Single childrens club!

[Livgivare]

Hello. This might not come as a chock to some, but I never got any siblings and both my parents are without siblings too. So I call myself an extreme single child, since most of my personality comes from two single children who had to raise a single child on their own. And if the 20/80 rule can be read backwards, it is most defenetly true with me. I got to become a unique girl with very few habits and most of them are some sort of bad. And what I also find is that I find myself so much into just me. This is the problems that single children can find themselves with.

1) Affraid of too much responsibility (this can lead to no respnsibility what so ever)
2) Go the other way of 1 and get too much responsibility.
3) Have a hard time understanding what a relationship is and how a good one is. This makes one single child either avoid relationship or get too much time together.
4) Extra need for time spent alone.
5) If no extra time is arround you bend just to become loveable to others so you have to feel good anyway and become insecure.
6) Extremely hard time leaving childhood behind or cutting the navelstring to your parents, you need to make sure they are OK more then others and need to know what they think all the time so you know who you are.
7) Defining yourself on your parents only and when others come into your life you start to get lost at times.
8) Finding it hard to keep friends and b/f, g/f and lovers.
9) Always being more comfortable with older or younger people then yourself (many never find a spouce that are at the same age).
10) Being yelous of people with large families and/or people with siblings.
11) Never understanding fully by heart how siblings work emotionally and relationshipwise.
12) Thinking that you are very unique and no one understand you (why should you feel otherwise since you never got to share anything with someone that had to do with family buisness, you have a very narrow mind of what a family is and how it works).
13) You constantly need the light on you, many famous people are in fact the only child of their family. Narcisims can become your middle name.
14) Having a hard time loving more people for real then yourself or just one person. In general finding love a bit hard.

The list could go on and could become more deep. I once read a book about being a single child and it was the scariest book I've ever read. And it was also the first time I ever felt like I was not an ailen to the world, that there was people like me out there in the world. And since this forum might have many people who are just like me, single child. I would like to know if we could found a group or a club, or just debate and talk to each other under this topic. Seriously I would probobly not be so conscience about where I am or who I am and those things if it wasn't for that book and the thoughts that it brought me. So if there is someone out there that likes the idea of talk, we can help each other out. We are not bad or dumb people I know that.

I would love to help if I can help any with this. And getting to know some people that have got no siblings and want to talk about it would mean the world to me.

Love Leelene

[Zukin]

I am an only child also, and I read a book a few years ago about only children that said a bunch of things I didn't want to hear - things like the list you posted.

Now it turns out most of the research on only children is flawed. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on only children says this:

"A 1987 quantitative review of 141 studies on 16 different personality traits contradicted Adler's theory by finding no evidence of any maladjustment in only children. The primary finding was that only children are not very different from children with siblings. The main exception to this was the finding that only children are higher in achievement motivation. A second analysis revealed that only children, first-borns, and children with only one sibling score higher on tests of verbal ability than later-borns and children with multiple siblings."

[ellie]

I'm an only child, but I think that list could really fit in with children with brothers and sisters as well.

I love being alone and having my free space that's for sure

I do agree only children are probably more sensative, but hey that's life.

[bwbfbh]

Dear Leelene,

I agree with the things that you said. I am an only and I understand you. I have met 3 onlieas in my life and they have the same problems. We understand eachother. I think that their are other onlies who do not fall into the same category maybe because they lived in an extended family with cousins or they have half brothers and sisters that they have spent their lives with in the same house. A child becomes a real only if they had no children living with them in the same house at the critical age from birth to about 10 years. After that even if you get a sibling you might still carry some characteristics of the only.

Non Onlies do not realy understand us. Sometimes however much You analise things and try to explain to them they might understand at the moment but soon forget and revert back to their norms.

We have to understand them too. It is their wealth of knowledge and training on social interaction that they got at their critical age of 0 to 10 years which makes them very socially smart. (Imaginne mom brings a small cake home. They have to share it or else suffer the consquences. As for an only, she/he could eat the whole thing by him/herself but the consequences are much less drastic.

Well that is all for now. I guess we have a lot to talk about.

Niroshan