Only Child Syndrome: Brats, Myths and Little Emperors

What sort of behavior, personality and life can we expect from an only child? A lot of cultural expectations persist about the singleton, from the spoiled Veruca Salt of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” to the “little emperors” who rose up in the wake of China’s One Child Policy. But what’s the truth of the matter? Robert and Christian explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.

(00:48):
My name is Robert Lam and I'm Christian Sager. Robert weird. Questions.
Are you an only child? No, I have two younger sisters.
I'm the eldest child. But I thought you had a stare.
But you have to They they split since I last
heard about them. Now there's two of them. Yeah, there
there are, each with their own, you know, separate personalities.

(01:10):
Oh yeah, yeah, how about yourself? I actually have the
reason why I did the split. Thing is I have
a twin brother and sister. I'm not a twin of them.
They are twins and they're ten years younger than me. Um,
they were adopted, so I was ten years old when
they were adopted, and so I was an only child
for the first ten years of my life. Well, actually

(01:32):
we my parents fostered a couple of kids before they
adopted my brother and sister, and then they adopted my
brother and sister and it's been now now we're all adults. Okay,
So so you have a little bit of the the
only child experience. Yeah, I definitely, like the first ten
years of my life, I remember adults making only child

(01:55):
cracks at yeah, like jokes, not teachers, but more like
family friends are like aunts and uncles and stuff like that,
saying stuff like oh you better watch out, like the
he's going to grow up to be an only child
or something like uh. But I don't know, I've always
had a different experience with that term than I guess

(02:17):
what the stereotype is. Maybe, Yeah, Like I definitely remember
growing and this is not something where where it was
like even like my parents saying it or specific teachers,
like I can't remember like anybody really pushing the only
child syndrome agenda. But I feel like it was definitely
out there in the culture, this idea that if there's
a family and they have only one child, that child

(02:39):
is going to be a nightmare. That child is going
to be spoiled, they're gonna be a brat, they're gonna
be and it's and you'd certainly see it to varying
degrees in popular media. You do. And let's be honest too,
as adults now and I'm absolutely guilty of this. There
are people that I meet in life and I go, oh,
they must be an only child. Yeah, it's such a
predominant nare you end up summoning it, even even if

(03:03):
you don't logically agree with it, even if you're not,
you don't apply much thought to it. Yeah it is.
It's weird. Like so all right, I guess we should
spell it out if if people are unfamiliar with this,
although from what the research said, it's pretty much common
in every culture. It's not just an American thing, which
is something I learned for this episode. But the idea
here is that only children end up being selfish and lonely.

(03:25):
U they're maladjusted and they end up being loners. Uh.
And the other thing is that they're overprivileged and overly intellectual.
Uh So that's a little or or or not or
not that intellectual, according to at least one variant of
the myth that we'll get into. Okay, that's a little
different from what I always assumed the stereotype was, which

(03:46):
was I guess I always had it in my head
that the only children were less conscious of social cues,
and they subsequently talked too much in conversation, and they
usually talked a lot about themselves. They're sort of noxiously
self confident. That's what I thought it was. And I
guess like after looking at the research and how like,

(04:09):
at the beginning of every article on only child studies,
they had to sort of explain, well, here's the myth,
and here's how we debunk it. I've been living a lie,
like my version of the only child. I gotta come
up with a new name for these people, uh, like Singleton's.
I saw that term a lot. Is that one them Singleton's?
Or maybe I just shouldn't generalize as much, Yeah, because

(04:29):
that's what ultimately way it comes down to generalizations and
stereotypes regarding Singleton's And I also have to add on
this that that my son is an only child. So
so a lot of this is not only me looking back.
I'm like these ideas that were predominant, uh, in the
culture growing up, but also like how I look at
my own son and I and I find myself. I've

(04:51):
I've over the past, um, you know, four years, I've
had to sort of push down some of these narratives
in the back of my mind, saying, Oh, he's gonna
maybe should have should have a second child so I
have someone to talk to, or oh, you know he's
I sure hope he's not a spoiled brat because he's
the only one wh's getting all this attention blah blah
blah and uh and so yeah, this episode is about
exploring this idea where it came from, and looking at

(05:15):
what the research has to tell us about not only
only children in Western culture, but we're also going to
get into a little bit about the so called little
Emperors of China, especially like what happens when an entire
society is forced to have only children whatever repercussions. Yeah,
and and indeed, how do you even study that? I

(05:37):
would like, before we get into this. I have hung
out with your kid a number of times, and I
never got the sense that he's got quote unquote only
child syndrome. So I hope nobody's telling you that. Well, yeah,
it's one of those things where, to come back to
a previous episode on on the Barnum Effect, you can
always sort of pick and choose what aspects of a
generalization you want to apply and so, and that's what

(05:59):
I find myself doing, Like I'll be around like when
you mentioned about oh, well, you know, maybe single children
or more outgoing and a little obnoxious, and they talked
too much. Like instantly, I'm checking those some of those
things off in my head. I'm like, oh wow, Baston
never shuts up. He talks all the time. I had
so much confidence. But he's a little He's a little
that's the thing. He's Yeah. So if you had said

(06:19):
the stereotypis other a little bit shy sometimes and I
would be like, oh, yeah, just shy the other day.
So exactly, there's a lot of different ways you could
apply it to sort of like fulfill your own prophecy
about exactly when it means well, yeah, I mean, so
it's interesting that you brought up to like the the
idea of the social pressure because every article we read
for this, So you have a son and I have

