The Challenges and Joys of Being a One and Only

Alexis White never liked leaving home.

When she was 10, she telephoned her parents, Charles and Carolyn, every night from summer camp, sobbing.

When she slept over with friends who had brothers and sisters, she was always glad to get back to her room in the Whites’ orderly, quiet Hancock Park duplex so she could play with her own stuff.

Soon after she moved into a UCLA dormitory two years ago, she started coming home Wednesdays and weekends to stay overnight.

“It’s nice here. There’s good food. My parents have created such a nice atmosphere for me, I struggle with leaving home,” she says.

Separation wasn’t much easier for the Whites. With Alexis at UCLA, Charles says, the emptiness in their home was almost tangible, the silence deafening. “I felt like a big portion of me had gone away,” he says.

In the four years since they started “Only Child,” a newsletter and Web site (https://www.onlychild.com) for only children and their parents, the Whites have found that separation anxiety is only one of the challenges facing families with one child. Since then, subscribers, who number roughly 750, have raised a host of issues from children’s manipulation of parents to parents’ overprotectiveness of children.

“We have definitely become the ‘Dear Abby’ of only children,” Charles says.

For many parents and children, bonds have grown increasingly intense as family size has shrunk, demographers say. Working mothers, divorce and infertility have only accelerated the trend that began a century ago, when infant mortality declined.

“At the beginning of the century, you had to have three children to have two that would survive to be adults,” says Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “If you have two children now, there is an excellent chance those children will live to be adults.”

In recent years, only-child families have become the fastest-growing family form. According to U.S. Census survey figures, only-child families have grown from 10.9 million in 1972 to 15.6 million families today. Two-child families increased from 9.9 million to 13.9 million, while families with three or more children decreased from 10.1 million to 7.9 million.

Surveys show, however, that many couples may be having smaller families than they want. Asked what they consider the ideal number of children, 57% now say two children, up from 41% in 1972, Smith says. Those choosing zero or one child as the ideal haven’t increased in 25 years.

The Whites had hoped to have a second child, but learned Carolyn would be unable to carry another pregnancy to term. “We talked about adoption as a possibility or some fertility procedures,” Carolyn says. “We decided we were happy with the one we had.”

Their urbane home is the calm, well-ordered abode of two professionals (she is assistant admissions director at Crossroads School in Santa Monica; he is a professional photographer) who dote on their only child and could afford private schools. Alexis’ drawings hang on the walls around the kitchen table. Framed pictures of Alexis, many used as Christmas cards, sit on night stands and dresser drawers in their bedroom. At least 20 photo albums are filled with pictures, including commemorations of her first Halloween, first haircut, first airplane ride, first trip to Disneyland.

Alexis admits that as a young teen she felt stifled and overprotected. “It was like all the attention was focused on me as opposed to having brothers and sisters to spread things out,” she says. Then in high school, she started to feel lucky. “They came to all the functions. When I was in a play, my dad helped build the sets. My mom made costumes. My friends would say, ‘Your parents are so cool. They’re not annoying parents.’ ”

Not all single-child families resemble the Whites. “A number are divorced or choosing to be a single parent for assorted reasons. A number of lesbians and gay couples are adopting,” says Susan Newman, a social psychologist and author of “Parenting an Only Child” (Doubleday 1990). “A lot of women marry men who are older and have been married before. The father may be supporting children from his first marriage or may not want another child. Usually, they will concede to having one.”

In many cases, however, the issues are similar.

“People have the same doubts. They still worry, ‘Am I cheating my only child by not giving him or her a sibling? Can I raise a well-rounded, happy, content person as a single child?’ ” Newman says.

Though fading, old-fashioned stereotypes of only children as spoiled, shy or unable to share still remain in some quarters,Newman and the Whites take the optimistic view, citing several recent studies that show only children are no different from those with siblings. They are often similar to firstborns in high achievement, notes Carolyn White, who includes profiles of famous only children, such as Alan Greenspan or Cary Grant, in the “Only Child” quarterly. Shyness, Newman points out, has recently been shown to have a genetic basis. In many cases, she says, only children are actually more willing to share because they have less fear things will be taken away.

Many only children like Alexis acquire a stable of friends so close they are like siblings. “They’re very resourceful,” Carolyn says.

Still, the critics occasionally strike a nerve. One mother of a 6-year-old boy wrote to “Only Child”: “I deeply feel my son is lonely. He has many times wished for a sibling or makes comments about ‘wishing my stuffed animals were alive so I’d have someone to play with.’ ”

One parent who had been an only child said her experience was so painful, she would never subject her own children to it. “The choice to have an only child is a shortsighted and selfish life choice made by parents, not by children!” she wrote. “I can tell you that never in a million years would I have only one child. I have three.”

College-age only children have written in to complain about parents who overprotect, over-control or are too close. One boy said he had to fight to go to the college of his choice, not his father’s. One girl said she didn’t want to hear any more about her mother’s dates.

A constant concern of both parents and children is what will happen when the parents become elderly and frail.

“It’s hard to think about,” admits Alexis White, 19. “It’s something I’ll have to deal with alone and that’s pretty scary.”

Often, the problems that parents see in their only children are “parent-driven rather than child-driven,” Newman says. Starting kindergarten, picking out their own clothes, going on a first date, driving a car or leaving home can all be problems for parents. “Any issue that says, ‘I’m breaking away, I’m an independent person’ is scary for the parent.”

For parents of only children, separation is even more emotional, she says. “Everything you do is the first and the last.”

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Information on “Only Child” is available from 137 N. Larchmont Blvd. #556, Los Angeles, CA 90004, (800) 478-3452, or at https://www.onlychild.com