Speaking of Psychology: Are ‘onlies’ lonely? Busting myths about only children, with Toni Falbo, PhD

Even as the average family size shrinks in much of the world, myths about only children remain common—including that they’re lonely, spoiled or maladjusted. Toni Falbo, PhD, talks about her decades of research with only children that have dispelled many of these myths, explains what researchers have found instead, and offers advice for parents of only children.

Toni Falbo, PhD, is a professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is most well-known for her research about sibling effects on a variety of outcomes, including academic achievement, psychological adjustment, and loneliness. Since 1978, she has published 38 journal articles and chapters about sibling effects, examining these effects within child, adolescent, adult, and elderly populations. She is internationally recognized as a leading expert on only children.

Myths about only children have deep roots in psychology. But in recent decades, researchers have disproven many of those longstanding beliefs about how growing up without siblings affects people. So what have they found instead? Do only children differ from kids with siblings in any significant way? Are they lonelier? Are they less happy? Or are there advantages to being a singleton? Do only children benefit from getting more resources and parental attention? Do they become more successful as adults? And how do beliefs about only children and their outcomes in life differ between the U.S. and other countries?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Toni Falbo, a professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the world’s leading experts on only children. For more than 4 decades, she has studied how siblings, or a lack of siblings, affect a variety of outcomes, including people’s academic achievement, psychological adjustment, and loneliness. Dr. Falbo is an APA fellow and won the 2007 Newman-Proshansky Award from APA’s Division 34, The Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology, for her contributions to the field of population psychology. 

Dr. Falbo, thank you for joining me today.

Toni Falbo, PhD: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Mills: So in the introduction a moment ago, I mentioned some of the stereotypes about only children—that they’re more lonely, spoiled, selfish than other kids, for example. Where do these stereotypes come from and why are they so common?

Falbo: I think these stereotypes just come from common sense. I mean, people assume that if you are only one child in a family, you don’t have somebody to play with. And as a result, you might develop neuroses or maybe your parents will overprotect you and you won’t get out and about have the kinds of experiences that are important for children, or maybe they will overindulge you and so you might be selfish. So it’s sort of like common sense I think that motivates this stereotype.

Mills: But of course, that’s not scientific, that’s just people’s impression.

Falbo: Right, that’s the myth. And many common sense conclusions often come down to being not really supportable by evidence as we do science trying to evaluate it. Is that really true? So that’s the question, of whether only children were selfish, lonely, and maladjusted, that was really motivating my early research long ago in the '70s and '80s.

Mills: Well, let’s talk about loneliness. Many people believe that only children must be lonelier than kids with siblings. And is there any evidence to support that?

Falbo: The evidence is a little weak. Maybe when we think of loneliness, we can think about something sort of like a dispositional that’s something is a permanent part of the kid. They’re just kind of depressed and feeling alienated because they’re alone a lot. And we measure that and we don’t find that only children score higher on that kind of measure. And in fact, in some places like in China where there are many, many millions of only children there, there children score less lonely than kids with siblings. So there’s this dispositional idea of this is like a permanent fixture of a person growing up without siblings, they don’t score as lonely as others. They in fact do fairly well, and sometimes even they’re less lonely than others.

It is the case, however, that only children do spend more time alone than other children. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are lonely during that time. And it’s also the case that some of the research done on how children spend their time and who are they spending their time with, that only children are more likely to spend their time with their mothers than are children with siblings. So it’s more one-on-one time for an only child, and then when they look at peer activities, a sports club or going to Girl Scouts or something that, onlies are as likely as someone with a sibling to participate in that. So I think the assumption is that if children spend more time alone, they will develop this chronic sense of being alone and lonely. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Mills: So people tend to think that only children must have some social deficits, that they won’t be as good as kids with siblings at making friends or getting along with others. Now, is there evidence to back that up?

Falbo: Well, one study was done on kindergartners as a very large sample, and they had teacher reports on interpersonal skills of kindergartners. They also asked the parents the same question, and they also had their reading and math scores for kindergarten. And the teachers reported that the people without siblings, at that time, were deficient in their interpersonal skills, but parents didn’t report that. So there’s no difference in how the parents were reporting it, and only children were having better vocabularies, better reading and math skills for that age group.

