Busting Only-Child Myths

Pronatalism

Mar. 2

Lonely, selfish and maladjusted? NOT. Careful consideration of all the ramifications of your family-size decision is smart. Perhaps you’re leaning toward having only one child; there are plenty of good reasons to stop there. But you’ve heard only children are spoiled and selfish, or can be peculiar. It turns out these are myths.

Journalist Lauren Sandler did a lot digging, and in this episode she tells us there is “a lot of data supporting the one-child family as a healthy, important choice.” Lauren wrote a Time magazine cover story on the subject, The Only Child: Debunking the Myths. She followed up two years later with the book, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and The Joy of Being One.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Dave Gardner 00:00
Honey, I am sick of washing dishes. Let's go get a dishwasher.
Carolyn VanderDolder 00:03
I've got a better idea. Why don't we just have some kids? They'll be washing dishes and mowing the lawn before we know it.
Dave Gardner 00:09
I don't know kids are kind of expensive. Why don't we just have one?
Carolyn VanderDolder 00:12
One? Are you kidding? We don't want a spoiled, selfish brat who doesn't know how to get along with others.
Dave Gardner 00:18
Busting myths about the only child syndrome next on the Overpopulation Podcast. This is the Overpopulation Podcast, the podcast that dares to tell the truth about our planet's human overpopulation crisis and explores the solution. Yes, overpopulation is a thing. There's plenty of science and empirical observation to back that up. But that's why we launched the One Planet, One Child billboard campaign, and you play an important role in that. Head over to oneplanetonechild.org to get the details and help push this groundbreaking project over the finish line. I'm Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance, the nonprofit working tirelessly to solve overpopulation. Learn more and join us at worldpopulationbalance.org. Co-hosting the podcast with me is the bright, compassionate, special projects coordinator at World Population Balance, Carolyn VanderDolder. Hi, Carolyn.
Carolyn VanderDolder 01:18
Hey, Dave, it's good to see you. I'm glad to be here.
Dave Gardner 01:20
Any big news before we start myth busting today?
Carolyn VanderDolder 01:22
I can't think of any but I'm really excited for the conversation.
Dave Gardner 01:26
Me too. But first, I want to give you a quick update on the One Planet, One Child billboard crowdfunding campaign. We're now in the final week, counting down to the deadline. If we make our $15,000 goal, by the end of the week, the project will fund. Then we'll be able to celebrate the small family choice on big, high profile digital billboards for a month in Minneapolis and Denver. Of course, Carolyn, you know, that's just a start. Hopefully, these billboards will get enough attention that we begin to attract more and more funding to expand the project, eventually posting billboards across the US or maybe even around the world. We passed the 50% milestone this past weekend. So we just need another $7,500 Roughly. If this episode of the podcast activates your interest in improving overpopulation literacy, and encouraging faster progress toward a one-child family norm, please visit oneplanetonechild.org and contribute. And tell your friends. Okay, let's have that conversation, Carolyn.
Carolyn VanderDolder 02:32
Okay.
Dave Gardner 02:33
The topic is the one-child family. Is being an only child good or bad for a kid? Well, we'd better explore since we're in the midst of celebrating the decision that more and more people are making to have one child and no more. We're thrilled to be joined today by journalist Lauren Sandler. Lauren's essays and features have been seen in The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, and a host of other top publications. She's worked in several roles at National Public Radio here in the US. But we've invited her here because she wrote a Time magazine cover story published way back in July of 2010, The Only Child: Debunking the Myths, and she went on to write a book on the subject, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One. So Lauren, you've not only researched the topic, but you've lived it for two generations. So we're really excited to get both what you learned about subject as a journalist and what you have lived about subject.
Lauren Sandler 03:31
I have lived it, both as a parent and a child, and done far more research than I would have ever imagined.
Dave Gardner 03:39
Speaking about that research, we should kind of just do a level set here. There was six or seven years ago that the book came out. So there could be some new data since then. Have you been staying up on the subject or, as a journalist, have you moved on to other things?
Lauren Sandler 03:54
I've definitely moved on to other things. My new book is about a mother who's struggling with homelessness. So similar issues, one would be surprised to learn perhaps, which is about, you know, structural inequality and how we deal with malfunctioning systems and how we think about motherhood in terms of our broken world. But in the meantime, I will say, I have not seen tremendously new studies about who only children are. The data that has changed is the rise of the only child family, which I think will probably surprise none of us talking right now when we understand how hard it is to have a child in this world and also how it takes a lot of thought. One of the things that I have been thinking about a lot over these years is the changing of norms, and what it takes to change norms. When I was researching my book, I did a lot of reporting in China, where obviously the one-child policy was enforced in the most horrific and draconian ways. But what it did do was it showed an entire generation of people what a new norm looks like. And once that norm was set, it's not been the case that people have gone ahead to have second children, most often, especially in urban areas, because we have a certain standard of what a life could look like, what a certain level of freedom can look like. And I think that for those of us who are watching climate change advance, there's a deep fear for a lot of people about what it means to bring each set of carbon footprints into the world, one after another. That, however, is a topic that I have seen explored far less than I have wanted it to be. So I'm very happy to be here.
Dave Gardner 05:39
That's great. Well, you've pretty well screamed through everything we were going to talk about today. So thanks so much for being here.
Lauren Sandler 05:44
So we're done. All right, good talking to you.
Dave Gardner 05:48
That's just amazing. Well, first of all, let me back up a little bit. You know, I introduced the episode as being about the only child and I wanted to know, is it important what we call a family with one child? Or what we call that one child? Is there something wrong with that phrase, the only child?
Lauren Sandler 06:06
Well, those words I think are fine. It's when we bring in words like lonely, selfish, maladjusted. Those are the words that tend to crop up a lot when we're talking about the single child family. Those are the ones I have a harder problem with. But no, I mean, we never have the right language to talk about families, I feel. You know, the word singleton sounds like something clinical, like something out of a zoo lab. The only child family? Sure. As far as I'm concerned, it's good to call it anything that feels comfortable as long as it isn't something that's perpetuating the myth that somehow parents of one child are screwing up their child by not giving that child a sibling so to speak, or that the assumption that that child will be worse off for not having a sibling.