(06:42):
no children, and I just immediately was like, wow, I
had no idea how much pressure there is on parents
one way or the other, whether you have an only
child or you have more than one child, Like you're
doing something wrong in society is telling you about it constantly, right,
I didn't realize that. Oh yeah, you know that's I

(07:03):
think that's something that a parent has to come to
terms with pretty early, is yeah. And I imagine it's
similar with any kind of responsibility, Like, um, like I
don't own a dog, but I know there are lots
of voices on dog ownership. This is the right way, No,
this is the right way. This is the wrong way.
If you're doing this, then you're just a complete monster.
It's similar with children. Yeah, yeah, oh certainly. I mean

(07:23):
listeners probably have heard me talk about my dogs before.
I have two pit bull mixes, and I've taken one
of them through uh what is like certification behavioral training, right,
and it was extreme for what I thought. And then
like we we've started taking our second pit bull to
a different place for training, and we realized, oh, there's

(07:44):
entirely different methodologies, just like there are with parenting, uh
for training your dog. Um. Yeah, and it like one
was more strict and like you beat the alpha, right,
and then like the other one is more like, you know,
focus oriented and positive reinforcement. Yeah, so it seems like
there's some some common ground there. Now. We mentioned earlier

(08:05):
that we have all these different Singleton's, these different only
children in popular media and our stories and our movies
and our fictions, and how those kind of informed this
really this this kind of conflicting notion that either only
children are the worst or the absolute best, like it's
on the spoiled brat end of the spectrum. Verukas Sault

(08:27):
from Charlie and the chocola factor instantly comes to mind.
That's true. Although all right, I'm trying to remember now
it's been a while since I've seen it. I know
Charlie's grandparents hang out in bed all day. But does
he have siblings? I think that he, if I'm remembering quickly,
he might be only child as well. But he's you know,
growing up in this crowded household. And so that okay,

(08:48):
that right there speaks more to what we're going to
find out in the in the research, the Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory syndrome, which is Charlie is better adjusted
in the movie or in the book because of his
socio economic situation, and the rook assault is not because
she's spoiled. She's spoiled because of her socioeconomic situation, right,

(09:11):
not necessarily because she's an only child, although from the
research it's the other way around. It seems like, Yeah,
you know, another another popular media thing that came up
when I was looking around is Harry Potter like virtually
all the children, not not all of them, and you,
you Potter experts, can correct me on this, but we
certainly are the weaklies. There are certainly not only children,

(09:32):
but a lot of the characters are both the really
awful villainous ones um but also the heroes, Harry himself.
So we see this conflicting idea, and I wonder to
what extent is this. Yeah, we're echoing these ideas and
expectations of only children, but maybe there's this in creating
a narrative, it's easier to not figure out what their

(09:53):
sibling relationships are, or there's like this desire from those
of us who are not only children to look, I
can have either you know, have all the positives or
the negatives of being a child and having these relationships
with parents. Have it all focused on you. Well, like
any good myth. As we've talked about on the show before,
it seems that the only child syndrome myth has spawned

(10:16):
an archetype. And I imagine that there's been plenty of
things that have been written in the last hundred years,
but probably even further back than that, because this, like
as we'll find out that this is a cultural idea
that has deep roots. And I think that, you know,
it seems that these uh writers or maybe subconsciously adding

(10:37):
that trope in, whether they know it or not. Yeah,
I think that that sounds reasonable. Who else we got
on the list? You've got, of course, Damien from the Omen. Yeah,
if only Damien's parents had just had another kid, they
can fix it, right, that's the thinking. Yeah, I feel
like a lot of horror movie characters, Jason Vorhees, Norman Bates,

(10:59):
I think, and again I wonder how much of that
is like just an expression of how little thought goes
into the character development of a monstrous human character where
they say like, oh, and he had a mixedtep thing
with his mom, or and his mom is a witch
or something, and then someone might ask what about his siblings?
And I haven't got time for that. Let's we've got
blood effects of the panel. Watched Bates Motel at all?
I haven't, but I understand they introduce a sibling. Yeah

(11:21):
in that show. Yeah, I I only watched a little
bit of the first season, but I'm pretty sure there's
a like half brother or something like that in there. Yeah,
that that matches up with what I was seeing in
the research. But apparently in the original we get the
sense that he's plase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a
couple of stats that I want to run through before
we dive into more on only children, sort of setting

(11:45):
us up for that, like what we were talking about
regarding like parents and expectations, at least here in the
United States. According to a New York Times piece that
we referenced a very like deep dive into the only
child syndrome philosophy, one in five American fan Lee's has
just one child. So that's far less than I would
have thought. And according to a Time magazine article. The

(12:09):
U s Department of Agriculture reports that in the US
get this, each child cost their parents around two hundred
and eighty six thousand and fifty dollars before college on average.
You know, I don't have kids, So I hear that
and I go, ah, like that's a lot. I hear
that and go walk. Yeah, but you're probably aware of

(12:32):
it more over time, right, like educational costs, food whatever. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean it's certainly it's it's like a daily reality
of But what I immediately think is like, how does
anybody afford to have more than one child? You know,
Like I have friends who have like three, four kids,
and I'm like, how are you doing that? Like who's

(12:54):
paying the bills? Are you just horribly in debt? You know? Well,
you know it's it's part of the whole switch wishing too,
is you we live in this age where people are
making choices about their family structure and their size of
their family. You know that thanks to thanks to the
use of contraceptives of course, and then of course other
modes of of building a family such as adoption. Uh,

(13:14):
you know, you make distinct choices and what that the
number of children is going to be whereas you know,
based on the researchers I was looking at here the
like the older model, and pretty much everywhere was you
just had kids until you could not have them anymore,
you know. And it wasn't a choice of like how
many how many children do you think you'll have? No,
it's it's just until they stopped coming out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um.