But when you move along in the ages, kids grow older and they spend more time in school, they have more opportunity to interact with their classmates. So when you look at evidence from, let’s say people age 12 and older, that they have as many friends as do others, they report having as many friends and they get as many mutual selections as other kids. So apparently over that period of time, kindergartners are able to adjust and learn how to do what needs to be done in order to have a reasonably successful social life.

Mills: Are there advantages to being an only child, for example, do only children do better in school or in life, presumably because they got their parents undivided attention and resources?

Falbo: So that’s one of the main advantages is that the only children are probably getting a lot of parent conversation. And so that would elevate their vocabulary earlier on in life, and that might be a benefit in early years of school. So they might be identified as being better at school because they have this experience, more deeper experience with hanging out with adults. Many times, parents of only children just take the kid with them wherever they go, and that is not so easy to do for parents if you have several children, trying to corral them around is very difficult. So you tend to leave them at home, whereas if you just have one kid that’s manageable. So I think there’s a good chance that only children spend more time in adult activities. Like it wasn’t designed for a child, but they can get to observe it. And I think all that kind of benefits them cognitively early on.

Now, I think there’s reason to believe that as people with siblings grow up, particularly if you just have one sibling, for example, as you grow older, you might be able to catch up with only children so that they might have that kind of experience talking with other teenagers and adults, which happens later in their development. So it’s not like it’s a permanent IQ advantage or vocabulary advantage for only children. By the time they get to be like 25, I think probably there’s not much of a difference at all.

Mills: What about the notion that only children are more likely to be spoiled? And I’m not even sure what that means, but has anybody done research looking at that? Is that even a concept that exists in psychological research?

Falbo: Yeah, that was hard when I started and I was trying to see if only children are more spoiled than others. I mean, how do we measure spoiled? So one of the kind get around this, I was looking at the research that had been done with parent-child relationships. And so with Denise Polit, I did a meta-analysis of the research that had been done in the first 80 years of the 20th century on only children. And we expected that only children would have a negative relationship with their parents because they’re spoiled and overindulged. But that’s not what we found. In fact, the quality of the relationship seemed to be better than if you had more children. And so I think there is also evidence that children who—you’re the only kid, you go to the dinner table, you have mom and dad there, rather than spoiling you or indulging you, what they’re probably going to do is quiz you or talk about now, What did you do in school today?

And then the kid has to explain it, then they talk about it. Whereas if you have multiple siblings and little kids in there, parents are just wanting to get the food in and the parents are talking to each other, not to the child. They don’t get this didactic interaction. Probably—the kids obviously don’t absolutely need this, but there’s kind of this expectation for adult conversation and behavior for only children earlier on. So rather than being spoiled, I’d say they’re kind of pushed harder. So that’s sort of American data that we have.

But then in the Chinese case, they mandated only children in urban families, and so there are millions of them produced there. And the original stereotype starting in 1980 emerged that, the English language version was little emperor, that they would become little emperors. And that’s part of being spoiled and just sort of lazy because everyone does everything for them. That’s the little emperor stereotype. So that’s what they were expecting to see. And so a lot of research in China was done, and it seems like rather than being indulged, and what happens in China is they’re pushed very hard, because if the parents know this is my only kid, they want that kid to be perfect. They have to be high scoring in school, they have to have perfect social behavior, moral behavior. So kids are really shoved very hard. They’re in school 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. So if anything, they’re not spoiled, but really the expectations are very, very high.

Mills: Now? You’ve written and spoken about growing up as an only child yourself. Is that what got you interested in doing this research? And how do you feel today as an adult about having been raised as an only child?

Falbo: Yeah, it’s a great question. Thank you. Well, how I got into this topic originally was that I was an only child and I was at UCLA in the psych department as a graduate student. And we were learning about stereotypes and the impact of stereotypes on behavior. And at that time, we were talking about men versus women, Blacks versus Whites, and how the stereotypes would lead to people reacting to and interpreting behavior in a certain way. So I thought, wow, there’s a stereotype about only children, maybe that is motivating people to have another child. And a few demographers had put this question in some of their surveys, their fertility surveys, and found in the 1960s, 1970s that people were saying, Oh yes, I’m going to have another child because I don’t want my first one to be an only child. So that stereotype was in fact motivating people to have a second child.