Dave Gardner 06:49
Good to know.
Lauren Sandler 06:50
I'm going to use this moment to tell you a couple things about my book, since you haven't read it yet, which is okay. My book kind of uses the notion of a parenting book as an excuse to talk about issues of structural inequality, feminism, and climate change. And so that means getting the mythbusting about only children out of the way first, but I am someone who has spent my career writing about war, religion, you know, gender inequality, you name it. And so this felt like a way to talk about those issues. So the first third or half of the book is like, okay, let's get this out of the way, let me tell you why only children are fine. Now let's talk about why it is that people are expected to have more children, how the world fails to support that, and how we're killing the world by doing so. And it actually originally started through a piece that I wrote on overpopulation, which is actually why I thought that you were asking me onto the podcast was because that is what the whole last part of my book is about.
Dave Gardner 07:51
Well dang, now I'm gonna go get the book and put it on the top of the stack. Of course, I haven't googled your name and overpopulation. So I had no idea.
Lauren Sandler 08:00
Right. And also, that was in a magazine that didn't have much of an online presence and has since defunct. It was big and thick and beautiful, and very hard to find now.
Dave Gardner 08:10
So what this means is that you checked us out a little bit and you know the episode that we just published yesterday of the Overpopulation Podcast was about the connection between family size, population, and climate. So we can circle back and mention that here.
Lauren Sandler 08:25
If you'd like.
Dave Gardner 08:26
So I think Carolyn was about to comment or ask the next question. So.
Carolyn VanderDolder 08:29
Yeah, it was just an aside. When you talk about how to refer to one-child families, it's, you know, singletons or whatever. You don't really talk about a family with two kids as doubletons or doublets. Or I mean, it is a very distinctive thing that we do when kids are in a one-child family.
Dave Gardner 08:45
Yeah, I like the sound of that. Yeah, well, let's just make sure that by the end of this episode, that we have sent all of that baggage about the only child to the unclaimed baggage department to rot in hell. But you mentioned the data that has changed. And let me ask about that before we get into the myth busting. I think you had written that single child families roughly doubled during the last half of the twentieth century, plus a few years, and maybe spiked to 23% during the Great Depression. Do you know, did that turn out to be a spike or what's happened since the Great Depression?
Lauren Sandler 08:45
And there's a lot of othering that happens there. But you know, it is one of the things where it would be good to have good words for things. And in this one, unfortunately, the word only child seems to be so loaded with all of the baggage that it's carried for so long, but that's what it is. I'm an only child, my kid's an only child. Honestly, whenever I use the word singleton in the book, it's just because I can't use the word only child again in a sentence. So for the sake of our conversation, what if we just call them that, or sometimes I call them onlys because fewer syllables are easier to say.
Lauren Sandler 09:50
Well, after the Great Depression, and especially after World War II, there was of course a baby boom. And there was also a move to the suburbs and a real reinforcement of what an American family was supposed to look like. And concurrent with that, there was also a rise in cultural conservatism and especially in terms of conservative Christianity, which of course has the role that one should be fruitful and multiply. And we often find that there is a correlation between family size and religiosity, there's often a correlation between one's sense of gender roles and what one's expectation of motherhood should be. So I think it will surprise no one that as religious conservatism grew in this country, so did a certain norm of a certain family size. Ironically, there's nothing like not having money that can reframe that a bit. And that is certainly what has happened as inequality has become more and more extreme during this Gilded Age in which we live, in which people are struggling more than ever. And so there are plenty of people who feel at the moment that they cannot afford to have another child. There are also many more who feel that, you know, at the ages that people used to have their first child, that's something that is no longer tenable. That it's something that is either unaffordable, or one hasn't hit the right moment in their career, or frankly, and this is something that I think about a lot, in sense of what an adulthood should look like in terms of its freedom, its pleasure, its flexibility, is something that has changed radically since women were expected to stay at home and raise children. And so there's both the second shift element of this where most women work, and most women need to work, and most women also are responsible for most of what happens at home. And that is a very major thing to carry without the support that other countries give mothers that we fail to do in this country. Support like childcare, support like paid family leave. And those considerations are certainly pushing motherhood to later ages, then there's less fertility. You know, many people have only children, not by choice in some biological sense, however, there is also a choice to delay fertility. And so I always wrestle with that formulation a little bit. The idea that this is a tragedy for people is something that I think is very true in some cases. And I feel a lot for that. And in other cases, there is this moment where I want to look at people and say, "Is the world telling you that? Or is that what you are actually feeling inside?" Because when the world is telling you something that you should feel sad about because of your own choices and your own freedom, it's sort of incumbent upon us to ask why.
Carolyn VanderDolder 12:49
I read recently an article in The Atlantic about the nuclear family and how that ideal really isn't ideal, that it's kind of a really brittle construct. So what you're describing about the move out to the suburbs, and the focus on your family and your children, really does in some significant ways, cuts us off from each other as a society and makes everything more vulnerable. So when you talk about a family with one child, as opposed to many children, people often talk about the fear that their child won't have siblings or cohorts to grow up with and to learn from. Sometimes that means, I would think, you could probably speak to this much better than me, I was the youngest in a large family, but you make those connections outside your nuclear family. It seems like the support system that you build for yourself is a lot more stable and perhaps more far reaching than when you concentrate on that fifties idealized suburban nuclear family, which this Atlantic article really described as being quite brittle.
Lauren Sandler 13:50
I really do agree with that. I mean, I think that for families with one child, it is much harder if you're in an isolated rural area, there's no doubt about that. But that is not how the majority of us live. And even within that situation there, you have a kid who goes to school, most likely, or, you know, there are church groups, there are lots of different ways that people come together. And there are friendships. And I think that it's really important to remember that our kids are not home alone most of the time. They are at school, they are with friends. And just as parents, we have to learn how to navigate the particulars of our lives in the best way for our kids, whether that's a question of divorce, or juggling a couple jobs, or you know, whether we have a sick relative, all these elements, which are just part of life. So is having one kid - it means maybe being a little bit more intentional about having kids over on weekends or having your kid hang out with other kids outside of the school day, which for me has only been a joy to add into my kid's life. And in doing so, we've knit together a really incredible community of people with different parents and with different backgrounds and a different way of living together with a chosen family, and also our biological family. And that, to me, is a really beautiful and intentional thing to build.