(13:38):
In fact, one of the things that's been noticed is
that in modern society, single child families spike when there's
economic downturns, like for instance, that Time article was written
during the recession, so they're seeing a big spike in
people who are saying like, that's it, like just one
kid is enough for us. Um. And the reason is

(14:00):
why parents usually have a second child. This was when
I really got into that uh social pressure thing that
I wasn't aware of. So usually they say it's for
their first child so the first child won't be lonely.
But other parents say they do it because they love
their first child so much they want to experience that
love all over again. They want the full experience. And

(14:23):
I've heard that from some of my friends. Yeah, yeah,
I think about that every day too, because it will
be this thing that you love in your current relationship
with your child, and you know that's gonna go away
at some point, and then you know who's gonna you know,
who's gonna who's gonna snuggle, who's gonna you know, who's
gonna play Legos with you? You know, and you're like, oh,
I've got to have that again. I guess the second

(14:44):
child is the right choice. And then, of course some
religions advocate against birth control, so you end up with
a lot more kids. Like my friends back in Boston
who are Catholic, they come from families where they've got
like eight ten siblings or something like that, because that's
just kind of the norm um. But then there's this
one from Science Daily that I read. Check this out.

(15:04):
Some people say they have only one kid to prevent
carbon pollution, and I've never heard that before, But there's
a two thousand and eight study in Global Environmental Change
that found that an American can prevent twenty times more
carbon pollution by having one fewer child then they can
by adapting eco friendly habits for the rest of their life.

(15:27):
Well that's that that to me. I don't know, I
can't speak for everybody that does sound like a wonderful
fact to pull out in in retrospect. I guess, yeah,
it's it seems a bit extreme. Yeah, a lifestyle choice,
but I mean it's it's you can certainly put it
on the pro list. You do pros and right, I
can say, like now I can say, oh, that's why

(15:47):
I don't have kids. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm saying it's
my carbon footprint. Yeah, it's for the my read on it,
and every the thing is because everybody is different. Everyone
walks into the situation with the same with it with
a different with differ and ideas and different expectations. But
I feel like there's so many different pressures, some that
you're you're aware of and some that are just kind

(16:09):
of in the ether of your culture that are informing
your decision. That it's that's it's difficult to nail it
down to just one thing, you know, Oh yeah, absolutely,
I mean just looking at all these different reasons, you know,
I I imagine that we have listeners out there right
now who are screaming at their podcasts saying, wait, wait, wait, no,
my reason is this. You know, there's got to be

(16:30):
an infinity of reasons. But we try to make sense
of it right and packages well, this is like, well,
one thing that comes up with me a lot is um,
so my son is is adopted from China, and so
people will say, oh, why did you decide to adopt
a child from China? And like the answer to that
question is not like it just a succinct. Oh well

(16:51):
the reason A, B, and C, Like the reasons change
the the it's a learning experience, as should go through
that that process. And uh, and I imagine this is
the same with with bio babies and other forms of
acquiring children, building families, etcetera. Is that you may go
into it with one idea, but those ideas are going
to evolve, and even after you've made your decision, you're

(17:12):
gonna have new information that's coloring whine you made that decision.
So it's difficult to boil it all down with something
as majorly complex as being a parent. Yeah, of course
there's gonna be multiple reasons. Um In Pew who does
They're they're the masters of surveys that we're always setting
them on this show that is Survey and American Motherhood.

(17:32):
And forty six percent of the adults that they interviewed
said that two children was the ideal number of children
for a home, which struck me as interesting because I
guess it brings us back to the idea of like
the atomic family. Yeah, um so at one point five
or the two point five one point Yeah, I think
it is one point five, which always gives me like

(17:52):
a fallout franchise vision of like the mutated child with well,
that was you and me too, because we grew up
during the Old War, right, so that of course made sense.
It's probably different now. But get this, Only three percent
of the people in the survey said that one child
was ideal, and only three percent said that zero children
were ideal. So that strikes me as and it definitely

(18:15):
doesn't play out when you think of Okay, so the
New York Times piece said there's one in five families
just have one child, but three percent say one child
is ideal. Those numbers don't line up. Yeah, alright, So
let's get into the Western idea of the spoiled brat,
the the only child that is also a problem child.

(18:36):
It's it's fascinating when we start breaking this down to say,
where does this idea really come from? Because certainly, as
we discussed it in the Old days, you just always
choice wasn't really an option. You just had as many
children as what's going to happen for the most part.
So where does this idea that the choice to have
an only child is a bad idea? Turns out it's
one person. But we're gonna we can blame it all

(18:58):
and what well, now we can't blame it all in guy,
but one we can attribute a lot of this one
And he sort of had a following. And his name
was Granville Stanley Hall. Yeah, this was more than a
century ago. He is and he's he's he was a
rather big deal. He established one of the first American
psychology research labs, and he was a leader of the

(19:19):
uh you know, the child study movement. Yeah, this is
yet again like another like historical look at psychology's early days.
It's we did a lot of things the wrong way
with psychology is that discipline without any real methodology. Yeah, yeah,
well that's the problem here. So so Granville Stanley Hall,

(19:40):
he actually established a network of study groups around America
that we're called hall clubs. That sounds sounds funny. We
got hall club on Tuesday, uh, And it was where
his teachings about only children were spread. Now, keep in
mind Hall's research practices where nothing like ours are today.
So the instance, if he were to publish one of