And so this was part of my research, and this is something that I found very interesting, that this stereotype was having a significant effect. Now, in terms of my personal opinion, I never felt bad that I was an only child. I was a nerd. I loved to read. I didn’t have any trouble at all spending my time. So my mother was the one who would say, no, you’ve got to get out and do stuff. And she insisted that I do it. And bless her heart, she did that and really helped me. She said very often to me, I don’t want you to read about life. I want you to live it. So even though she was happy I did well in school, she really didn’t want me to just be an indoor reader. I had to go out and engage with other kids and the natural environment and get exercise.

And so I benefited from her perspective on child rearing. Now it’s possible that other only children don’t have that kind of experience, and they might stay inside and be really miserable. My mother-in-Law, for example, was an only child. She was born during the depression, and it was just after the pandemic of the early 20th century. And so her mother was very frightened of her catching some disease. So her mother never let her go outside and play. So she would tell me about times when she was a little girl. She would look out of the window and see other children playing outside, and her mother would never let her go out there.

Mills: Oh, God, that’s terrible.

Falbo: I know. She ended up having six children.

Mills: Just a curious question. I mean, do only children tend to have more imaginary friends? Did you have an imaginary sister because you wished you had one?

Falbo: No, I didn’t have. There’s no evidence about that at all that they would be, that’d be a great story to tell, but really I am always paying attention to what’s coming across in terms of new research and new ideas. But if somebody tested that hypothesis, they couldn’t find any results that really supported the idea that only children may have a sister or brother is imaginary.

Mills: Well, let me ask a more serious question. What about advice for parents of only children? Is there anything special they should be doing to help their kids have a happy and healthy life?

Falbo: Well, I guess I’ll just give the advice of my mother. It seemed to work well for me. I was perfectly happy as is an only child, and that is that you don’t want the kid to spend all the time on a screen, and this is really the problem. Now you get toddlers on screen for hours and then it just gets worse as they get older. And that means then you’re not physically active, you’re not outside, and parents just need to, but it may be more of an issue for just one child. But it’s easier to do, just take the screen away and put them in a sports school or have them go outside and explore the leaves that are falling from the trees or doing something and keep them from overindulging on screen time, and being able to go outside and play with other children and just be physically active. So these are, I think, issues now I think are probably more challenges for people who just have one child.

Mills: What’s the trend in the U.S. in particular? Are only child families becoming more common and what’s it looking like abroad—other than in China?

Falbo: Yeah, so internationally there’s a lot of low fertility, which leads to people having no children or just one child. And so you see that in almost any part of the planet. It’s very surprising. Even countries like Iran where we assume they have the mullahs and they have the conservative Islam and so on, but they’re not producing lots of children and they have a lot of only children there. And of course, what is motivating that I’m sure is there’s a lot of uncertainty, economic deprivation, the place might explode into some kind of a war. And one of the things that parents are saying, I want to be able to protect my child and make sure that I can support them so that they can become a decent adult when they grow up. And if you’re very concerned about not having enough money to feed them even or no shelter, then you tend to reduce the number of children or have no children at all.

So we see a lot of young adults now so concerned about climate change and the world coming to an end and into some, either you’re being flooded or burned, you think, well, do I want to bring a child into this world? So a lot of people are stuck with no children at all. And so they might have one. Then they’re wondering, should I have any more? And actually, Bill McKibben is a famous environmentalist, wrote, has written many, many books and won many awards for his environmental work. He wrote a book in the 90s called Maybe One. And he interviewed me to talk about, well, maybe this is one approach to having some impact on global warming, which is just have one kid as opposed to having two or three or four. And so his whole book is supporting that idea. And so I think it was an early idea of, well, it’s good to become parents maybe, and if you just become a parent, then just one is a good idea. So that was Bill McKibben’s take on this.

Mills: Well, given that book and many of the other things that you just said about people being concerned about bringing children into a perilous world, do you think the public’s attitude toward only children and single-child families has shifted?

