Changing the conversation (cross-posted with Psychology Today)

I wanted to cross-post something I wrote up for Susan Newman’s Singletons blog at Psychology Today.  Some it it might feel like old hat to readers, but my brief discussion of a recent Wall Street Journal story, and New York Magazine‘s controversial piece on the unhappy realities of parenting are, I think, worth a look. Plus, it’s an excuse to run the picture of my kid that accompanied the Psychology Today piece. Because, yes, in spite of my best intentions, I am that kind of mother.

I’m a journalist, and an only child with (for now) an only child. In considering my choice to have one-or another-I began investigating both sides of the singleton question: what it means for kids, and what it mean for parents; drawing from my own experience, and my parents’, was not enough. And so I went to the literature. In interviews, I delved into the lived experience of kids and their parents. And I parsed what the increasing number of only children mean for the world: how our deeply personal, individual choices add up on a societal level.

The result of that investigation-or rather, a brief abstract of it-is this week’s cover story in Time, “One and Done.” Is it a watershed moment for only children? Every few years a mainstream publication trots out the old research-stacked on my desk in the bold colors of academic books published in the 70s and 80s-that has long demonstrated that only children are just fine, thank you. Recently we’ve learned that parents of only children may be happier as well, despite our social stigma as selfish. (And what’s wrong with selfishness, I wonder? My parents decided that to be good parents they needed to be happy parents, and to be happy parents they needed to be happy people. Is that selfish?)

But the fact that this story ran on the cover, and that it was always discussed in-house at Time as a story that belonged on the cover-never was it considered as an article which would be given short shrift in the back of the magazine-speaks to an awareness that it’s time to shift the dialogue. In scores of radio interviews since the issue hit newsstands (including one I particularly enjoyed with Susan on The Takeaway, producers commented each time that they had been bombarded with calls and emails, that they wanted to continue the conversation on another show, that they had no idea this would be such a “Hot Topic,” as the daytime show The View named it this week. It’s clear the culture is hungry for a more honest, open conversation about only children.

And yet, the old rusty saws about singletons continue to cut deep, whether by maintaining how we are stereotyped, or by simply negating or ignoring the choice to stop at one kid. Television’s two critical darlings from the past year reinforce the only child myths in vainglory. On Glee, where almost every principal character on the show is an only child, just Rachel-precocious, self-obsessed, chronically insensitive, lit with ambition that scorches everyone around her-is ever identified as such. Or consider Manny, the singleton tween son on Modern Family, who repels everyone except his doting mother with his aggressively adulticized tastes and tendencies, ending up friendless, sipping coffee in a pressed button-down shirt.

Journalism doesn’t get a better handle on us, I’m afraid. Take this Wall Street Journal essay written by reporter Sara Schaefer Munoz who poses the question, as the headline asks, “Is My Only Child a Lonely Child?” She doesn’t go in search of research to answer her question. Instead, she writes about her own (completely relatable) anxiety, and poses the question to readers, most of whom fill the comment queue with vitriolic admonishment of the parents of only children-some who are parents of multiple kids, some are unhappy singletons themselves- which leaves happy only children and their parents scrambling to defend the choice as a minority view. It’s hardly subtle. Just take a look at this fairly typical response to the essay: “I feel it is child abuse. Would you choose to have a child with a missing limb? Choosing to have an only is selfish and materialistic.”

Even Jennifer Senior’s recent buzzy cover story “I Love My Children: I Hate My Life.” in New York Magazine struck me as reading studies with an eye toward negating-or, more truthfully, ignoring-the choice to have a single child. Senior, a writer and thinker I tend to adore, who I believe is a mother of a singleton, exhaustively combs through studies on parenting and happiness, giving almost no discussion to the fact that many of the researchers she spoke with say people are happiest with just one kid. It’s just not a part of her story. Instead she swings the pendulum as far as possible from the Stepford-smiling vision of perpetually joyful parenting to the opposite extreme: that it’s a whole lot of misery, albeit we should embrace it should we forever regret not having done so. Parenting shouldn’t be distilled into a binary of joy or misery any more than we should discuss the merits of “children” versus “childlessness” without considering the place in between: having just one kid.

While Dahlia is dancing

In reflecting on reporting the Time piece today, I keep harking back to a snapshot from an afternoon which encapsulates much of the giddiness and longing and ambivalence that for me permeates the “one and done” question.

In her typical uniform (sans monkey pajamas).

