The one and only

If the cliches about only children held true, the Gantt family of Sherman Oaks should be a psychodrama of selfishness, self-involvement and maladjustment.

After all, Leanna and Bradley Gantt both are only children. And so is their daughter, Riley, who will be 5 in August.

If they were film characters, Leanna might be the sadistic selfish queen bee Regina George in “Mean Girls,” Bradley the overwhelmed and smothered Andrew Largeman from “Garden State” -- and little Riley a female version of Dudley Dursley, the overindulged only-child bully of “Harry Potter.”

But life is not art, nor does it have to be cliche, and instead Riley sits eating her pasta and coloring quietly while her parents enjoy a Sunday brunch with friends at a beachside restaurant in Santa Monica, discussing their plans for a new business venture. It’s not as if Riley doesn’t have a few characteristics commonly attributed to only children. While not in evidence during this brunch, Riley enjoys being the center of attention -- a trait that can have her singing at the top of her lungs when someone else is talking or serenely interrupting an adult in the midst of a conversation.

“I think that this is the biggest only-child trait that she has,” Leanna Gantt says. “It is very much because nothing distracted us when she said absolutely anything. From the moment she started talking, it never occurred to us not to react to her. So, of course, she got used to it and now we are trying to undo it.”

Is this an “only child trait” or is it just Riley? As Stephanie Wiltgen, Riley’s preschool teacher at the Neighborhood School in Valley Village, says, “Riley is a strong, independent, dramatic child, and she would be that way if she had a sibling or not.”

And yet, like some anachronistic Rorschach test, the cliched image of an only child as spoiled, lonely and self-centered persists. These children are flawed in some profound way, the thinking goes, because they were deprived of the important influences of sibling rivalry and divided parental attention. Like exotic hothouse flowers, these children develop in ways that are not quite natural.

Of course, with every stereotypical spoiled, under-disciplined only child, there are the overprotective, hyper-vigilant parents hovering nearby, poised to fiercely protect and pamper the center of their universe.

As it turns out, that is where the problem really lies. It is obvious that parents have enormous influence on the way their children develop. But with only children, parenting pitfalls can become magnified. As any element gets diluted by additional ingredients, so too does the intensity of parenting when there are more children to feed, discipline, cuddle and educate. It is not the state of being an only child that inevitably creates a little emperor; it is the state of mind that some parents develop with an only child.

“The stereotypes are that they are self-centered, difficult in social situations and not able to have the same kind of easygoing peer relationships as kids with siblings,” says Carolyn White, founder and editor of Only Child magazine and author of the book “The Seven Common Sins of Parenting an Only Child.” “And yet so much of that has to do with parenting rather than the fact that these kids are only children.”

Psychologist Susan Newman, the author of “Parenting an Only Child: The Joys and Challenges of Raising Your One and Only,” agrees: “The presence or absence of siblings has much less influence on the outcome of the child than the way that parents parent.”

*

They’re like their peers

One need only look at some of the great minds of history to see formidable validation for the stereotypes. In the late 19th century, the famous American psychologist G. Stanley Hall described being an only child as “a disease unto itself.” Sigmund Freud concluded that only children were likely to have problems with their sexual identity. And psychologist Alfred Adler offered a harsh assessment: , “The only child has difficulty with independent activity and, sooner or later, they become useless in life.”

A body of only-child research that looks at everything from preschoolers’ ability to play with others to psychological functioning as adults, however, has shown that only children are no more likely to be selfish, depressed, maladjusted individuals incapable of forming long-range attachments than those with siblings. And the research is likely to continue, with 15 million only-child families in America. Families with one child are the fastest-growing households in this country and in most industrialized Western European countries.

“In one study after another, only children just don’t stand out in a negative way,” says Toni Falbo, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, who has studied only children for nearly 30 years.

Falbo’s research in the United States and Asia found that only children were not disadvantaged socially or intellectually. In terms of maturity, emotional stability and popularity, across cultures, they were indistinguishable from their peers with siblings. In some cases they even exhibited some advantages. For example, they tended to reach higher levels of educational achievement as adults.

The reason, Falbo says, is a simple case of supply and demand. With one child, parents have more time and money to direct to child rearing. Children can attend better schools, college tuition is less onerous when only saving for one, and the family often is involved in enriching activities such as trips or cultural events.

In some ways, this is a variation of “the Confluence Model,” a mathematical theory that was first advanced in the mid-’70s, and is still in use, to study the significance of birth order and IQ scores. The basic idea was that the child’s intellectual development is a function of the intellectual environment provided by the family. So firstborn children, and only children, don’t have to share their parents’ attention with other siblings (at least for a time) and can benefit from the intellectual environment. The more children, the theory goes, the more childlike the environment and the lowering of the bar of conversation, vocabulary and intellectual give and take.

Perhaps the greatest laboratory of only-child observation and research is China, which has had a one-child policy for nearly 30 years. In a 2002 study of 134 university students with siblings and 126 university students who were only children, researchers from Anhui Provincial Hospital in China found increased neuroticism-anxiety, aggression-hostility and depressed mood in students with siblings.