Falbo: Gosh, those opinion polls just keep suggesting not, and you were mentioning that Gallup poll, and this just continues to be the case. So when people are asked the question, "what is the ideal family size?" it now hovers around two and it’s not zero or one. And then if you’re going a little beyond that, you go to three. So that’s the range where people see as ideal. I think people rarely plan to just have one child. I was one of the weirdest, I adopted just one child, but most people, they have one, assuming it’s going to be a firstborn, and then things happen either biologically they can’t have another child, or maybe their life situation is such that it doesn’t work out. So they end up with just one child. It wasn’t a planned event. They didn’t think of it as ideal.

And so just anecdotally, every now and then I’ll meet people and they’ll tell me, oh, I only had one kid. That’s all we could do. And they’re almost like apologizing for this that they didn’t achieve that ideal state. So I don’t know that the one-child family is going to be considered ideal or what young folks are going to want to do because—there’s plenty of evidence out there that it’s okay as a choice, but that belief that you need two at least, so they have each other, is certainly something that’s very much inside our thinking as human beings.

Mills: Now, psychology historically has also fed into this myth. I mean, can you talk about where it came from originally? Because I think that some of our earliest pioneers basically promulgated the idea that only children were messed up.

Falbo: Yeah, that’s right. G. Stanley Hall is famous, they probably have a lecture series at APA named after him. And he was a man of his times, 18th century New England, grew up in a rural area. And his notion is: How does a child learn how to play well? They run around in the fields out there in the woods with their siblings. It’s not an urban environment where kids are just next door. You’re on a farm somewhere, and it’s quite a distance. People just didn’t drive off anywhere. So the assumption he had was in order to develop this, have that fun kind of early childhood where you’re exploring and playing with other children, he just assumed that was normal.

And then when he did develop more scientific approaches to the study of human development and then suggesting how to guide families and parents and teachers, he was collecting individual cases of people who would come to him as a clinical worker and trying to get help for their children. And it turned out that many parents of just one child would come to him and he said, well, there’s more of them than people with three children or 12 children, so therefore that one child probably must be particularly flawed. So I think he’s reported to have said something like, only children are a disease unto themselves. So that was his conclusion. It’s hard to find that in writing, but apparently he lectured about this many, many times. He went all over the United States lecturing about how to bring up a child, what’s appropriate child development, and I think had a lot of positive things to say in general, but when it come to only children, he definitely had a negative attitude. And I think that influenced the field early on.

Mills: We talked a little bit about the research you’ve done in China, and I’m just wondering—anything that we haven’t talked about from that work that was interesting to you that you discovered was unexpected, perhaps?

Falbo: Oh, that is an interesting question here. If you had a more psychodynamic perspective, you’d assume that the people who were only children grew up, their parents were forced to have just one child, that you as that child would think, oh, well, when I get a chance to have three kids, I’m going to have three kids. Obviously that’s what I should do, or two at least. But what I didn’t expect would be that what we’re seeing now in China is this generation of only children going through and not really either wanting to have any children at all, or maybe just having one. A few of them, the government now is trying to get everybody to have three, but they don’t have a way of coercing. They’ve lost that control. So they can’t coerce people to have children. And so some people are having two or three, but they’re not getting the birth rate up as a result. Actually, the size of the population of China is in decline, so they have more people dying than being born.

Mills: So just to wrap up, what’s next for you? What research are you working on now? What are the big questions you still want to answer?

Falbo: Right. So I’m getting more interested in screen time and the influence on the neurological development, the cognitive development, but also the social development and mental health of children. And I think that only children may be more vulnerable to more screen time, but I don’t know that. Right now I’m using some nationally representative data sets trying to run those analyses and figure that out. And the trade off typically is with more screen time, there’s less physical activity, and that’s negative. We have an epidemic of obesity even among children now, and less activity is not the direction to go in. So I want to see if only children, therefore, are more likely to get less activity. I don’t know. This is an open question. That’s what I’m working on.

Mills: Well, Dr. Falbo, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been very interesting. You can read more about Dr. Falbo and other psychologists’ research on only children in the September issue of APA’s magazine Monitor on Psychology, go to www.apa.org/monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.