(20:01):
these things as a paper, it wouldn't go through peer reviews,
it wouldn't not meet the criteria that we would expect
it to now. In particular, his eighteen nineties six study
came out titled A Study of Peculiar and Exceptional Children,
which sounds like a delightful young adult title. It sounds
like a tim if you like that Tim Burton movie there. Yeah,

(20:22):
So in this work he profiled a number of only
child misfits and without any credible research practices in place. Uh.
One of the quotes from it is quote, being an
only child is a disease in itself. Uh. And he's apparent.
Apparently he was drawing in like a lot of this
was this was a time when you know, there's a
lot of movement into cities and the the the the

(20:46):
country lifestyle sort of fading away, and he was very
nostalgic about that and very opposed to change in urbanization.
And uh, but but here's the thing. This this idea
that the only child is a disease in itself, it
penetrated mainstream. It made it, it made the headlines. This
is one of those examples where it made its way
into the larger culture, into the atmosphere of culture. And

(21:10):
subsequent attempts to discredit Stanley's work in the decades to follow,
like none of none of these discrediting studies, UM exploded
quite as well as his did, and his remained at
the dominant narrative, and to a certain extent, remains the
dominant narrative despite all these studies that have come out
and and and continue to continue to get to discussed

(21:32):
and you know, in major podcasts, that get published in
major publications to say, actually, there's nothing to back this up. Yeah,
in fact, we're gonna look at it later. But there
were studies from nine until the eighties that were constantly
saying this wasn't true, and none of them could break
through the archetype. It was just too prevalent um. But

(21:55):
and for me, like, I go, surely it can't all
be this one guy, But it seems like according so
I looked around. Uh, there's a California State University at
Dominguez Hills researcher named Adrianne Mansilla's and she says, yeah,
it's totally cross cultural. It's everywhere. It's from Estonia to Brazil.

(22:15):
And and why we'll think about it, It's exactly what
you tied it back to, right when you think about
people needing bigger families to farm their land or to
to work as part of the family unit and care
for the parents as they got old, exactly. Yeah, that's
a big part of it too, and then industrialization threatens that.
So I can absolutely see why that became the prevalent narrative.

(22:38):
In fact, one of the lead researchers that we're going
to talk about later in the episode said that the
only reasons why families used to stop at one child
was due to death, divorce, or medical reasons like they
physically couldn't have children. Yeah, basically active god. Yeah, okay,
So why don't we take a quick break and then
we're gonna turn our site. It's over to China and

(23:01):
it's one child policy. Alright, we're back alright, So just
to refresh on the one child policy, um so, China's
population increased by four million people between n and nineteen
seventy six. As such, following the death of Malsatong, the

(23:24):
People's Republic of China instituted its one child policy in
the late nineteen seventies in order to ensure that quote
the fruits of economic growth are not devoured by population growth.
Population was swelling urban centers especially, and this is something
that's virtually never stopped. So it seemed like, you know,
in a way a reasonable solution, right, you just ask

(23:46):
everyone to or ask you tell everyone to have only
one child and it will keep the numbers. Yeah. So um,
this became the policy, the one child policy, and it
it ended in two following a relaxation of the rules
and previous years. So it didn't apply to ethnic minorities,
and of course there are several ethnic numerous ethnic minorities

(24:08):
in the People's Republic of China. And also I believe
in recent years one child parents, parents who were themselves
Singleton's were permitted to have to it's right. Yeah, there
were exceptions, uh. And the way that this worked was
from nineteen seventy nine onward, it was enforced, especially in
urban areas, mainly by using economic incentives. Right, So there

(24:31):
were benefits to your family if you if you stayed
with the only child policy. In twenty eleven, Chinese officials
actually excited data. And I don't know if this is
accurate or not, but this is what came from the government,
and it said that this policy had prevented four hundred
million birds. So you know there is some I mean,

(24:54):
I guess if you look at it in a very
logical manner, you can say, okay, well, those are four
hundred million less mouths to feed. And of course it
it plays into the what was the quote up there,
the fruits of economic growth or not devoured by population growth. Okay,
and I've seen that statu UH as low as two
d fifty million, but that's two fifty million people. So

(25:15):
that at a very like basic mathematical level, you can say,
all right, well that that was successful. Um, so obviously
we we could devote an entire episode to the fallout
of China's one child policy. The policy was was always controversial,
and you can find arguments for it against it. I
mean really they're different, different pros and constant lineup on

(25:37):
both sides depending on who you talk to. UH. Fertility
certainly decline more rapidly than it otherwise would have. We
already talked about the stats two hundred million averted births,
but and it also resulted in an age demographic divide
that may have contributed to one quarter of its sizable
economic growth, But at the same time, it meant a

(25:59):
skewed sex ratio. You had ended up having more more
boys than girls, and it means that there's an aging
population with fewer young people to care for them. They
were certainly there were certainly negative fallout, as one might
expect of any large scale social policy. There were fines,
there were punishments. There are accounts of quote unquote forced abortions,

(26:19):
and all of this made the policy a source of
public discontent. Um. They're all additional um you know, accounts
of female and fanticide, of abandonment, et cetera. Those are
the horror stories that I think we hear over hear
them most often, which is like, uh, some poor young
woman has had a second child. What does she do?