Dave Gardner 15:15
You know, I'll confess, I made my family size decision quite a while ago, I'm getting to be up there in years. And so I stopped at two because I thought that was the right thing to do to end population growth. Turns out that we didn't accomplish that yet. But I remember thinking my kids, before they went into public school, it was important to me to get them into preschool. You know, I didn't feel like they were learning how to get along with others and socialize just the two of them together at home. And they certainly weren't learning how to be independent of their parents. So I felt like it made a lot of sense to get them into preschool so that they had to deal with the rules of the pack and all of those dynamics and plus learn that they survive if they don't see their mom or dad for a few hours.
Lauren Sandler 16:00
There's certainly plenty of data to support your choice. And I also think, you know, you know your kid, you know what's good for your kid. I don't think that there's one-size-fits-all families, nor do I think they're a one-size-fits-all modes of parenting. I think that for me, the real concern is what questions we're asking ourselves about our policy, about our culture, and about our planet. And I think that we tend to get really wrapped up in questions of parenting, which are important questions, but so consumed by that, that we end up missing the larger scene, which is increasingly a really brutal and essential scene to question.
Carolyn VanderDolder 16:44
I do have children, plural. And one thing that I appreciate, they're all young adults now.
Dave Gardner 16:50
All eight of them.
Carolyn VanderDolder 16:50
All eight of them. Not really. They're starting to partner and these couples, they talk with such intention about what they want to do, about whether they want to have kids. It seems like this generation that's coming up that I've been exposed to really seriously considers all the implications. I'm old, but I'm not that old. It seemed more an expectation than a decision. I remember Ricky Gervais talking in an interview and he said, "People keep saying, 'Why don't you want to have kids?'" And he said, "I think the question really should be why do I want to have them? We need to be deliberate about the way we live on the planet as our population keeps increasing and our resources are limited and decreasing." So anyway, just to kind of speak to that, I think the intention that this new generation is having to bring to all kinds of lifestyle choices. It's in some ways regrettable that they don't have the illusion of affluence and abundance. But in some ways, it's such a more adult and responsible way to go about living, I admire them for that.
Lauren Sandler 17:53
There is an element of illusion around what those ideals are. Also, you know, millennials are dealing with precarity in a way that no generation has before, for generations and generations. And they are dealing with deepening inequality. And they are dealing with a real climate threat. And I think that if you have grown up within that reality, it's a really hard thing to avoid. I also think that we have become a culture that questions norms, at least many elements of our culture, in a way that we didn't before. And I think that that questioning has been very much compelled by those crises. But it has rearranged the furniture in such a way that I think is very, very essential. I agree with Ricky Gervais. And I also agree with many other people who have said it too. There's a really fantastic book of philosophy by a professor in Toronto, which really examines what it means to choose to have each child and each subsequent child. And it's always been madness to me, though easy for me to say, I think, because my norm growing up was that I'm an only child. And so I only thought of having children one at a time instead of in sibsets, that we don't think of each birth, each pregnancy, in terms of its own distinct questions - in terms of our lives, in terms of the planet, and really in terms of our own desires - that there's been so much cultural expectation that does that decision-making for us. And I think it's really important that we question why. One of the answers that I have personally come up with, which is opinion, but opinion based on a great deal of reading and thought over the years, is I believe that we live in a society that expects women to be mothers more than they want us to be anything else. And to have the bandwidth for citizenship, to have the bandwidth for pleasure to have the bandwidth for power is significantly different the more we are in that phase of raising young children over and over and over. That does not mean that we don't want them, it doesn't mean that we don't want two, and it also doesn't mean that I don't think that people should have the number of children that they want. I deeply, deeply think that. I am not someone who thinks that it should be a zero to one rule for everyone. I just think that we need to think of each child we choose to have in very significant ways in terms of our own desires, and also in terms of what it means for the world that we're living in.
Dave Gardner 20:29
Well, it turns out, especially in this day and age, between the opportunities that women have, finally, you know, I think we men were pretty clever that we kind of got it all set up so that women had to work and they had to come home and take care of everything. What a deal we had. Tongue in cheek, I hope, you know.
Lauren Sandler 20:45
It is actually a great deal. And it's the deal that our entire economy has been founded on. And it didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, you may be kidding, but I think the word for it is patriarchy. And it's been really effective so far.
Dave Gardner 20:58
Yeah. And I'm sorry. It's just too bad that the men were left in charge way, way, way too long. But we're working on correcting that. And I liked that you mentioned challenging and changing the cultural norms. I think that's kind of what we're trying to do with the One Planet, One Child campaign that we're undertaking is we're trying to kind of accelerate the progress, we're hacking the norm or jamming the norm a little bit, because our culture seems to be hanging on to that old stereotype that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I'll say it because we want to destroy that. And that it's the default mode to get out of school, get married, have kids, start a family. And it's the default to have lots of kids and that it shouldn't even have to be a considered decision. We're trying to really see if we can't erase all that as fast as we can. And yet, here we are, we have economists and velociraptors who are seeing the change and trying to retard that progress. So I'd like to get your thoughts about those efforts that we're seeing today, alongside all the other pressures that a young woman to this day feels around having kids.
