Less Than or Equal to One Kid

While I was fixing the laptop of a particularly irritating libertarian corporate stooge years ago, the small talk turned to marriage and kids (for some forgotten reason.) I told him "yeah, we might have one at some point." Without hesitation, he forcefully opined "No. Children need siblings. Have at least two."

I've heard this opinion before and since, of course, most recently on a plane when a couple with a little daughter were told, again forcefully, that they had better have another when they told some guy nearby they were just having one. People who would not, presumably, tell you who to marry or what career to pursue or what color shoes to wear think they have the right, even the duty, to tell you that you are a bad, bad person for just having one child.

I was thus very excited to see the new Time Magazine cover story dispelling the one-child myth, i.e., the idea that only children are selfish, maladjusted, lonely, etc. As it turns out, that whole notion was cooked up by some late nineteenth-century "psychologist" (before they had anything like a scientific methodology) and instantly became received wisdom, passed down through the generations. It cross-pollinated with the fact that families used to need lots of kids for work in the fields and/or the fact that 50% of them died young, as well as the whole biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

In short, a mish-mash of complete bullshit resulted in the utterly incorrect and baseless belief that only children are inherently disadvantaged. As numerous studies have since shown, only children are smarter, happier, and more "successful," as an aggregate, than kids from larger families.

This issue strikes pretty close to home for me. I have always, always known that if I was going to have a kid, it was going to be just that: one kid. Happily, B had reached the same conclusion without us ever having to talk about it. We want to keep our lives. We want to be able to go through life sharing things with Plan C, not being worried sick that we have nothing to share because we're stretched too thin (emotionally, mentally, temporally, financially) by multiple kids.

The most interesting part of the Time article to me was the fact that almost all parents who have more than one child do so because they think they're supposed to, not because they really "want" to in so many words. It's a classic case of basing important decisions on received wisdom rather than actual independent thought.

Finally, I'll add that the one thing the article doesn't address is the fact that most pregnancies are, of course, still unplanned. The whole issue is kind of moot for most people with multiple kids, because they didn't intend to do anything. Not to get any further up on my high horse here, but that shit still drives me crazy. Birth control. It's simple. It's straightforward. PEOPLE SHOULD USE IT.