(26:41):
She has to kill her own child because of this law.
That's the like the horror story version of it. Yeah,
I mean, and it kind of goes back to our
episode on Wicked Problems, right, because when you look at
any kind of attempt to change something, to alter some
sort of problem in society, um, such as population was
like any like large scale solution, it's going to spiral

(27:04):
off additional problems. And I'm not I'm not I don't
want to come off as an apologist for for the
the one child policy here, but it um, I guess
I'm just trying to see it at different levels, Like
you can certainly see it at the individual level, but
then like trying to understand it. Is this some macro
response to perceived threats. Yeah, it's certainly like an incredibly

(27:26):
complex thing. And and as we're going to discover from
the research that's been done in the last couple of years,
it's not as simple as just treating a community as
large as China's population as like a single organism where
you just prescribed like one uh policy that will fix
this whole thing right at any rate, though, the ultimate

(27:47):
outcome here was that you had more Chinese family centered
around than only child. And here's where we see the
so called Little Emperor syndrome, particularly Chinese version of the
only child syndrome. And it's based on the idea for
the ones that child policy resulted in an entire generation
of Singleton's children doated on by parents and grandparents and
pampered by resources that might have typically gone to multiple children.

(28:10):
They lacked siblings and therefore they lack proper socialization. This
is big, right, Yeah, two is as well right that
they're they're going to be in a house. They're only
dealing with a bunch of grown ups that are just
pampering to their every need. Then they and they also
the idea here is they lack not only siblings but
also cousins, and this is gonna eventually spiral out into
aunts and uncles, um and and this becomes like a

(28:33):
major this becomes an important idea. Like even here at
how Stuff Works, there was a there's a there's a
Chinese version of how stuff Works dot com. And I
remember years ago when they were talking about like the
the advantage this is like previous owners of the company.
They were saying, oh, well, you know this is big
because since you have this situation where there's an only

(28:55):
child with all these resources going to them, that means
there's more educational money to mean made off of them.
There's more, you know, there's there's more of this focused
attention because you have kind of like all your eggs
in one basket. I didn't even know that. Yeah, I've
worked here for three years. Wow, Okay, yeah, it's out there.
I can't remember the name of the website offhand, but
you look forward. They just take the content from How

(29:17):
Stuff Works and translated into Chinese. They did at the time.
I don't I don't know to what extent it's still cultivated,
if like new content is being translated. But I know
there there there are articles that I wrote for How
Stuff Works years and years ago that have like Mandarin
translations on this interesting website. And but it's not just
over here looking in. The notion of these little emperors

(29:38):
gained a lot of support in Chinese media. Chinese China Daily,
the popular publication there even dubbed the demographic as quote
the spoiled generation. But it was largely no empirical evidence
for this notion. So was it You have to ask,
is it was? It was? This? Is this any different
than any situation where an older generation judges the younger,

(29:58):
you know, the greatest genera ration versus the baby boomers,
versus Gen X, versus the millennials, versus whatever we're calling
the next group of young people that we don't understand
and think are horrible and destined to ruin the world. Right, Yeah, um,
this reminds me of my time when I was working
in academia. There was a lot of consternation about quote
unquote millennials, like we don't understand them, what do we do?

(30:22):
How do we how do we teach them? And Uh,
the university that I worked at had an expert who've
done a lot of millennial studies come in come and
give a huge presentation to like almost all the faculty
of the university and they're basically like, all the stereotypes
that you know are wrong. There are there is data
that shows that there are things about this generation that

(30:43):
we know that we can use toward uh coming up
with strategies for teaching plans or something like that. Right,
But it was like none of the stereotypes that people
think of when they say millennials. Yeah, it's not a
situation where you can imagine, like to scientists dissecting a
millennial and they're like, oh, this is where the millennials
digestive juices. You know, it's like there their people and

(31:04):
there's a there's a vast that there's a lot of
difference in personality and background. And the same can be
said of Singleton's in in any culture, like they're going
to see a lot of different personality types. However, there
are a few things we can say about personality UM here.
For instance, there's a lot of evidence to support the
idea that birth order plays a big role in the

(31:25):
manifestation of individual personality UH. For example, the paper Birth
Order effects on personality and Achievement within Families argues that quote,
across four diverse data sets, first borns were nominated as
most achieving and most conscientious. Later borns were nominated as
most rebellious, liberal, and agreeable. So we're talking about statistical

(31:49):
generalities here, but it does raid the race the question
would would this mean that the vast social experiment of
China's one child policy may have helped to exclude certain
personality types from manifesting. That is interesting especially to think of,
like as that generation is now coming into power. So

(32:12):
this is one of those areas where we don't have
a lot of study to look to, and it's kind
of it's difficult to study because, on one hand, so
many of these studies are dealing with Western UH one
child situations, and that's a little bit different from the
People's Republic of China, where we have essentially a one
child family culture that's been built out of this, again

(32:35):
taking into account to ethnic minorities and other circumstances that
are in play, but it makes it difficult to have
proper control groups for any kind of study. Yeah, that's
certainly true, I guess. Like so I'm just like immediately
popping back to my subjective experience of living in China
behind these and like trying to imagine like I was

(32:56):
in Beijing and trying to imagine having a family with
more than one child in the homes like that we're
that we're common is just like it would be next
to impossible again, like as an economic disadvantage, like thinking
comparing it to the American thing where I was saying
earlier about how much money it costs to have like

(33:16):
just one child in the United States, and then like
just thinking about like the space considerations in Beijing stuff
like that. Indeed, now, the one study that we do
have that gets into this, uh, the one that certainly
I was able to come across, is a two thousand
thirteen study. Lead author is A Lisa Cameron of Monash