Lauren Sandler 22:08
Well, I think it's pretty transparent when we see the anxiety that economists express about a lowering fertility rate. That in that equation, children are future consumers. And it is very much a, you know, a crisis of not having enough people to buy the things that our capitalist society depends upon. That may sound extreme. But I actually believe that it isn't. I believe that that is a very, very objective reading of what it means to be looking at these economic models. And together with that, there's this notion that as we culturally promote a certain notion of motherhood, womanhood, and family, as the thing that is desirable, that is something else to consume. And that is something that then requires products, it requires a lot of different things, frankly, all of those things, you know, their manufacture, their place in landfills, you name it, is something which is advancing our declined as a planet. And to be thinking about humans as consumers and to be thinking in terms of manufacturing, and you know, a goods-based economy is, to me, missing every possible point of where we have arrived at in that model. One thing that people talk a lot about recently is that when women only have one child, or when gay couples only adopt one child, or women or other people have none, that is considered to be not meeting the intended fertility that, in general, people articulate. Here's what I mean by this. It's this whole way that demographers talk about things where if you poll a bunch of teenagers or women in their early twenties, they'll tell you, "Oh, of course, I want to have two children." And it's part of a very fantastical organization of how their adulthood has been something that has been sold to them, something that they have imagined throughout their early lives. And then of course, as realities start to mount up, as student debt mounts up, as the realities of this workforce mount up, as housing costs mount up, what actual childcare costs, what our health issues might be, I could go on. You know what I'm talking about. You know, what desired fertility looks like is a very, very different thing. It's not about buying another Barbie for the dream house anymore. And that notion that women are somehow failing at reaching their intended desires, I think has done a number on us. And it makes me a little crazy, as though our desires are things that are set before we've really lived through and asked ourselves these really tough questions. And then it makes me even crazier when I think about this in terms of climate change, when I think about how, even for people who, you know, are so good about bringing their Trader Joe's bags to the market, and recycling like mad, and raising super woke children, each one of those children is increasing, you know, our decline in such a radical way if they're raised in a developed country. And so I can currently see a trend amongst, you know, what I often think of as the sort of artisanal parent, the sort of parents who only dresses their baby in organic hemp onesies and makes their own food and only gives them wooden toys to play with. And all of that is great, but the notion that there is this sort of idealized expression of liberal feminism through one's multiplied motherhood, to me seems to be really missing the whole point. I don't care if you're teaching your kids to recycle if you have five of them. That's looking at the equation wrong. If you want to have five kids, and that's incredibly important to you, great. But don't see it as the woke choice. And I say that, the last chapter of my book talks about a friend of mine who was raised by two environmentalists in Australia, and they had an only child for, as they said, the planet. I tend to be suspicious when people define their family size based on other values, because I think it's usually a confirmation of a desire rather than the motor behind one. And that's okay. But she has gone on and had five children and has as many cars and has just doubled the size of her house. And she is someone who owns, you know, fewer pieces of clothing than almost anyone I know, has recycled more adamantly than almost anyone else I know, has, you know, the most incredible spirit, has grown this incredible community where she lives. I think of her as sort of a paragon of what the right spiritual persona for our planet could be. And yet, that feeling is also what made her want to have child after child. And so it's complicated. I love all of those kids. And I love this woman. But the notion that raising woke kids for, you know, planetary salvation is something that I struggle with mightily.
Dave Gardner 27:21
Yep, the math doesn't add up. That's for sure. And if you listened to our last episode where we talked about the climate-population connection, we get into that math. I have to confess that we're working so lickety split right now that I hadn't had a chance to read your book about this, Lauren. But it sounds like you actually got into climate change in this book that I assumed was just strictly about all of the other issues that prospective parents deal with regarding family size.
Lauren Sandler 27:50
So that was my sneakiness in writing this book. Here's my story. I have written about religion, war, inequality for many, many years. And when I got pregnant, I asked my partner to make me promise to him that I would not be one of these women who had a baby and all of a sudden just wrote about motherhood. But I realized, oh, once you have a baby, it is all religion and war and inequality. And even beyond that, I felt like, oh, this is an incredible way to sneak these conversations into a readership that might not be looking for it - for someone who wants to pick up a book that looks like a parenting book and lo and behold, they end up reading a book about structural inequality and climate change. I once, when I was writing a lot about religion, profiled an evangelical romance novelist who said, "This is what I do, I sneak the gospel into the romance. It's what I call being sneaky deep." So this book was actually my sneaky deep. A way of saying these are ideas to wake up to if you're not already thinking about them. Because this is a big concern to me, that there are many of us who are already really feeling this and thinking about it a lot and having these conversations in our own silos. To me, the question is, how do we break out of those silos? How do we introduce these conversations to people who can't be thinking about them, because they haven't had someone to say, "I'm going to pull you into an unexpected place and make you feel something and think about something."
Dave Gardner 29:23
We really underestimated your sneakiness.
Lauren Sandler 29:27
I even got you.
Dave Gardner 29:29
Yeah, maybe we should be doing a podcast about fast food and fast fashion and sneaking in some sustainable population thoughts.
Lauren Sandler 29:37
You may joke, I think it's a great idea.
Carolyn VanderDolder 29:41
But it is true, we are inundated with this alternate message that isn't any longer valid. And there are whole swathes of people that just don't have any exposure to the connections that are so important between population and climate change and resource depletion, and all of that. So thank you. I'm sorry that we are kind of late coming to the party and saying thank you for the work that you did on that. But thank you.
Lauren Sandler 30:06
Oh, no, actually, it's sort of a treat to see it happen in real time.
Dave Gardner 30:10
You got us, you got us. Let's promise to circle back to this subject. But I'd like to propose that we spend a few minutes though now, addressing the issues related to only children or single children, that would be important to a mother who might not even be worrying at all about the climate change math, or the inequality, or anything like that, or overconsumption even. But for prospective parents who are considering the one-child decision, there's certainly a lot of mythology out there, you know, you could probably come up with a list of pros and cons for the kid and pros and cons for the parents, couldn't you? Where would you like to start?
