Book of the week: One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One by Lauren Sandler

(Simon & Schuster, $25)

It’s time to bury “the long-standing stereotype of the only child as selfish, maladjusted, and eternally lonely,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. Three quarters of Americans recently polled by Gallup say that children with no siblings are seriously disadvantaged in life, but Lauren Sandler’s “thoughtful, well-reasoned” new book makes a strong case that the popular view is simply wrong. Sandler, a journalist who was raised an only child and has one herself, blends a wealth of research with personal anecdote to argue that only children in fact grow up with significant advantages.

The benefits of being an only child are actually well documented, said Glenn Altschuler in Psychology Today. Sandler unearths overlooked studies going back to the 1920s that help her demonstrate “clearly and convincingly” that onlies are at least as well-adjusted as people with siblings. Perhaps because they receive undiluted parental attention, they tend to have better vocabularies and higher IQs. They also mature into more sociable, generous, and successful adults. Not that there aren’t disadvantages: Because only children often have more intense relationships with their parents, many feel extra pressure to do the family proud and harbor “a consuming dread”—in Sandler’s words—about life after their parents’ deaths. She writes about such anxieties “elegantly, if a bit hyperbolically, especially in light of the evidence she has introduced that only children report less psychological distress than their peers with siblings.”

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Sandler’s ongoing introduction of one study after another “becomes occasionally overwhelming,” said Jessica Grose in The New Republic. Yet “a welcome strain of argument” undergirds her otherwise lively book, and that’s the notion that good parenting often begins with parents who don’t completely sacrifice their happiness to child-rearing and its demands. Studies show that having a second child seriously curbs women’s ambition and satisfaction, so “kudos to Sandler for discussing this honestly.” More impressively, she never suggests that there’s an ideal family size, said Lori Gottlieb in The New York Times. “Children are a desire, not a calculation,” she writes, admitting that she too struggles with the choice between having another child and stopping at one. In fact, “the book’s greatest strength is that we are forced to wade uncomfortably in that ambiguity.”