(33:38):
University of Melbourne, Australia, and she had co authors that
were also with the Australian National University and the University
of Melbourne, and they attempted to figure out to what
degree the one shot policy impacted the personalities of China's children.
And again this is like the pretty much the only
study out there, so take that into consideration. We don't

(33:59):
have a lot to compare this too. So that what
they did is they used games from experimental economics to
measure altruism, competitiveness, and other traits and individuals born just
before and just after the one child policy. After controlling
for gender, education and other factors, these researchers found that
those who became only children because of the one child

(34:20):
policy were supposedly less trusting, less trustworthy, less conscientious, and
more risk adverse. Yeah, so this is interesting to me
that these researchers chose economic based games for their measurement
system when they're looking for social and personality results. The

(34:41):
implication here is that the economics and the sociology are intertwined, right,
that they have to be connected somehow, hence socioeconomics. But
but you know what I'm saying, It's that like I
would imagine that they would give them a different kind
of personality test. Yeah, one of the criticisms that has
come up with this is the this is kind of
a limiting way to look at them and trying to

(35:03):
analyze and understand you know, the whole generations of people,
um that the study does that they do They did
seem rather interested in the economic output here, uh. The
the idea of being that this would also mean that
these individuals would be, um what would be uh less
likely to engage in risky occupations or go into business
for themselves, and that it would impact like the entrepreneurial

(35:27):
spirit of Chinese people. Again, you're kind of painting with
the broad brush here. Yeah, and you could also, you
know whatever, like in any generalizable way, like uh, say
that there are multiple reasons for why they may be
less entrepreneurial, like maybe it's because of you know, political philosophy. Now,

(35:50):
when you start looking at these findings and how people
reacted to it, you'll find that that some were would
praise it and say, well, this is a great starting point,
and others would say, you know, it's just this is
an incomplete attempt to understand the influence of confounding factors
in Chinese society. UM. Because again, how do you find
a control group. When you study the nature of Singleton's
in what is you know, essentially a one child society.

(36:13):
Other critics argue that age differences may have skewed subjects
decisions in the economic games. Yeah. I found that there
were some experts that chimed in on this analysis and
they just basically said, look, this requires more complex research.
It's such a difficult topic to just nail down with
one study and needs more research and it's far from complete.

(36:33):
They also said that age differences could have skewed the
decisions that were made in these economic games too, so
that you know, that could have been a factor. Yeah,
now specifically on that if just to give a little
more background, Camera and Company looked at four one subjects
born in eighty and eighty three, so definitely our generation plus.

(36:55):
You know, if we're to accept these findings, we have
to consider that the Singleton's lived up to their bad reputation,
right and perhaps too bad expectations. So we can just
can we discount the degree to which Spoiled Brad and
Little Emperor notions stigmatized and kind of code children that
you know, we have to remember the labels and expectations

(37:16):
are powerful things. So how much of it is, oh, well,
they're gonna be little emperors and you keep telling them this.
I would be very interested to hear from any single child,
any singleton listeners out there, like did you find that
narrative influencing the way you behaved? Or you know, there's
so many factors and what what builds the personality of

(37:36):
the kind of self fulfilling After a while, if you're
told so many times, well, the reason why you act
like this is because you're an only child, then you
start thinking to yourself, Oh, I guess it's okay for
me to be whatever the stereotype is, a loner or
misanthrope or something. I'm both of those things and I
have brother and sister. Yeah, but it uh, you know,

(37:58):
I do agree with critics saying that more study is
needed here though, because it it's such a singular situation.
It's like so much of these other studies we're looking at,
they're dealing with generally, they're dealing with Western families where
there is one child by choice, and certainly in China,
we're dealing with a large scale situation where there is
one child due to government mandate. So uh, it's it's

(38:21):
it's its own thing. Yeah. I also wonder too, like
in the sense that we were talking about earlier that
the fear moving from like an agricultural society to an
industrial society in the United States probably influenced the stereotype.
What other like major um cultural shifts in China that
we as Westerners are totally unaware of maybe influencing these stereotypes. Indeed,

(38:47):
all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we come back, we're gonna look at what the science,
most of it Western science, has to say about single children. Okay,
so we're back. So let's get down to the nitty
gritty here. What does the science say. I mentioned earlier
there were studies from nine until now that have basically

(39:11):
said this is a myth, right that the only child
syndrome is not real. Right, So let's go through some
of them at least and its spell it out. Yeah,
because ultimately it's kind of the situation where every few
years there's a new study that says that the the
stereotype is complete bs and they'll be dated to back

(39:33):
that up and it's and then it'll be there'll be
individuals in the media who will write about it and
it's just to what degree does this actually breakthrough and
change the cultural perception? Right, it doesn't really penetrate the consciousness. Yeah,
that's sure. Generally speaking though that it seems like universally
across all these studies, there are no true negatives to
being an only child. So you'll you'll find some studies

(39:56):
to present data to support negative attributes, but for the
most part, you don't. So there's a we're going to
coverage some of the big ones, some of the more
recent ones generally, but in two thousands, there's a two
thousand ten study University of California. They found that having
more siblings means less chance of divorce as an adult.
So you could you can say, all right, here's one
study that you can interpret as saying the like the

(40:20):
negative being that if you're an only child, you're more likely. Yeah,
there's a two thousand twelve study from the University of
Gothenburg and they found that children who grow up without
siblings have a more than fifty percent higher risk of
being overweight or a beast than children with siblings. And
this uh was gleaned from a study of twelve thousand,

