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‘Lonely onlys’? No longer: How single-child families are busting myths
The proportion of Australian families with one child has doubled in the past 35 years – nuking stereotypes along the way.
By Konrad Marshall and Melissa Singer
As the parent of an only child, you never have to wonder what other people think about you. They let you know, through constant, casual questions. The benign ones wash over you: “Didn’t want more?” or “Just one, eh?” The pointier ones hurt the heart: “Isn’t that selfish?” and “Won’t he be lonely?” And that’s before they move on to the unprompted, uninformed, unhelpful – and utterly untrue – stereotype of the kid you’re raising, who apparently risks growing into a spoilt and strange lonely only.
As parents of an only child each ourselves – a 10-year-old son and a 22-month-old daughter, respectively – we have our own clichéd tales of imposed guilt. There was that time the daughter was cuddling her doll, and a woman felt the need to coo and chide: “Oh, she really wants a baby brother or sister.” Or the day the son caught the eye of a supermarket cashier, who explained why he gave his boy a sibling: “Because when I am gone, and my wife is gone, my son will have a part of us left to talk to, and he will not be left alone.” These kinds of interactions make something twist in the gut of an “only” parent. All because of the notion that the only is somehow aberrant. But, of course, they’re not aberrant. Not any more.
The proportion of Australian families with one child has doubled in the past 35 years, from 7.5 per cent in 1986 to 15.1 per cent in 2021. Four out of 10 families still have two children – a national norm that’s held steady for years – but families with three or more kids are plummeting as the “nones and ones” increase. The reasons are often unique and personal – sometimes incredibly private – from age and infertility to death and divorce.
There are pragmatic factors, too. With multiple kids, not every family can afford the right house, or the right school, or trips abroad to see elderly parents, or simply their desired lifestyle. Contributing another carbon footprint is becoming more of a factor, too. Perhaps the threat of pandemic and war, economic and democratic collapse is enough to make you pause after baby number one, lingering on that life calculus whispered between partners at night.
We’ve been trained, of course, to believe that bigger is better in families, not just by peers but by politicians, too. Population growth is key to a thriving economy and there are real financial and social downsides when it stalls. Who can forget former treasurer Peter Costello, who famously exhorted in 2004: “If you can have children, it’s a good thing to do: you should have one for the father, one for the mother and one for the country.”
The catchcry has been similar globally, as swathes of the developed world gradually shrink. The total fertility rate in Australia in 2021 was 1.7, below replacement level, just as it is in the US and UK, Russia and Germany, Italy and Greece. “South Korea has a negative birth rate, too, and Japan,” says Amy Conley Wright, director of the Research Centre for Children and Families at the University of Sydney. “Those are societies in a kind of demographic spiral, with the average age skewing older and older.”
Lixia Qu with daughter Hanna, 23: “You may want to have more children, but have waited too long.”
This shift has been building for half a century, with various cultural and societal events influencing fertility rates. In her tower office in Melbourne’s Southbank, Lixia Qu, a senior fellow with the Australian Institute of Family Studies, shares a line graph charting each precipitous drop in family size. There’s a big dip around 2008. “That? That’s the global financial crisis.” (Early data suggests the pandemic won’t result in a similar drop.)
In the mid-1970s, free higher education and no-fault divorce saw the birth rate plunge, as more women enrolled at university, entered the workforce and deferred marriage (or dissolved their union). The fall during the 1990s is viewed by many as a part of the “second demographic transition” – academic shorthand for a world in which (among other things) family creation is increasingly postponed due to factors including cohabitation without marriage and the widespread use of contraception.
Migration is another factor, insofar as we compensate for our sub-replacement fertility by replenishing our population from abroad – yet migrants themselves are often more likely than natives to have an only child. Qu herself has one – a daughter, Hanna, 23, graduating in international relations and environmental commerce from Monash University and headed to study law at the University of Melbourne – of whom she is justly proud. The demographer didn’t have time for more. “For immigrants, you come to a new country, and it takes time to get established, finding a job and a partner, and then your age is a factor,” says Qu. “You may want to have more children, but have waited too long.”