Lauren Sandler 30:49
Yeah, and it's deep. It's deep in it's historical. So let's start a long, long time ago, in this very galaxy. So you know, it used to be that if you wanted your tribe to survive, you needed to have as many people in it as possible. That's a pretty base thing in us. And then as we became agricultural people, if you wanted your farm to produce, you needed to have a workforce to work the farm. Those were your children, too. But then the industrial revolution happened. And that changed the math of things a bit. And then flash forward to today and the notion that one needs to procreate to survive, to survive economically, or to survive as a species. Well, you know, our own survival as a species now seems to have turned all of that on its head, as has our economy. And so I think that we are dealing with some bad stereotypes that really go back back back to when we needed them to persist. And we haven't caught up to that yet. So there is this notion that only children are lonely, selfish, and maladjusted. That's the language that usually applies. And I've heard all those words said together so often. In the book, I even write them as one word at times. And to just go through them very, very quickly, I will say, in all of the studies that I've read and all the reporting that I have done, there is a difference between solitude and loneliness. And because only children do not necessarily have someone sharing their bedroom with them, they, first of all, don't get annoyed by that person. And as a parent, I don't have to manage that conflict. But more than that, you know, you do learn to have a primary relationship with yourself, which is a very, very powerful thing in the world. So it won't surprise you to know that only children are readers, only children tend to be more independent. Those things are true in much of the research. In terms of selfishness, that's, you know, like all these things, these are questions of parenting. If you are parents who gives your child, whether that is one child, or five children, or Carolyn's eight. Carolyn, how many children do you have?
Carolyn VanderDolder 33:07
I have three.
Lauren Sandler 33:08
Oh, okay. Well, you know-
Carolyn VanderDolder 33:09
Close.
Lauren Sandler 33:10
Together, sometimes it might feel like eight. You know, you can definitely keep up whatever that kid wants, no matter how many kids you have. And so, if you spoil your kid, you're gonna have a spoiled kid, whether you have one child or not. I will say that all of the parental attention does shift things. And it can shift things in different ways. You know, there have been studies that have been done that correlate the number of words spoken directly to a child with their intelligence and with their self esteem. And so as we think about resource dilution, which is the term used for the amount of a family's resources, it's very similar to how we think about the planet, but it's within a family. The more people you have in the family, the more you dilute the resources. That isn't just true around money that you spend, that is true in terms of even the words that you spend. And so, you know, parents speak to one child more than they speak to two children, individually, directly. That is the sort of resource that an only child does benefit from. That said, if you lavish attention on your kid and don't give your kid on a space, well, that's a parenting error. But that's the sort of thing that if we actually had conversations about how to raise only children instead of just telling people that they were wrong to do it, we could introduce into how we parent a little bit better. I mean, we have all types of conversations in our culture about different types of parenting, whether it's single parenting, divorced parenting, gay parenting, dealing with twins, dealing with, you know, big age gaps, having four children, you name it. Somehow, having one child is something which we have not thought is worth troubleshooting because we're so busy heaping blame and judgment on the people who do it, whether they choose to or not. In terms of this notion of being maladjusted, I guess this is related to selfishness. But because only children don't have an automatic peer at home, they know that they have to work at it a little bit with friends at school or at dance class or at soccer, you know, wherever kids go. I don't know. Where do kids go? They go to places where they have to be nice to people or they're not going to be friends with them, and where they have to not only be nice to people in the short run, but if they want to have sustained friendships, you know, if they want to have a sustained peer group, that means using forgiveness, that means using generosity in ways that are essential, because it's not like when you have a sibling and you have a fight, that kid is going to be at the dinner table with you and you're just going to have to get over it. And so there's actually a lot of research done about how only children are often very well socially adjusted, and because of this, less selfish than one might expect. That said, these are all things that need to be validated by parents. So regardless of all of this, this stereotype persists. And every few years, another researcher says, "I'm going to set out to prove that it's true." And every few years, there's another study that just sounds like a sad trombone when it comes in. Because it's like, well, yet again, it didn't quite bear out. And so I think that it's really important that instead of carrying the biases that we might confirm with the selfish only children that we know, because believe me, I know plenty of them, I'm sure I've been one, there are moments when my daughter has been one. Or we don't imagine that when we see a child alone, that's something that is synonymous with loneliness. I'm someone who loves being around other people, I also really need to sort of crawl back into my bed with a book at the end of it all. Those are two different forms of happiness to me. If you don't project what you think something means, on a kid or on a family, chances are, you won't be confirming those biases all the time. And so when I wrote this book, I really intended to say, "Okay, let's get this stuff out of the way. There is no proof that only children are any worse off." I even likened it to astrology, where it's like, well, I'm a Virgo. So I read my horoscope and it says I'm like this, that's going to confirm the things that I believe to be true about myself at times, even though I am a Virgo and I'm like the opposite of what a Virgo's supposed to be. That said, apparently, I'm an Aries moon sign, and that kind of checks out. So who knows? You know, I think that it's sort of the last stereotype to die in many ways. Not that there aren't plenty of stereotypes that continue about other people, but we know they're wrong, we know to keep them in check. And instead, this is something where when Dahlia, my daughter who's now taller than me, we don't get this as much anymore. But when she was little, you know, and people in the supermarket or in the subway would see me with one kid, they would walk up to me and say, "Oh, what are you having another one?" And if I would say, "I don't think I'm gonna do that. Pretty happy the way I am right now." They would look at me as though I was an abuser, they would say, "Oh, you wouldn't do that to her," or "Oh, but think about your child," or they would just cluck their tongue and walk away. And it's really hard to imagine any other life choice or any other demographic provoking that sort of response in people. And then having those people think that that is not only an acceptable response, but one that is best for someone's child. And that is deeply troubling to me, especially when you consider structural inequality for women, especially when you consider our economics, and more than anything, when you consider what each additional child is bringing into our planet right now.
Dave Gardner 33:14
Carolyn, you raised three children. Lauren, you're in the middle of raising one. And one of the concerns that some people have about the one-child family size decision is that you end up having to spend a lot more time parenting if you have one versus three. So I'd love to get each of your perspective on that.
Carolyn VanderDolder 39:13
Well, it's kind of hard to say because I haven't ever lived through a different experience. I did leave the workforce to stay home with these three little boys. And then when I came back, it was with part-time jobs and so it did change the arc of my life outside the home. I'll sure say that in response. In terms of the time it takes shuttling people around, I'm sure that that's more. The expense certainly, you know, outfitting them for cross country skiing or even new clothes and then college. So yeah, in terms of resources and time, I would say that it was pretty demanding.
Lauren Sandler 39:47
But what about the part that I envy? Which is not true in all families, but certainly true in some where, oh, guess what, they're all just going to play like puppies upstairs while you guys get to just drink bottle of wine and have an adult conversation downstairs. Tell me what I'm missing?