(40:40):
seven hundred children in eight European countries. This is like
the last possible stereotype that I would think of regarding
only children as well. Well, there was in Wali Wanka,
wasn't there the Oh yeah, yeah, I assume, yeah, I
was he an only child? I can't remember. I don't know.
I don't know. Yeah. And again I so if you
want to pull from that study and use that to

(41:02):
profit the idea that that only children are gonna are
more likely to be overweight, they're apparently. Yeah, somebody needs
to do we just passed Halloween. Somebody needs to just
study how much candy do only children eat on Halloween? Yeah?
I imagine, though, the reality is you're gonna find only
children that are skinny, only children that are overweight going

(41:24):
to run the game. Now. There's a two thousand thirteen
New York Times article by Lauren Sandler that is really
good on the on the topic will often include a
link to it, but she summarized the scenario as follows. Quote.
Consider the data in hundreds of studies during the past decades,
exploring sixteen character to traits, including leadership, maturity, extroversion, social participation, popularity, generosity, cooperativeness, flexibility,

(41:50):
emotional stability, contentment. Only children scored just as well as
children with siblings, and endless research shows that only children
are in fact more self involved than anyone else. It
turns out brutal sibling rivalry isn't necessary to beat the
ego out of us. Peers and classmates do the job.
And this and this is another thing that comes up, right, Like,

(42:13):
it's not like you're going to have an only child.
I mean, some only children are probably gonna grow up
in scenarios where there are fewer children in their midst
but other kids are going to they're playing with kids
in the neighborhood. They're playing there, maybe they have cousins,
they're going to pre k and schools. Yeah. Absolutely. One
psychotherapist told Sandler in that piece that only children actually

(42:35):
have strong primary relationships, but they're with themselves instead of
with siblings, and that that tends to provide better armor
against actual loneliness. So they're better at being alone. They're
not lonely. That's not interesting. Like they know how to
engage with with personal time a little better maybe than
someone who constantly has another playmate around the course. I

(42:59):
know how having had a sibling playmate is rather a
director generous term, and so without somebody to argue with.
Now another question that comes up, or are you know,
obviously are they lonelier? Then? Um, we've discussed it a
little bit already. But Tony Falbo at the University of Texas,
who has studied only children syndrome, suppose you know that's

(43:21):
the term that's gone out, only child syndrome. She studied
it quite a bit and looked into it and determined
solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and indeed it often
strength and strengthens character. Yeah, I think we could probably
call Tony Falbo the m v P of only child studies. Uh,
she's been involved in this stuff since the nineteen seventies

(43:41):
and she's just all over every single article that I
read on the topic. She and she's done studies in
both the US and China. It should be noticed she's
studied tens of thousands of subjects in her time. After
examining hundreds of studies that were done on only children
from nineteen twenty five until the Falbo and her colleague
Denise Pollitt found that only children have quote demonstrably higher

(44:06):
intelligence and actually have more self esteem than children with
siblings then they did this. They performed a second review
of two hundred personalities studies, and they found that the
personalities of only children were totally indistinguishable from their peers
that had siblings. Uh so, I mean, she's really like

(44:26):
reviewed everything that's ever been done here. Yeah, and and
certainly worked to um to to dispel some of the
previous um studies that were out there, including some from
the nineteen seventies that claimed that only children scored lower
on intelligence test. But it turns out these findings turned
out to be skewed by imbalances and socioeconomic and one

(44:48):
versus two parent household scaling. So again it comes down
to what what what? What are you judging here? What
are you looking at? Are you looking at just um,
you know, only child versus multi sibling house olds? And
are you taking into account all the various other reasons
socio economic and otherwise they influence the personality of an
individual um Sandler who wrote that New York Times piece.

(45:09):
She also cited a sociologist named Judith Blake as finding
the precocious quote qualities of only children come from the
parents being able to devote more time, money, and attention
to these children. Instead of having to divide them up
among other children. So the stereotype may come from the
fact that only children are often raised in quote richer

(45:31):
verbal environments. And what this means is they're sharing their
meals and other activities with more adults rather than like
they're not at the kiddie table. Yeah uh. And this
subsequently leads to higher SAT scores and better self esteem.
So it seems like all the research is saying the
exact opposite about only children. Yeah, there's a quote that

(45:53):
came across this is from University of Texas researcher Dr
Harold D. Grodevant, and he said, quote whether child is
an only child doesn't matter as much as the kind
of relationships in the family. So so again you can't
boil it down to just did they is there another
child in the house. There all these other relationships are
having just as much of not more impact. So here's

(46:15):
some other key findings from Falbo's work in the nineteen eighties.
She found that socioeconomic status of the family, as well
as the presence of both parents in the home is
is likely a far more important factor. Yeah, that just
seems like a no brainer. Yeah, like that we would
look at that far more than how many siblings you have. Yeah. Indeed,

(46:36):
also she found that only children are as popular with
their peers as children and as adults as anybody else.
So that's that the whole like loner or antisocial thing
doesn't hold water. And also on an Ohio state survey
of more than thirteen thousand children backed this up and
found that only children had as many friends as anyone else.