Qu was 36 when Hanna was born, and felt too old by the time she was ready to try for another. Hers is a common path. The 30-39 age group is now the most popular biological window for having a first child in Australia. Fifty years ago, that age group represented 7.2 per cent of all first-time mums, a cohort that rose to 49.6 per cent by 2020.
Dr Fleur Cattrall is the medical director of Melbourne IVF and one of Australia’s leading fertility specialists. Many of her clients have only one child because they began their families later in life. “Put it this way: the chance of a woman conceiving per month at age 30 is around 30 per cent. And by the time a woman gets to the age of 40, it’s more like 2 or 3 per cent,” she says. As a result, the practice of egg-freezing has grown exponentially – particularly during the pandemic – as has the use of donor sperm. “The world was shut down but in here we were busier than ever.”
Fertility specialist Dr Fleur Cattrall says many of her clients have only one child because they begin their families later in life.Credit: Jess Middleton
That was certainly the case for her client, Katrina Dawson, 41, who Good Weekend meets at her spotless two-bedroom townhouse in Chadstone, in Melbourne’s east. Dawson apologises for not having picked up every toy, a typically unnecessary mea culpa for a first-time parent. The events sales manager first saw Cattrall five years ago. “I just got to a certain age where it was like, ‘I haven’t met someone, and I don’t want a one-night stand,’ ” she says. “You get to this stage where your career has taken over but you want to be a mum, and you’re on a ticking time clock.”
It took four attempts, donor sperm and about $30,000 – the financial limit she’d set for herself – for Dawson to have Noah, now aged two. She chose the sperm from a booklet filled with relevant non-identifiable info – education, occupation, race, sexuality, medical history, eye colour, hair colour, height – but no photos. “It’s not like Tinder, going through trying to pick a good-looking guy.”
Noah is testing a few boundaries, Dawson says, smiling, but remains the love of her life. He’s phasing out of CoComelon and getting into PAW Patrol, and loves The Wiggles. “He’s a happy boy who loves spending time with other people, and will go to them. He’s independent, and keeps himself entertained.”
Katrina Dawson with her son, Noah. “It’s him and me against the world. And he’s happy.”
Dawson says she’d consider having another child if she found the right partner, and says it sometimes plays on her mind that Noah would be a great big brother. But she refuses to let those fleeting feelings emotionally sway her. “I don’t need to have another child to be fulfilled, or to try to appease other people’s stigmas about only children. It’s him and me against the world. And he’s happy.”
Before the 20th century – before modern medicine and industrialisation – families needed to be large. This is still true in much of the developing world. Children worked the fields and factories, and they often died young. Conditions improved and broods shrank, but people remained suspicious of “singletons”.
The first president of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall, oversaw an influential 1896 study of only children, after which he concluded that “to be an only child is a disease in itself”. In 1922, the psychologist A. A. Brill wrote that it would be best for the individual and humankind “if there were no only children”. Such language was used all over the world, including in Australia. The 1904 Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-rate and on the Mortality of Infants in NSW was blunt in its findings: “The life of an only child is an uninterrupted lesson in egoism.”
And so we came to a place where only children were assumed to live in their own sad and splendid isolation. Alfred Adler, a student of Sigmund Freud, claimed only children would struggle with independent activity “and sooner or later … become useless for life”. (Their parents, he noted, were “timid and pessimistic”.)
But there were counter studies, too, published throughout this period showing that onlys suffer no such harm. These findings rarely punctured the public consciousness, but showed that being sans siblings did not create maladjusted hermits and eccentrics. To the contrary, onlys were likely to be more intelligent, more gregarious and better behaved.
Toni Falbo, a psychologist at the University of Texas, was the world leader in debunking negative myths about onlys. Her seminal 1986 review of 115 studies found that onlys were more highly motivated towards academic achievement, had higher self-esteem and better relationships with their parents. Onlys, Falbo says via Zoom from Austin, disturb people’s assumptions about what families should look like. “People don’t ask, ‘Do you have a child?’ They say, ‘Do you have children?’ There’s still a social norm and an implied moral responsibility to provide kids with company.”
Yet our perception of them as lonely, she adds, is little more than an assumption. Only children – and this was true for Falbo’s extensive research in China during the One Child Policy era, as much as for her work in the US – are no lonelier than other people. “That’s a fact that needs more dissemination,” she says. “Even though they spend more time alone, they also spend more time with their parents. They’re being called on, and brought places, and involved in discussions, and not at all feeling left out.” And many have “sibling surrogates”: cousins, school friends and so on.
