Are only children selfish, spoiled and lonely? Duh, no, a piece in the New Scientist recently concluded, unpicking all these stereotypes.
There are many more only children now: in 2022, 44% of UK families with dependent children had just one child. According to researchers at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society, they are doing just fine. Rejecting the “outdated preconceptions and stereotypes about only children”, they found “an overall reassuring picture of UK only children’s lives and outcomes”.
Other research has shown that only children are not more narcissistic, report less loneliness and are as happy as or happier than those with siblings. Have those findings shifted our prejudices? Nope. Speaking to New Scientist, Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and long-time researcher into only children, said that her many years of reporting no difference or slight advantages for only children had “not done much at all to improve the stereotype”.
That’s also true of our beliefs about birth order, the persistent notion that eldest children are conscientious and controlling, middle ones rebellious (but also peacemakers) and youngest children sociable and self-centred. We instinctively feel it’s true, but empirically, it’s not: “birth order has little or no substantive effect on personality”, according to various studies. There’s just too much going on in every family – yes, happy or unhappy, Tolstoy – for something that simplistic to be true.
These indestructible assumptions are not just unreliable, they’re ancient. The foundational study on only children was published in 1898 (and based on 46 only children out of 1,000 studied); Alfred Adler, who conceived of birth order theory, was a contemporary of Freud.
But we like them anyway, as this year’s swathe of “eldest daughter syndrome” memes shows. We identify as neurotically conscientious eldests or maligned middles; we worry only kids are maladjusted. Why?
We all like a story that makes some sense of the asylum (sorry, “multifactorial context of family environment”) where they raised us, I suppose. But even Adler thought birth order was in our heads. “It is not, of course, the child’s number … which influences his character, but the situation into which he is born and the way in which he interprets it,” he wrote. Growing up with a big-age-gap sibling, I’ve always attributed my various neuroses to being an unholy eldest/only child hybrid, but perhaps it’s time to strike a blow for science and accept it’s probably just dumb (or “multifactorial”) luck.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