Carolyn VanderDolder 40:05
Well, sometimes that would last for about four and a half minutes. You know, sometimes it wouldn't work like that. A lot of times it was people in different corners. So it's a mixed bag. And I do know families where there's an awful lot of strife among siblings. So it, yeah. It's kind of the luck of the draw. And you know, Tina Fey was writing an article and she mentioned what her obstetrician said when she was trying to decide whether to have another child or not. And the obstetrician said, "Somehow it will work out. I mean, whatever decision you make, whether you make one or two, it'll be fine. It'll work out." I don't know that we can say that for the planet anymore, which is a whole other conversation. But yeah, it is kind of the decisions you make day to day and the dynamics that you're dealt, you never know what's going to be in your hand. But what is your experience? Talk a little bit about your experience.
Lauren Sandler 40:55
I think that everything is a compromise. And I, you know, can imagine lots of ways in which it would have been wonderful to have another kid. I also can't imagine not having the sort of delicious special relationship that I have, where we don't have to share each other in the same way. It's interesting. There's a psychologist in Austin named Carl Pickhardt who I really like and admire. And what he says that only children miss out on is not the camaraderie, that we often idealize that. What only children miss out on is not learning through the conflict and competition of having a sibling. And I think that's really interesting. He's written about that a lot. And I can see that, and I think that there are moments now that my daughter is twelve and she's a very teen-y twelve. In a good way, she's mature. But that means that often I feel like, oh, is she playing out some sibling rivalry with me? Or with her dad? You know, are these moments in which she's getting that conflict and that competition with us and will I survive it? Great so far, but let me tell you, she just only turned twelve. And there are six years to go while she's still living in my house. And at the same time, I want to padlock her into her bed so she'll never leave. I promise, I won't actually do that, I think. And then there's the other part of me that feels like, okay, what is my life going to be like when she's out of here? If she ever is out of here, because increasingly, that's a difficult thing to do. I don't know if any of you have kids living at home, but these conversations about what a family looks like I think have really changed a lot. There used to be this notion that, you know, they hit eighteen and they were on their own. And increasingly, that's not happening.
Dave Gardner 42:40
Boy, there's so much to comment about that. First of all, I bet Carolyn will be able to lay some of your concerns to rest, that you might be bearing some conflict that a mother of three children wouldn't have because there were three of them to fight with each other. But Carolyn, I'm betting that's not the case. I bet you got more than your share of teenage attitude.
Carolyn VanderDolder 43:01
Well, I was just gonna say that she might be playing out some sibling conflict stuff with you, but the feeling of just locking them in their room? That's a common thing with with all parents, I think. But yeah, the conflict between siblings I think can be constructive, and certainly is a learning tool for them or was for my boys and for me myself?
Lauren Sandler 43:19
Well, I think it's just a mixed bag. I think that the issue is that we demonize one of those bags, and we idealize the other ones. And my book, when it came out, it got a lot of press attention. And there are a lot of people who thought, oh, finally, this book. And then there were other people who said, "Oh, what a lousy argument for having one child." And I thought well, I really didn't set out to make an argument, I set out to say, why is this the one type of family that we find so abhorrent? That we consider, you know, like child abuse at times, when there is so much supporting this as a healthy, important choice, both for child development, and for our own freedom as parents, but then also for the planet. And also for our engaged citizenship at times, which I feel more than ever. And this is certainly not to say that there are people with siblings who they're raising who can't do that. I would say that, you know, some of my friends who I consider the most active in their own activism, or the most present in their own parenting, are parents with multiple kids. I don't think there's one way to do it. I just think that we need to stop saying there's one way to not do it, when that is the thing that our climate needs.
Carolyn VanderDolder 44:40
I've heard this expression, I think it comes originally from the Talmud, "We see the world not as it is, but as we are." And I wonder in terms of the reaction to this conversation that you're trying to spark in this understanding, those people that see you being judgmental or see you as promoting a propaganda like a one-child policy, how do you reach people that can't seem to get out of their own pre-judgments?
Lauren Sandler 45:04
I mean, it's interesting. I had said before that I've written a lot about religion and war and feminism, I mean, controversial issues. And I'm used to people getting very upset by the things that I write. That's my path that I've chosen as a journalist. I did not expect after all of my years about writing about atheism, and the evangelical right, and abortion, and Islamic Sharia, that the thing that I would write that would make people the angriest, and the most judgmental, and the most emotional, would be about the simple choice to have one child. And it shocked me. And I think that in addition to all of the historic conditioning that I referred to earlier, there's also this feeling for people with siblings, and for parents of people who have siblings, that feels like I am saying, "Well, that person should not have been born." My sister-in-law, who is my husband's younger sister read the book and said, "So you wrote a book basically saying that I shouldn't have been born." I don't think that at all. I mean, there are moments that Diane and I had fights over these years where maybe I thought it for a second, but not in terms of this critique. And I think that that's a very common response to have, to say, "Well, you think that I should have been aborted, or you think that this child who I love should have been aborted?" And I understand why there is that deep, primal defensiveness, but I think we got to just like take a deep breath, and step back and say, "What are we really looking at? What are our desires? What is our defensiveness? What is our conditioning? And how would we want our world to look? Because we need to make some choices pretty quickly right now."
Dave Gardner 46:46
Yeah. So I wanted to ask you, do you really think that she was seriously asking that question? Because you know, we get that question, because we're talking about sustainable population and choosing smaller families. So we do get that challenge, "Oh, so you think we should kill half the people on the planet?" And it never seems like a serious objection to me, but you take it pretty seriously.