TV personality Rebecca Maddern can relate. She endured years of fertility issues, including unsuccessful rounds of IVF, before she and her husband, cameraman Trent Miller, had their daughter Ruby, now five. “We had totally given up, we had exhausted all avenues,” says Maddern, 45. “We were googling what dog to buy.” Maddern grew up in a blended family, a six-child “Brady Bunch” scenario, the polar opposite of that of her daughter, for whom she cultivates constant play dates. “Ruby has my undivided attention, 100 per cent of the time. I don’t think there’s much opportunity for loneliness. She has more birthday parties and social things than I do.”
Sydney University’s Conley Wright says only children can be “very socially precocious, which is probably the opposite of what people think” and “often have very adultified social skills”. Many parents of only children, she notes, tend to seek out opportunities to foster peer relationships, whether through cousins, school friends or recreational activities, as so-called “sibling surrogates”. They’re unconsciously embracing the “social convoy theory” of human development, whereby we travel through life as a cluster of humans, some of us dropping out along the way through death, others joining us through birth. “It takes a village,” says Conley Wright. “But that needs to be cultivated, because people are very individualistic these days.”
Having an only child is not always a choice, and there are emotional repercussions that come with that. Kristy Holden of Berwick, in Melbourne’s outer east, came from a big family, and wanted five kids of her own. Now 45, she remembers the moment she realised – after a final, failed round of IVF – that she would have only one child: “I was mopping the floor. I stopped, and was crying. Next minute my daughter, who was only four at the time, came out and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” Holden realised she’d forever carry both the love of her daughter, Bella, now 14, and the grief of not giving her siblings.
Kristy Holden and her daughter Bella, 14. Kirsty remembers the moment she realised she would have only one child. “I was mopping the floor. I stopped, and was crying.”
Cattrall, the fertility specialist, often sees this struggle. “Couples have had that parenting experience and know how wonderful it was, and when it’s not met with the second one, they know they can’t have that joy again,” she says. “That’s almost a hidden grief they carry around because they feel they can’t tell people, as if they should just be grateful for their one child.”
It’s not just fertility issues. The mental-health toll of having children – even without including miscarriage, traumatic birth, postpartum depression – is increasingly cited as a reason for becoming a “triangle family” (a term used in singleton circles). Rachel Anderson, 39, says her decision to stop at one child – Indiana, now aged three – was driven in part by the health of her husband Jason, an army veteran still dealing with physical and mental health issues sustained after service. “Neither of us would cope mentally with another child,” she says.
A public servant from Canberra, Anderson sometimes feels a sharp pang of longing for another – when folding bundles of tiny clothes that no longer fit Indiana, for instance – but feels she’s at her limit as a carer, even with the respite of family help nearby. “We’re so happy we can drop her off and go on a date,” she says.
Cost-of-living pressures were another consideration for Anderson, as they are for many. And children are expensive. The cost of raising kids can’t be reduced to an average amount, due to income, age and other variables, says Bruce Bradbury, of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW, so it’s better to look at cost proportional to income.
The median cost of a first child is 24 per cent on top of other expenses, not including housing and childcare, amid inflation and lack of real wage growth. A diminished ability to work, and the loss of leisure time, also come into the equation. Bradbury’s studies have shown that couples with one child lose about 1.9 hours of leisure time per day, which grows to 3.6 hours when number two comes along. “If people are trying to maintain and enjoy the living standards they’re used to, one way is not to incur additional costs – like children.” Or, as the introduction to one of his papers concludes, “children are very expensive”.
Rachel Anderson and Jason Baker with their daughter, Indiana. “Neither of us would cope mentally with another child,” says Anderson.Credit: Rohan Thomson
The alternative, of course, is having all those extra children, and many couples clearly thrive with more than one child. Some families, however, serve as a cautionary tale of how work-life balance can collapse, relationships flounder and careers stall – the source of headlines such as: “I love my children, I hate my life”. “It isn’t selfish to weigh up what will make you happy,” says US psychologist and author Susan Newman, who has written several books on only children. “Those who choose to stop with one child understand that second and third children may not be their ticket to bliss.”