(46:58):
So she also found that only children are equally satisfied
and happy, health and mental health are the same. Only
children scored higher and intelligent tests than non only child children,
and this is comparable sociogomic level and family situations. Yeah.
I found just a small bit of research tied into that.
A guy named Dr John G. Claude found that the

(47:19):
only children performed better on cognitive skill tests than children
from families with two or more child. Yeah, and you know,
I can't help but think about homework in the scenaria.
I just listened to a really excellent Ideas episode about
homework bands and filled me with lots of anxiety about
coming homework my child. But yeah, they're talking about all

(47:42):
the homework parents end up having to help one child
with and then if it's two, I mean, some something's
gotta get it's gonna fall through the I'll just help
each other. Yeah, well you had the second one, Robert. Alright.
So Falbo also found that points out that only children
have higher academic aspirations, they retire levels of education, and
attain higher occupational prestige. Only children start dating at the

(48:05):
same age as children with siblings. However, only children have
a slightly less active social life overall, dating somewhat less frequently.
So you know, in all of this too, of course,
we're also even statistics back all this up. I mean,
we're still talking about generality. There may be plenty of
examples that buck the trend on both sides. Now. Interestingly enough,

(48:26):
in Falbo's worked in the nineteen eighties, she predicted that,
is more families chose to have only children, attitudes towards
both parents and child would change. So there'd be less
of this stigma against having just one child, and they'd
be less of this, uh, this this attitude and this
expectation of of say, spoiled behavior or or antisocialization in

(48:49):
the only child. Yeah. Sandler, who wrote the piece, her
own research indicates that only children experience more intense emotional
family lives where the love is more concentrated is how
she put it. Um And she says, well, while that
can be enriching, it can also be suffocating. So she
interviewed a lot of adult only children. She found that

(49:12):
they told her that they wanted to have more than
one kid, specifically because the intensity of being in that
like concentrated love scenario as a kid was too much
for them. Um. And there's also data she cites from
the National Alliance for Caregiving that shows that the closest
living sibling we brought this up earlier is usually the

(49:34):
one who is responsible for elderly caregiving. And only children
reported to Sandler that this was the number one issue
that they felt strongest about regarding their sibling status, like
how many siblings they had, what their relationships with their
sibling was. It came down to who's going to take
care of mom and dad old age. Yeah, so that's

(49:55):
a big factor as well. And then Time Magazine spoke
to psychologist Carl Pickard, who wrote the book The Future
of Your Only Child, and he did this after four
decades of experience as a you know, therapist. He said, yeah,
they're indulged and they are protected by their parents, but
only children also are given more nurturing to develop themselves.

(50:19):
And he clarifies that this isn't the same thing as
being selfish. Now I've got a personal example here, and
maybe you experience this too, Okay. As a writer, I
find that I am often guilty, although I really try
not to be of self comparing to the success of
other writers. Uh. And for instance, I think to myself,

(50:42):
how did somebody like za D. Smith sell a novel
when they're only twenty two years old? And that's not
me saying Zadie Smith is a bad writer. That's me
going how did she have the acumen at age twenty
two to be able to do that? And as I've
gotten older, I realized, well, it's because I didn't necessarily
have of the nurturing that would lead to developing skills

(51:03):
as quickly as maybe she did. Right. Uh And while
z D. Smith was hammering out novels, I was still
trying to figure out who I was at age twenty two.
By the way, she's not an only child. She has
a lot of siblings, so she's she's not an example
of like an only child. But I guess when you
look at it from an only child's perspective. They may
succeed earlier, but they're they're experiencing this intense pressure from

(51:29):
both their parents and themselves to succeed. So that's interesting
to think about too, just from like an adult perspective
looking back, right, is that there's sort of like a toolbox,
and you're given a certain amount of tools to work
with in that toolbox. Uh. And though you have to
use those as you're getting older to sort of figure

(51:50):
out who you are, what your skills are, what you
want to do with your life. Uh, and not everybody
like uses the tools in the same way. Yeah, And
I mean I can certainly see that where you would
have the parental expectations of hey, there's no plan B,
there's no mental child, right, there's no room for you
to be the screw up here. You've got to you've
got to be the success story. Yeah. Yeah, I think

(52:12):
that that's the pressure that people feel, or than that,
like they put it on themselves too. Yeah. Um, So
you know, to close out here, I think first of all,
I would love to hear from our listeners who are
only children, uh, find out what their experience are how
much Uh this gels with your personal experience or not

(52:33):
the research or the stereotype per se um. And I'd
also like to point out Sandler also says most people
say that they have their first child for themselves and
the second to benefit their first. But if children aren't
inherently worse off without siblings, as has been proven through
these studies, who is best served by that kind of thinking?

(52:55):
So that's worth questioning as well. Um, it's probably not
the parents. They're probably not best served, right Uh. Sociologist
Hans Peter Koehler, who is at the University of Pennsylvania,
he analyzed thirty five thousand Danish twins who knew there
were that many Danish twins, and he found that women

(53:15):
with one child said that they were more satisfied with
their lives than either women with no children or women
with more than one. So that's an interesting point of
comparison to He's like, I'm assuming he's looking at twins
as a control group. Uh, and finds that the despite
what we heard earlier from that Pew study that the

(53:37):
self reporting in America at least says that well, two
seems to be the ideal number of children these women
were reporting actually I was most satisfied when I only
had one, uh, Regardless, According to a University of Pennsylvania demographer,
projections show that in the United States, the number of

(53:58):
larger families and the number of only children are going
to keep growing and in the rest a couple of years. Yeah,
so there's going to be a growth of both, and
we'll see what kind of repercussions that has culturally for
our for our own socio economic climate. Yeah, and indeed,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there who has

(54:20):
some input on this, if you're an only child, or
you're one of many siblings, if you're a parent of
an only child, or if you have an entire brood
going on, and indeed, what your kind of outlook on
that is. And certainly if anyone out there has you know,
personal experience with the one child policy, we need to
hear your your thoughts on all of this as well.
Be very interested to hear a personal experience with that. Yeah. So, Okay,

(54:43):
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