For Late-Starting Families, One Child Is Enough

Gail and John Duncan came to parenthood slowly. They postponed the decision into their late 30s while they built careers and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle earned through hard work.

By the time they decided to have their first child, it was clear that they would have no more. Their schedules were already so full, and money was so tight that, both practically and emotionally, one was all they could afford.

“It’s better to give one child the best than to give two children half as good,” said Gail, 42, an advertising copy writer in New York. “One is affordable. One is manageable. One is a handful, as it is.”

The Duncans have found happiness in an only daughter named Phoebe. Like a growing number of couples, they have decided that one child works for them where two would not.

“Instead of having an army of children, we have time to devote to one child,” said John, 46, who runs his own interior design firm. “And she’s learned to dovetail, to work together with us in our busy lives.”

The baby-boom generation faces an economic and social equation vastly changed since their parents were starting out. Today’s parents often spend more raising one child than their own parents spent on a whole brood a few decades back.

Millions of couples have adapted by scaling back the 1950s family ideal to suit contemporary realities such as the dual-career lifestyle and the high cost of child care, education and even stocking the fridge.

“Middle-class parents want their children to have private schools, a car, a VCR and a college education,” said Edward L. Kain, a Southwestern University sociologist and author of “The Myth of Family Decline.”

“But this generation is looking at downward mobility, and a great way of ensuring against that is to have fewer children and put more resources into the ones you have.”

Indeed, that’s what many couples have done. The number of women ages 40 to 44 with an only child more than doubled, to 1.2 million in 1988 from 598,000 in 1978. Over the same 10 years, the number of women ages 30 to 34 who said they planned to have only one child surged, to 1.7 million from 1 million.

“It’s been a dramatic trend toward smaller families,” said Martin O’Connell, a demographer at the Census Bureau. “It’s much more common to be an only child today than it was a decade ago.”

Whether by choice or financial necessity, it’s also far more common for that child’s mother to be holding down a full-time job outside the home. As a result, busy parents are often exhausted just imagining a larger family’s exponential demands.

“Two children does not mean one more than one. Two children is like 600 children,” said Wendy Reid Crisp, director of the National Assn. for Female Executives and the mother of a son.

“According to the taboos, having three children you can barely afford is doing the right thing,” Crisp said. “But I think the idea of having only one child because that’s how many you can afford to provide well for is a very honorable idea.”

For a growing number of women, it’s also proved de facto reality. Couples increasingly have delayed childbirth well into their 30s while pursuing career and other commitments.

The parents of many only children found that, by the time they’d negotiated the right time to have a baby, the biological clock had ticked on until it was too late to bear a second child.

“Many women who started having children at 35 and up must go to great lengths to have a second child, but many do it anyway,” said Susan Ginsberg, editor of Work & Family Life newsletter.

“Some feel the family isn’t complete without two kids, and others are driven by an inner need not to have an only child,” Ginsberg said. “Many just don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket.”

Though a pragmatic and increasingly common option, many prospective parents still resist raising an only child because of firmly rooted stereotypes, however erroneous.

“I’m old enough to have been raised with all the stigmas and taboos,” said Susan Newman, mother of an only son who was “supposed to be spoiled, demanding, selfish, unable to share, antisocial and, therefore, lonely.”

But through her own experience and scores of interviews for her book, “Parenting an Only Child,” Newman happily discovered otherwise.

“Only children are no different than other children,” she said. “They are very successful, very well socially integrated and very happy.”

In fact, far from feeling deprived, many siblingless adults believe they are better off for it.

“It gave me the confidence to take leadership roles in student council, sports, drama, everything I do,” said Meredith Varga, a freshman at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. “It’s something my parents instilled in me because I got all that attention.”

Contrary to images of the only child as loner, Varga learned early on to be outgoing and personable. Without brothers and sisters, she had to make friends when school was out or the family was on vacation.

“There were times when I was a little lonely and felt deprived. And sometimes people said I was overprotected or my parents focused too much on me,” Varga said. “But we share so much love. We’re all we have.”

John Armour is also particularly aware of his special strengths just now, as he, too, spreads his wings to start his first year away at college.

“At the dinner table growing up, everything was adult talk, and I think that made me more mature and articulate. My parents gave me a head start,” he said from his dorm room in Rochester, N.Y.

“Only children get a lot of goodies they wouldn’t have otherwise: camp, private schools, trips. From the time you enroll them in nursery school, you’re forking out gobs of money,” said Armour’s mother, Nancy, who lives with her husband in suburban Dallas. “There aren’t many people who can multiply all those goodies two or three times.”

Still, many parents worry that the “goodies” are not enough. So, the inevitable and often agonizing questions arise: Is it fair to the child? Will the only child grow up too quickly, or feel too much pressure?

Katherine Harrison, herself an only child, considered the pros and cons before deciding she would like to have at least one sibling for her 18-month-old daughter.

“There is a specialness in being an only child, but I would have liked to have siblings, not only growing up, but as an adult,” said Harrison, 30, whose novel, “Thicker Than Water,” is narrated by an only child.

As adults, many only children must face alone the physical and emotional burden of caring for elderly parents. Harrison, whose parents and grandparents are dead, was spared that trial.

“But I’m left feeling there’s something missing,” she said. “I have this longing for a sense of shared history, and a real sense of being alone in the world.”

Eleni Otto is self-reliant, confident and independent--qualities she attributes to growing up with plenty of parental attention and support. She would not change her only childhood, yet there were compromises.

“When it’s just one, you can be very sucked into your parents’ lives and whatever they’re dealing with,” said Otto, of Seattle. “You’re very focused on pleasing them.”

If she had it to do over, Otto’s mother, Shirley Bergen, would give her daughter a brother or sister to ease some of the pressure. But that is hindsight.

“At the time, I didn’t see my decision as selfishness. I just thought it would be easier to focus and handle living with one child,” Bergen, 59, said from Madison, Wis. “But now, I look back and wonder. . . .”

“In the end, I guess, it’s not how many kids you have,” she said. “I guess in the end, it’s how well you love however many you have.”