Newman has lived both sides of the parental equation, helping to raise her ex-husband’s four children before remarrying and having an only child. Good Weekend calls Newman at home in New Jersey while she’s working on her latest book – specifically chapter nine, “Who will care for you?” – which addresses a common concern about what happens when the parents of an only child become elderly, and the burden of care falls on their sole offspring. The popular notion is of a lone child saddled with the unbearable weight of responsibility. But after interviewing hundreds of only children, Newman was surprised to find far more acceptance than resentment. “Many are quite enthusiastic about taking care of their parents,” she says. “They say, ‘They did everything for me – I want to do this for them.’ ”
After interviewing hundreds of only children, Newman was surprised to find far more acceptance than resentment.
Families with multiple children don’t always enjoy that kind of clarity when an elder dies. “Parents tend to get it into their head that their offspring will rally around their deathbed and all pitch in agreeably, but that doesn’t happen all the time,” Newman says. “In families with siblings, it’s usually one child that bears the brunt of the care. Then one sibling will think, ‘You’re doing it all wrong’, or one assumes their sibling will do all the work for them. And that’s before you factor in splitting an inheritance.”
Her larger point is that siblings aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. “You go different ways, have different interests, loyalties, politics, maybe a partner who clashes, and it can blow up and be volatile, or simply more separated and distant.”
Jacob Aldridge with wife Harmony and daughter Josette: “There’s so much we will be able to give her in her life because she’s an only child.”Credit: Johannah Hartigan
Jacob Aldridge, 41, grew up the eldest of four children. His wife Harmony, 41, a lawyer and business consultant, was raised an “only” in Tasmania. Her parents, who were kept to one child due to fertility issues, ensured she was well socialised with larger families they knew, in part to avoid the “spoilt brat” stereotype. “My mother would always say, ‘We will spoil you with love and attention and affection, but you can’t have everything that you want.’ ”
Fertility issues also plagued the Aldridges’ family plans. Harmony, who has battled polycystic ovary syndrome since she was 18, endured four pregnancy losses and more failed rounds of IVF before giving birth to their daughter Josette, now four. Jacob says that while two kids would have been ideal, they can see that their dream of becoming digital nomads, travelling the world with Josette, is more attainable with only one. Adds Harmony: “There’s so much we will be able to give her in her life because she’s an only child.”
Journalist (and only child) Lauren Sandler, who lives in New York with her husband and 15-year-old daughter, Dahlia, notes in her 2013 book One and Only that onlys as children have to adjust to “lacking something that the majority of people have, for better or for worse”. If as parents they opt to stop at one themselves, they must then accept something else: “The nagging feeling that we are choosing for our own children something that they can never undo.” Ten years after publishing her book, Sandler doesn’t believe there’s been a seismic shift in attitudes towards onlys. “I still don’t see culture changing,” she says. “I see the same comments about only children I heard before.”
There is one thing that has definitely shifted. A decade ago, Sandler had to fight to include a chapter on the environment in her book. Now, she says from Brooklyn, a neighbourhood that’s recently been blanketed in smoke from wildfires in Canada, climate change is one of the fastest-growing reasons for people to have fewer kids. While Millennials are more likely to cite the environment as a reason in hindsight – a form of virtue-signalling, perhaps – planetary peril is not an afterthought for their Gen-Z counterparts. “That generation is raised with a much deeper internalisation of what’s happening, and a much deeper fear of it, and also more ability to see their role in it.”
American author Lauren Sandler with her daughter, Dahlia. In her 2013 book, Lauren wrote that only children have to adjust to “lacking something that the majority of people have”.Credit: @sugarpuss74/Instagram
A 2019 survey by the Australian Conservation Foundation found that among women under 30, one in three were so worried about global warming that they were reconsidering having children. A more recent study by the University of Sydney found 43 per cent of men and women under 30 were heavily influenced by climate change in deciding how many children to have. Even Wall Street has taken notice, Morgan Stanley noting in a 2021 letter to investors that fear over climate change was affecting the US birth rate “quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline”.