Another study, published in 1994, from the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, looked at 444 children with siblings and 473 only children in the first, third and fifth grades. Researchers wanted to see how the children compared in academic motivation, interpersonal skills and attitudes toward manual labor. Only children were more motivated academically than the others, but no differences were found in interpersonal skills or attitudes toward manual labor.

The biggest variable? Gender. Girls consistently rated higher in achievement motivation and interpersonal skills.

*

Mental health assessed

One of the largest studies of the mental health of only children compared with others was published in 1996 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. In this study, 683 only children were compared with 2,364 children from two-child families seen in the same mental health clinic in London. Why do young children develop psychiatric disorders? Could being an only child, with all the attendant cliches of parenting, trigger emotional instability?

Researchers found that after age 5, there were no differences between the two groups. But younger children were different. Even though they were brought in for evaluation for psychiatric disorders, only children had fewer disorders than children with siblings. So why were they in a psychiatric clinic? Researchers concluded that the parents of only children were not overprotective; instead, they were more willing to seek medical advice.

These findings were challenged by a 2004 study of 169 children younger than 5 who were seen in the psychiatric department of a large pediatric hospital in Montreal. The researchers concluded that the crucial issue for the children’s mental health was not whether they were only children, but rather how strong their mothers’ parenting skills were, especially before the children turned 2. The mothers who were not impatient, stubborn, neglectful or overprotective were likely to have children who were emotionally healthy.

This seems like common sense. But many parents of only children make mistakes that they are simply unaware of. Newman, the psychologist and author, suggests that one of the best approaches to parenting an only child is to be aware of situations that lend themselves to overprotective behavior. She suggests that parents constantly ask themselves, “If I had three or four children, would I do this?”

With one child, Newman says, “you have to make a concerted effort to pull back.”

But it’s not always so simple to pull back. One reason is that powerful emotion: guilt. Many parents look back on their children’s lives with guilty pangs about school decisions made, punishments meted out and generosity withheld.

Parents of only children often have an additional reason to feel guilty: sibling deprivation. A letter to the editor that appeared in Only Child magazine expressed the situation: “We have an only child, an 8-year-old daughter. Nature chose an only child for us and I have found it difficult to accept this. I also have a lot of guilt and confusion because we have decided not to adopt.”

Parents of only children are prone to thinking: My child is lonely. My child has no playmates. My child will miss out on the close lifetime bonds that can develop in sibling relationships. Watchful friends and relatives -- often insensitive to personal issues such as secondary infertility or simple parental preference -- ask insistently when the next one is coming, as if any delay imposes still greater damage on the only child. Other issues can arise later in life: A second marriage may be strained because the grown-up only child never quite learned how to share. Or when parents age, the weighty burden of care may fall on the only child’s shoulders.

“One of the things I had never realized before was the extreme guilt that parents feel,” says Alexis White, the 25-year-old only child of magazine editor and author Carolyn White and her husband, Charles.

Indeed, Carolyn White writes about her experiences of guilt as a parent in her book. She describes sitting with Alexis when her daughter was 4 and trying to explain why she wouldn’t have the little brother or sister she had expressed longing for. Alexis looked up at her mother and said, her eyes filling with tears, “There is a hole in my heart that can never be filled.” The painful struggles with secondary infertility were nothing compared with this. Carolyn White writes, “[A]ll of a sudden I was choking on guilt and was close to being clinically depressed about not giving my child what she said she wanted most. It has stayed with me all these years, like one of those songs you can’t get out of your head once it invades.”

But for Alexis, who will be married this month, the yearning for a sibling was comparable to her yearning for a Cabbage Patch doll: intense but brief. “I had no inkling of my parents’ guilt when I was growing up. I was a happy kid and grew up occupied and busy and happy with my existence with my parents.”

No yearnings for a little brother or sister have ever darkened Riley Gantt’s days, even as some of her friends had siblings. “Since she was 3 she always said, I don’t want a brother or sister, I want a puppy,” Leanna Gantt recalls.

Guilt can be a powerful motivator for well-intentioned but destructive parental behaviors. White calls them the “Seven Common Sins”: overindulgence, overprotection, failure to discipline, overcompensation, seeking perfection, treating your child like an adult and overpraising. One common theme, aside from the guilt that motivates them, is the way they can cripple children, making it more difficult for them to grow up and be independent, says White.

Each behavior has its particular toxicity, but White considers overprotection and failure to discipline the most destructive to kids: “They can’t learn to be competent human beings if they don’t know where they stand in the world. Boundaries give kids a sense of belonging and safety.” Of course, one of the most important aspects of experiencing the world in a “normal” way is to be free from being labeled with a stereotype. One of the most irritating dialogues in Alexis White’s life, she says, is the one that begins, “Do you have any siblings?” and ends with, “I can totally tell.”

“I always say, ‘What do you mean?’ ” she says. “No one would put up with me saying, ‘Oh, because you are a middle child you are a doormat.’ You constantly feel as if you get sandwiched between being seen as a single-minded person and a kid who gets presents every day.”

Riley Gantt has not yet had one of those dialogues. She is eager to share her toys, loves to be the focus of attention and, according to her teacher, is a star student and class leader. Is this because she is an only child? Is this because her parents were only children? Or is this because she is Riley Gantt?