The Only Child

This research will examine the phenomenon of the only child. The developmental-psychology context of the child reared without siblings has emerged as an issue in recent years but evidence shows that only children do not appear to be at a significant disadvantage in regard to personality or other aspects of development and functioning.

Human development, which Shweder terms cultural psychology, can be identified as much by what it is not--anthropology, psychology, and sociology in their classical formulation--as by what it is (Shweder, 1990, p. 1). In general terms, Shweder describes it as "the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion" (p. 1). What marks human development from other canonical disciplines in the social sciences is its focus on the context in which developmental psychology takes place, centered on the human psyche and social and personal relationships as the starting point of analysis. The traditional assumption is that human psychology has universality by reason of "central processing mechanism" and that there is "a fundamental division" between that mechanism and the "context," or external environment in which the psyche is made to function (Shweder, 1990, p. 5). Human development has as its starting point of analysis not the individual central processing mechanism but rather context. A

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elief in his omnipotence was still operating and when there was only a very dim awareness of the difference between thought and action. The childhood relationship with his brother... was the primary root of the patient's anxiety...governed by destructive tendencies and by regressive fantasies regarding his omnipotence and the magic power of his hostile, destructive thoughts and wishes (Fromm-Reichmann, 1951, p. 149). The relevant point here is the issue of what Fromm-Reichmann refers to as envy and what is elsewhere in the professional and popular literature described as sibling rivalry. According to Sulloway (1997), sibling rivalry is manifest in the competition for parental favor and thus has a limiting effect on favoritism. On the other hand, Sulloway also notes studies showing that eldest children often adopt or assume adult roles and authority through younger siblings. Whether his interpretation is accurate, the more important point is that in a one-child environment, psychological disorder may be present in the child, but sibling envy would be virtually impossible to accomplish in the immediate family with the clinical force that Fromm-Reichmann describes. Controversy surrounds the questions of whether onlies need pity or ca

Category: Psychology - T