Dahlia is dancing in a tutu from my second grade dance recital, its orange, green and pink ruffles now rediscovered and tugged over her fleece monkey pajamas, rustling around her wiggling butt.  At her insistence and my pleasure, I too am wearing a tutu—a can-can skirt from junior high dance class, pulled up over my jeans.  “Ballet music” (Tchaikovsky) is playing as she twirls and jumps between the pocket doors to our bedroom.  When I first saw this house, I imagined these doors would make a perfect proscenium for living room performances. We spin together, and wave our hands like the mice in the Nutcracker video that has become her most recent obsession.  “All fall down!” she yells and, joined by an oversized monkey doll and a stuffed bear, we tumble into a giddy pile together, her green eyes twinkling, her blonde mop tickling my nose.  I tell myself to remember this.  Then I look at the clock, realize the workday is in full swing, and scramble up to check my email.

There I see a note from a demographer. If I can call him now, he’s free for an interview for a story I’m looking into.  I bellow downstairs for myJustin to abandon his paperwork in favor of the next installment of Nutcracker mice, and scurry out to the office clutching my frilled skirt around me.  I dial up Philip Morgan at his office at Duke University, eager to hear his analysis of the recent study he conducted on our cultural notions of ideal family size. He has long studied the discrepancy between the number of children young women say they want, and the number they actually have. I’ve seen the extensive tables in his myriad papers on intended fertility—the number of people who say they want one kid is below one percent, even in Europe where the fertility rate across the continent is well below two.   Citing such figures, he tells me that nobody wants just one kid, not anywhere, not even in Europe where fertility rates have plummeted. Morgan is clinical and abrupt, circling back to the numbers whenever I attempt to talk about our cultural biases, our politics, what we see on TV.  I explain to him that I am an only child by design, and that the small child giggling in a tutu may well be one too.

Now he abandons the figures.  “Listen, no offense to your mother or to yourself,” he says, “but I had three sons and I’m glad they have brothers.”

I am silent.  He continues, “I can’t imagine having just one child.  What would that be like? I don’t know why anyone would want it.  Their relationships with each other have been the greatest joy of my life. You’re saying to your kid, ‘you’re never going to have a brother and a sister.  When your parents die you are alone except for the family you create.’”  He clears his throat and goes back to the numbers.

I stop taking notes, too furious to pretend he’s simply offering me information. How patronizing! And yet, I’m unsettled by his words. Certainly, he has raised points that I have long-considered. I’ve always known that there can be advantages to sibling relationships, but my own experience without them was so positive I never worried I would deprive Dahlia if Justin and I decided to stop at one. But to hear of the joy witnessing his kids together has brought him exposes me to something new: never before had I considered what I would be missing as a parent.

The information in the Time story is all true–believe me, never before have I written anything so agonizingly fact-checked–and I’m happy that my editor was as encouraging of nuance and complexity as she was.  And yet, even with its inclusions of moments of personal narrative and my point of view, I can’t help but feel that a piece of journalism like what it is–and what it should be for Time‘s purpose–lacks the emotional nut of this conversation.  There are studies, and then there’s lived experience.  And as Dahlia grows into full-on childhood, with her delicious toddlerhood slipping away, I can feel why parents want it again, and why they want that childhood to include more children.  I may prefer my own lean threesome in the end, but will it really be because I’m reassured by studies, or by my own personal desires?  I’d be kidding myself if I said the former and not the latter.

My Time article on the truth about only children

These weeks of radio silence have been inexcusable.  Thank you for your patience with me.  The emails have been mounting up with article links, personal stories, questions, and I promise to sift through all of them soon.  My absence can be explained (in part, there’s hopefully some other exciting news on the horizon, too), by the story I have just wrapped up for Time, which is now available in abridged form online, and in its full expression on newsstands the world over.

I’m truly thrilled to have been given the opportunity to bring a conversation I care so deeply about to Time’s broad and influential stage.  It started this way:  I was having lunch with an editor–the amazing Radhika Jones–and we were batting around some story ideas.  She asked me what else had been on my mind lately, and I started talking about only children: about the lingering myths of our unfitness, about the stigma still associated with stopping at one kid, about how I felt we scrutinize every parenting choice but whether to become a parent again, about how I saw my own parents’ choice as a liberating one, and which I was considering, albeit with some ambivalence.  She mentioned our conversation at an editorial meeting the next day, and just like that a cover story was born.

I mention the genesis of the article, and its reception at Time, because I think it speaks to how ready we are as a culture to finally have this conversation. There’s been a ton of news in the past several weeks, from BP to Lebron, from World Cup to the financial bill in Washington, and Time still felt driven to feature this relatively news-less (what journalists call “evergreen”) human interest story on its cover.  It suggests to me that there a shift afoot in terms of how we think about the choices we make, how open we might become in questioning, and how that can change the way we approach happiness, overscheduling, the environment, you name it.  If this article can help people to make the decisions they want in their own lives–whether it be to have four kids or one, or none–based on a more honest discourse, sound research, and trusting their own needs, then that means we continue to evolve as a civilization.   And any way I can contribute to that evolution makes me very proud indeed, and grateful for my readers.