by the powerful context of society--indeed by popular imagination--as the fate of the only child, the child who is firstborn and "lastborn," the child lacking siblings to play with or fight with, hence the child who, according to the social context in which he or she grows up, is somehow doomed to truncated psychosocial development and a solitary emotional life. There are some 14 million only-child families in the U.S. today (Nachman, 1997). An Internet site known as the Parenthood Web posts comments from a psychologist who summarizes popular stereotypes of so-called "onlies":
The founding father of psychology himself, G. Stanley Hall, has been quoted has having said "being an only child is a disease in and of itself." Nowadays we still hear many stereotypes concerning onlies: "only children are selfish, they can't or don't know how to share, they are spoiled, they are friendless, they are lonely, they have more trouble forming intimate relationships, they are deprived." When it comes to school, you get mixed messages--either onlies are little "eggheads" or they don't do as well as children with siblings because they are deprived of social relationships (Nagel, 1999).
The reality of onlies is different, according to Nagel (1999) and to other sources, which support the view that the development of an only child, like the development of siblings, owes much to the state of what has lately in the professional literature been called family ecology (Shaffer, 1998). Now family ecology can be relatively healthy or unhealthy, nurturing or toxic, and according as it tends toward unhealthfulness/toxicity in an only-child household, then negative stereotypes of one kind or another. As Shaffer points out, the family functions as a social system subject to its intrinsic development, receiving both direct and indirect influences from society and exerting both direct and indirect influence on each family member. Shaffer develops the view that par...