Vaidehi Shah, 37, had her first and only child 21 months ago. She says the environment was a factor in deciding whether to have her son, Ravi (though her main reasons for stopping at one are more practical, such as cost and lack of family help). It’s unsurprising, really, given her work as a communications executive in the environmental sector. “I spend every day reading and communicating the science, and how it will affect us in the future,” Shah says. “Even the journey to having one child was a carefully considered and weighed-up thought process.”
Now she has Ravi, she is much more concerned about his happiness, including him not feeling lonely as an only child, than his carbon footprint. She worries, and seeks solace in online forums, but has no regrets. “Before we had him, we would say things like, ‘Oh, he won’t be lonely, he will make friends.’ But when you see it [in reality] you have to think about it a lot more, and make peace with your own decision.”
That can be hard, especially when only children voice their concerns, articulating the feeling that they’re somehow incomplete. When we reach journalist Miriam Cosic, she hadn’t picked up her 1999 book Only Child in more than a decade. We chat after she’s re-read the first 50 pages, including her own experience as an only, which – for most of her life – she viewed through a negative lens. “It wasn’t a book I wanted to write,” Cosic says. “I actually set out to prove to my friends once and for all that it’s terrible to have an only child. I used to say to them, ‘Don’t have just one – it isn’t fair.’ ”
Then she read up on the subject. Cosic, now in her early 60s and living in Sydney’s inner-east, found what most researchers find: that only children are well-adjusted, even growing up with certain advantages. The truth, for her, lay somewhere in between the two main schools of thought she came across. While writing her book, Cosic would look at the alarmist early academics and think, “Guys, it’s not that bad.” Then she’d read more recent positive research and think, “Hmm, it’s not that good, either.” Yet after all the research, she never quite shook the nagging sense that she’d missed out. “Within a year of the book I had slowly drifted back to that feeling that it’s still not perfect.”
For all the positive research, there are plenty of onlys who reflect negatively, or at least with conflicted feelings, on their childhood. China’s One Child Policy was widely predicted to create a nation of “little emperors” – tiny tyrants ruling intergenerational households – but little evidence emerged during the 36-year social experiment. Still, Beijing-born early childhood educator Xinwei “Chiv” Yu, 30, recalls a childhood that lived up to the stereotype. “I actually felt really alone. We never had playgroups because my parents were so busy. We had a nanny, Linn, and she was the only one who could play with me,” says Yu, who moved to Melbourne eight years ago.
“It’s a bit silly, but at a certain point if another kid was really nice to you, you would ask if you could call them ‘old bro’ (“Ge Ge”) or ‘old sis’ (“Jie Jie”).” And the little emperors? “Oh yes. That was me,” she says. “I feel like I grew up really self-centred, that I didn’t care about others as much. I never had to share my toys, or food. If I was full, the world was okay.”
Yu also became the focus for her parents’ ambition, with extra tuition on most nights after school, and weekends devoted to lessons in piano, swimming, ballet, English, singing, drama and mathematics. “As the only child, they wanted me to achieve and succeed in all areas. Every area.”
Falbo, a critical voice in separating fallacy from actuality, notes more recent research, albeit small studies, that has found some negative associations with only children. The correlations are weak, and the causation undetermined, but the papers suggest onlys might be “chubbier”, more prone to health issues in middle age, and more likely to get divorced.
The good news is that, overall, the only children of today seem to be coping well. The digital universe has helped. Kids who are physically alone at home have never been more connected to their peer group, whether playing Fortnite or FIFA23 after school, or, as they grow older, messaging on social media platforms.
Susan Newman, who is finishing a large research project involving hundreds of only children and their parents, was surprised by the positivity of this next generation. “Only children today are liking being only children, because the stereotype – the spoilt, aggressive, lonely only – has really faded,” she says, countering Lauren Sandler’s perception that it hasn’t. “If you talk to an only child over 60, they will have complaints – ‘I was lonely, I was unhappy, I wish I had a sibling’ – but you talk to Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen Zs, and they say, ‘I knew there were stereotypes, but they always seemed silly, false and invalid.’ ”
With only children on the rise, no longer even remarkable in the playground, those stereotypes will inevitably continue to fade. As Rebecca Maddern notes: “There used to be a stigma … something must have gone wrong with your parents. But in 10 years’ time being an only child is going to be pretty mundane compared to everything else that’s changing around us.”
The onlys will be all right.
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