Lauren Sandler 47:07
I don't think it's serious in terms of a well thought out critique necessarily, though, I think there are people who would counter that. I do think that it is a deeply felt emotional reaction to something. And I think that it's a hard one to dismiss because it's so deeply felt. I think that it's something that we need to make a little space for instead of saying what my reaction to that reaction is, which is, oh Jesus, don't be ridiculous. Instead saying, "Okay, I can see how you feel that way, I can see how you feel that that's what I'm saying. And that's a tough thing to feel. But let's step back and consider that I'm not saying that, and let's actually consider what I am saying, which is how do we want to make choices going forward? And what choices are we making and why? Because if you are someone who feels in your heart that you absolutely want to have more than one kid, and you've gone through all of the examination of what that choice means and that's where you end up, okay." I am just of the belief having done so many interviews with so many people who have either chosen to have eleven or three or two or none or one, that we aren't really examining that choice, and that when we do, we end up with a smaller family size, which is something that is really necessary.
Dave Gardner 48:28
So we've learned that children who grew up to be spoiled or selfish, not likely that that was because they were an only child, that being an only child doesn't really handicap you socially. It's not necessarily lonely. You probably get better resources in terms of parental words and time and money as an only child, you tend to do better in school, don't you?
Lauren Sandler 48:50
That's true. It's interesting. I was never into the birth order stuff until I started doing some research for this book. And I read this incredible book by a historian of science at Berkeley named Frank Sulloway. He wrote a book called Born to Rebel, and then I got to go interview him at Berkeley. And what he has found is looking at the history of science, the most Nobel Prizes, the most expected innovation comes from oldest borns. The most radical innovation comes from youngest borns. Oldest borns tend to follow the expected path of achievement and youngest borns say, "Hell with that, I'm going to try to figure out a new way to do it." Only children are both oldest borns and youngest borns. And so there's a really interesting mix of those qualities that I'm fascinated by. And so a lot of the understanding about why only children tend to achieve so highly as students and then professionally is because they're oldest born children, but I actually think that that wrinkle is really fascinating. Where some of them may do the expected thing and then some of them may really blow it open in ways that someone might not expect. And I think it's a really interesting group of achievers for that, and a population that we could frankly use a little bit more of instead of less as the world will tell you.
Dave Gardner 50:12
But having more six-child families isn't going to give us more only children or oldest children or youngest children. So we don't need to solve that problem by creating a huge, teeming mass of new human beings to emit carbon dioxide.
Lauren Sandler 50:27
At least not in the urban world, in the developed world, in the SUV-driving, plane-taking, burger-eating world.
Dave Gardner 50:35
What does the research tell us about the happiness of parents - one-child families versus multiple child families?
Lauren Sandler 50:41
Well, in my own reporting, I will say that people who really deeply wanted to have more than one kid and have found that to be biologically impossible, and it is a biological child that they really, really yearned for. I think that that is a painful thing. And it's something that I feel a lot for. But outside of that very specific population, and even including them to a certain extent, I mean, it's pretty cool. You know, Dahlia has a sleepover, that's one kid and all of a sudden, wow, we get a night. You know, the whole process of rearing a very young child is something that was completed in a very joyful, delicious, but limited number of years. There's an enormous amount of freedom, and some of the resources that we aren't diluting with multiple children, not only can we devote to our single children, we can also devote to ourselves. And for me, that was really essential. I didn't want to not be able to read novels, go to rock shows, you know, eat out, be with friends, do all these things that I think an old version of adulthood told us, "Okay, well, you got married. And that's all over." I think that there are very few of us who imagine that life now. And that we have come to imagine a more pleasure seeking, social, liberated life than many of the generations that raised us. And I think that that's a powerful thing. I think that it also opens the door for a deeper level of engagement with current events, with activism, and with work that we can be doing on ourselves and our families and our larger communities and our nation. That's really essential right now. You know, I believe that this sort of old notion of the nuclear family was not just an economic unit but, you know, frankly, it's a unit of social control. And it's been a very, very effective one. And there's a lot of beauty in it. You know, I happen to be someone in an incredibly normative dynamic, which maybe I would have never expected. I am a, you know, cis married woman to a cis married dude, and we live happily in our house with our kid. We own our house. I mean, here we are - living it. And it's nice. We're like a cuddly happy little group of people. But that said, Whatever freedom exists within that rubric is something that is really important to me. And if it isn't important to people, I think it's worth thinking about why.
Dave Gardner 53:27
There's one more subject that I think we would be irresponsible if we didn't bring it up. And I'd love to get your perspective on it. You wrote a little bit about it in Time Magazine back in 2010. You wrote, "A 2001 study found that one of the most consistent self-perceived challenges for only children was concern about being the sole caretaker for aging parents, including feelings of anxiety about being the sole survivor in the family once their parents died. My parents address my unspoken anxiety with monthly payments into a long-term health care insurance plan." So what are your feelings about that? You know, that is one more reason people bring up frequently about reasons to have children to begin with, or to have more children so that there will be somebody to take care of me in my old age.
Lauren Sandler 54:14
Well, I've been thinking about that a lot. When the book came out, it was a different economy. And soon after the book came out, my parents couldn't make payments to long-term health insurance anymore. Also the insurance industry changed and those payments skyrocketed. Since then, there's been a lot of turmoil in my family's health. My mom now has a, an incurable terminal form of cancer, and all of these things that to me felt like a theoretical existential crisis to be faced down the road or have, you know, we're living it now. And it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I think that amongst all of the only children that I've known and interviewed, it does seem to be this shared deep dread, not that any of us are looking forward to our parents passing and frankly, not that in any family, it doesn't tend to fall on one child to take care of parents, there's a ton of research about this. The closest residing female child tends to be the person who takes care of an ailing parent. Carolyn, I don't know... Yeah, you know, maybe a little gender fluidity.
Carolyn VanderDolder 55:30
I might have to adopt an adult daughter.
