The Parent Trap

The comments would have slipped right by me if I hadn’t been brought up to believe them myself. Nobody means any harm; it’s just how we were raised.

“Is she your only child?,” always uttered with a mixture of pity and curiosity about the apparent glitch in our reproductive systems that prevented my husband and me from repeating ourselves.

“My mom says it’s not your fault you don’t know how to share,” spoken by one of our then-6-year-old’s friends, when she failed to hand over a doll quickly enough.

“You have no idea how much harder cooking / cleaning / tuition is with two. But it was so important to us that she have a brother or sister”--a favorite, implying that we put our own creature comforts ahead of our daughter’s happiness.

An only child used to be considered proof that something was dreadfully awry in a marriage. An only child was like some poor pet with a leg missing--eager, affectionate, but not quite whole.

But now I am surrounded by them. I married one, gave birth to one, share my husband’s two best friends, both onlys. My daughter’s third-grade class is half only children. And yet the assumptions persist: They must be more selfish, less adaptable, more downright difficult.

Bill McKibben, a former deputy editor of the New Yorker and the author of the environmental call-to-arms “The End of Nature,” thought for a long time that he and his wife, Sue, would not have children; he was reluctant to contribute to an overpopulated planet.

Now, in “Maybe One,” he writes movingly--and convincingly--of the decision to have one child, the now 4-year-old Sophie, and no more. “I did it because of Sophie,” is his explanation for writing this book. Along the way, he demolishes a painful set of beliefs about onlys and suggests that they are the answer to many of our planetary woes.

The power of his argument comes from its humanity. McKibben acknowledges that he and his wife were unable to live up to their ideology: They had a child because yearning overcame environmental doctrine. McKibben writes about the journey back to a larger responsibility; on that road, he finds the strength to stop with Sophie.

McKibben wants to make sense of what he’s done, so he has reviewed all the research he can find about only children--and found that the seminal research about onlys was, to put it politely, skewed beyond credibility. Granville Stanley Hall, born in 1844, launched a national “child-study movement” in the early 1880s, and by 1895 he was at work on “A Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children.”

Hall distinguished between those who were physically peculiar and exceptional (“conspicuous scars or traumatic lesions”) and psychically so (“a buffoon; a restless, fickle, scatterbrained or tenacious child”). He dutifully pigeonholed 1,045 children--and found that 46 of them were only children, a bloated percentage in the general population at that time. It was an easy, if unscientific, half-step to his conclusion: Only children were oddballs.

His disciple, E.W. Bohannon, expanded on Hall’s study and published “The Only Child in a Family” a year later, and it became the foundation for a century’s worth of misguided beliefs. According to Bohannon, only children got sick more easily, were distracted at school, were nervous or failed to display what the researchers deemed sufficient interest in athletics.

No one addressed Hall’s bias (he had grown up part of, and endorsed, the large family), nor did they quarrel with Bohannon’s work. McKibben writes, “I’ve not discussed this study at such length because it’s intellectually powerful--it obviously violates every rule that any modern social scientist would observe. It is anecdotal, lame-brained, and meaningless. But for more than 30 years it was the only piece of research on the question of only children, and hence dominated the field by default.”

Enough time for even bad research to evolve into folk wisdom: So ingrained are the notions we inherited from Hall and Bohannon that although UCLA psychologist Toni Falbo and a colleague published a review of literature on only children in the mid-1980s and came to far different conclusions, their findings failed to make even a dent in the popular stereotype.

Still, the parents of only children chant “newer data” as their mantra. We desperately want to believe that our children are ordinary kids, no lonelier, no less popular, no more spoiled than any other product of an overextended consumer culture that considers procuring retail goods a decent substitute for attention.

There is one crucial way in which they are different, though: Single children deplete the universe at a slower rate than do multiple kids.

The “cornucopians,” a group of futurists who drive the environmentalists nuts, believe that growth is good--that it in fact encourages invention and fairly guarantees progress. As McKibben writes of their laissez faire attitude, “You might run out of copper, but who cares? The mere fact of shortage will lead someone to invent a substitute.” McKibben worries about this environmental boosterism; he tends to think that Malthus was right, that there is a limit to the Earth’s resources. Just because we haven’t outgrown our planetary britches doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

And the day we reach the magic number and produce too many people for the planet to support is the day when it’s too late to do anything about it. McKibben would rather use a little preventive medicine. And so Sophie will grow up alone, her father having joined the ranks of the vasectomized.

The process that led McKibben to the doctor’s office is far more complicated and subtle than running numbers on how much we have and how fast we’re using it up (though to his credit, McKibben manages to make those numbers interesting). McKibben is exquisitely aware of the price of his decision--not so much for himself and his wife but for Sophie. “It was,” he writes, “perhaps, the hardest part of the decision we made about stopping at a single child--the idea that at the end of Sophie’s life she may be lonely in a special way.”

Once her parents are gone, she will have no family with whom she can share precious memories. She is like the tree from Philosophy 101, the one that falls in the forest when no one is around; does it make a sound or not? Does family disappear once all blood relatives are gone?

To imply that shared DNA is the only meaningful family link is to buy wholesale the schmaltz that greeting cards have been serving up for decades. What Sophie will learn, if she’s lucky, is that a constructed family can provide an emotional resonance that a biological family does not always supply. My husband and daughter have both devised extended families--a best friend here, an older friend who lacks grandchildren there. With more onlys around, more people will be eager to make those connections.

I confess, we cannot share credit for wisdom, only a bit of commonsense--we had one child fairly late in the game, and couldn’t imagine staying awake with another. But it is nice to know, in the face of enduring prejudice, that we haven’t consigned our child to an unhappy life.

To be fair to the rest of you, though, reproduction is not the linchpin of environmental balance. What if we downsized our consumerist aspirations? What if those of us lucky enough to have farmers’ markets weaned ourselves from mid-January Chilean tomatoes, saving up the fuel they use jetting around the globe? Vegetables trucked in from Bakersfield use up fewer resources to get to your table than the ones flown in from Mexico.

Which is to say that McKibben’s book has meaning, even if you already have 2.4 children or more. It is about proportion as much as about family planning. More important, it is itself a beautifully balanced little universe, a seductive mix of statistics and emotion, science and religion. “Maybe One” is one of those rare books that encourages the reader to think and gives us the tools with which to do so; it has a point of view without ever becoming doctrinaire. For all its sobering issues, it is a delight to read. McKibben is that better kind of optimist, one who sees a problem and finds liberation in sculpting an answer.