

7. do you/did you feel a lot of pressure to live near your parents as an adult (more than is usual in your family's community)
No, though I do live near my mom and grandparents (both live about 5-10 minutes away).

8. did you have enough friends when you were a child/teen? Do you have enough friends now?
Zero friends would be enough for me, so I'm not really a good example. XD I did have neighborhood friends when I was little, though as a teenager I was pretty much solitary because my friends lived far away so I only saw them at school. I didn't mind that at all, though. Most of my friends are online now, which I prefer to offline. I live with my husband and that's pretty much all the company I need or want in person. I am very, very introverted.

9. did you spend a lot of time alone when you were growing up? If so, did you enjoy that?
Yep, lots of time alone. My favorite activities growing up were reading, drawing, riding my bike, and playing video games, all of which are (or can be) solitary activities. When I was in elementary school I did play more with other kids, but my two closest friends moved away and since I wasn't outgoing, I didn't know how to make any new friends. But like I said, that was fine, because I enjoy being by myself. About the only time I can think of that I really wished I had friends was when I would have really loved to play D&D.

10. did you have a happy childhood?
11. are you having a happy adulthood?
Yes to both. :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thanks!