Lauren Sandler 55:32
Well, you can have mine. If you know, things go on like this. No, I'm just kidding. She's great. Honestly, she is great. But you know, it is something where I am very, very aware of the support of my chosen family. I'm very, very aware of having friends that go back to my childhood, or my own adolescence who have, you know, all this sort of complicated shared feelings and memory, memories of my parents. And I also, frankly, am lucky enough to still be a person of enough privilege where my parents are not freaking out about how to afford my mother's care when it comes to that, which is increasingly a really unusual thing. And so this is something that I think emotionally, we all struggle with. But, you know, it's something that would come up a lot in interviews with people who were only children who had had second children themselves. And one of the things that they would often say to me was, "Well, of course, I did this because I don't want my child to have to go through that alone." And I really could feel that. But then I would also think, is that a reason to make another life? Is that a reason in and of itself, or even together with some other considerations to bring someone into the world and raise them into their own existence and their own choices, etc., just to try to avoid that one moment? And I always found that really puzzling. But I think that like a lot of the things that we've been talking about, it is a deeply felt emotional reality that is very tempting to dismiss. And yet, it's there, and it feels real. And we always imagine and idealize how it works in other families, how things feel in other families. I mentioned, as we were starting that last night, I spent my evening at a poetry reading. A book of posthumous, one of those hard words, especially on a microphone, works by my friend's dad, who was a poet in San Francisco. He was a gay poet in the seventies and eighties. And he was a single dad, her mom had died when she was really young, and in college she had to nurse him through AIDS, and she was never going to have an only child because of that. And I get it, you know, she's now forty-nine years old and I felt her pain last night, as I felt it for the twenty-something years that I've known her. And that is a real thing. Then again, I also know that her dad, Steve, had as much of the life that he could possibly lead as someone who was bohemian and experimental and living on his own terms as loving his daughter. And that Steve is the person who raised that Alicia, and Alicia wouldn't be who she was if she wasn't raised by that incredible spirit. And so it's such a complicated calculus. And I think that we tend to try to isolate these single strand concerns when it's really like everything else in life - all woven together.
Dave Gardner 58:28
Wow.
Carolyn VanderDolder 58:29
At World Population Balance, we are trying to change kind of this narrative that bigger is better, that growth means prosperity. And we encourage people who are aware of the overpopulation issue to talk about it as often as they can, to as many people as they can, in whatever context they can. I noticed with this one and only book, and also your new and upcoming book, All I Got, you use story really effectively, even though you could bludgeon people over the head with facts. And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about the efficacy of story in terms of cracking open people's consciousness to alternate ways of thinking.
Lauren Sandler 59:03
Carolyn, that is a wonderful question. Thank you for asking it. I think that story is essential. I think that we have a tremendous amount of data. And that our storytelling around these issues tends to be data journalism, data storytelling. And I think that those numbers can be scary. But I don't think that we feel them the way that we feel stories. And in fact, after One and Only, which, yes, has lots of characters, lots about my life, lots of scenes, but still a lot of data. And it's very much organized by ideas. I thought this isn't even the right form, even where I've gone so far. And the book that I have just written that's coming out in April, which is the story of a young homeless mother called This ls All I Got. It's a way of looking at the vast inequality in this country through a really closely observed single person, single year, in a single life. Because to me, it has felt like, how are we going to make people feel things if they can't feel them? How are we going to help people imagine a life outside of the one that they are living in unless we use the techniques that have been around forever, which is telling a story. And so that's what I've attempted to do in my new book is say, okay, what would it be like if you were someone who was, you know, a brilliant criminal justice student with ambitions, who was born into a totally unstable family, in a totally unstable economy, and you ended up pregnant and in a shelter? And no matter what you did, it was all downhill from there. How do we use that to look at the failure of welfare, the failure of our child support system, the, you know, deepening inequality of our Gilded Age - the fact that we can't seem to feel or see each other. And I think that increasingly, that is the way to move these stories ahead. It becomes really tricky with climate change, because so much of that conversation tends to be, you know, let's imagine a dystopia, let's imagine something that feels like science fiction. But sadly, those stories are now being told in the present tense. And I think that wherever we can find them, and bring people into them instead of just keeping on the numbers - which are important - or heaping on the doomsday scenarios - which are true - the ability to be able to help people feel a true lived experience is what actually is going to push change in the end.
Dave Gardner 1:01:40
Way to go, Carolyn, asking that question. And what a great answer. So a little embarrassed to find out today that you have actually written about overpopulation. And I didn't even know that. Is that piece available? Is there a link that we can share in the show notes so people can go read that?
Lauren Sandler 1:01:55
So the last chapter of my book, One and Only, is all about this issue. And there is another article that I had written, a magazine called Tar, a quarterly that looked at art and issues that was out for a few years, and I wrote a fairly sizable piece for that magazine, but I don't think it is available online because it was one of these, you know, is back probably ten years ago, where it was a group of disruptors who said, "We're going to have a gorgeous paper magazine that you have to pick up. None of it's going to live online. And then we're going to go out of business." Although I may have a PDF of it on my website, and if not, I should put one on. And my website is laurenosandler.com. But I think that a lot of what I had to say in that piece lives in One and Only as the final chapter about family size, overpopulation, and climate change. And it's bleak and depressing. And at the end of it, I talk about how maybe the biggest moment of having a crush I've ever felt is when Bill McKibben writes about going to get his vasectomy and driving back home to his wife with a bag of ice on his crotch in the car. And I thought, wow, that's my guy.
Carolyn VanderDolder 1:03:10
Takes all kinds.
Lauren Sandler 1:03:14
So you must be familiar with the book, Maybe One, that Bill McKibben wrote about this very issue. And I really recommend it to anyone interested in this. It's a brilliantly written, beautiful book by a beautiful man.
Dave Gardner 1:03:26
Yeah, a lot of people are unaware that that book even exists, and I think it is still available. Your book is still available. We'll include links in the show notes, we'll include a link to your website. And we look forward to your new book coming out just in April, right?
Lauren Sandler 1:03:41
Yeah, thank you.
Dave Gardner 1:03:43
Is there anything else that we need to know about and watch for and follow in the exciting and very valuable work that you're doing for us all?
Lauren Sandler 1:03:50
That book's been the focus for a while, but I really truly appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. Because as these climate issues have become more a part of our cultural conversation, I have found the population question to be missing in ways that really scares the hell out of me. So the fact that you are having it and that you've invited me to have it with you is something that I appreciate dearly. Thank you.
Carolyn VanderDolder 1:04:16
Well, thank you for joining us and for all of the work and the insight that you've brought to the issue.
Dave Gardner 1:04:21
Yep, come back anytime.
Lauren Sandler 1:04:22
I'd love to. All right.