015. "One and Won" - The Reframe on "One and Done"

I grew up thinking that to have the "perfect" nuclear family, I needed to have a family of four. And then motherhood and postpartum depression humbled me.

What age does your child have to be when people will stop asking you if you’re going to have another one? I find it interesting because just as much as people want to tell you that you should have another child, they also tell you indirectly (by NOT asking you) that after a certain point there is a socially unacceptable age gap too.

But I still think people still rather harp on the fact that having a sibling is a “necessity” in life, even despite a large age gap. That the age gap is trivial compared to the “egregious” fact of not having a sibling. And before I became a mom, I would tell you the exact same thing—that a sibling was the greatest gift my parents gave me and that it would be double or nothing for me when it came to having kids.

Oh, how I’ve changed my tune. It’s funny how a little perspective from being in the shoes of a mom can change your views. And motherhood has utterly humbled me.

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The important thing to disclaim before I dive in more on this topic is that I am NOT trying to say that there is a best family size; I am not trying to die on a hill that says one child or two children or more children is the ideal. There is only the size that fits for your family, and that is the best size. So please keep that in mind as you read. I absolutely don’t judge you on your family size, and I don’t think mine is superior or want to sway you to decide a certain way (if you have a choice). I understand having a choice is a privilege. Each of our stories and choices are uniquely shaped by our experiences, and that’s really quite alright.

But I do feel that only children are stereotyped and misunderstood, placed into a box of assumptions of the child before anyone bothers to know them better. Parents are pressured into thinking they must have more or else they are failing. So I’d like to try to normalize this by sharing my experience in getting here and what I’ve learned along the way. I write about it not only for seeking solidarity but also to hopefully dispel some of these myths that unfortunately follow only children before they get a chance to show you what wonderful humans they are underneath unfounded judgments.

People shouldn’t need to explain their choice in having a single child (if it even is a choice) because no one asks, “Well, why did you have TWO kids? Why not more? Why not less??” But the reality is parents of only children are often given a raised eyebrow, as if to say “there must be something wrong with you” or “what a shame you’re depriving your child.”

So I hope to be a voice to counter that, and I invite you to read with an openness and curiosity if you can’t imagine why not more. Believe me, I’m sure this is an internal battle that parents have wrestled with more than it needs to be given due mental space because of society’s influence. And also, it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to know right from the start that you only want a trio.

There are 6 sections below and they can’t even begin to cover all the nuances on this, but they’re what comes to my mind on this topic and some personal stories on how I ended up arriving here (particularly section 6). If you want more after this newsletter, we actually have a podcast episode on Healing the Tigress coming out tomorrow on this topic too. In fact, the discussion was what inspired me to write on this. So please subscribe to the podcast or stay tuned, and here goes…!
[Edit: Here’s the “One and Done” podcast episode that is now out!]

1. “Siblings are gifts”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I grew up believing this. My mom often tells me she almost didn’t have a second child because birth was so traumatic for her with me, the firstborn. It was also expensive raising a child, as my parents were immigrant grad students who came to the U.S. with only a couple hundred dollars and a few suitcases in their name. It was hard making a life here.

But as I approached 4 years old, my mom tells me that I was getting to be quite clingy to her and that friends told her to have another child for me to play with so I’d leave her alone. I’d like to think my clinginess wasn’t the only reason she decided to have another child… I was old enough to distinctly remember her asking me if I wanted a sibling—I said yes! I wanted a baby brother so our family would be fair with two males and two females. Well, I didn’t get a brother, but I did eventually get a sibling.

My sister and I got along so well despite our age gap. We never really fought, and we definitely never got into physical fights. We really were great friends, and I was very protective of her. To me, she really was a “gift” because I had someone to diffuse family tensions with, and I had someone to hang out with after school when both my parents worked. These have been cited true reasons why a sibling can be advantageous.

The thing I’ve come to learn, though, is that we cannot expect whole human beings to be presents for someone else. They have their own unique lives and souls, and as humans, we didn’t ask to be born.

But before I get all existential crisis on everyone, I want to say I’m very glad I have my sister, and YET—this really wasn’t my choice to make, like picking out a toy at the toy store. I won’t even go into this obvious fact, but good sibling relationships aren’t a guarantee, like I was so lucky to have. What is a gift is if you do have a good sibling relationship.

After a lot of work in therapy, I realized that personally for me if I were to have another child, the biggest reason shouldn’t be to provide my first child a sibling. I needed to want this human life enough, separate from my existing child’s, and value them individually as a whole distinct entity.

That was when I came to the conclusion that I just might never arrive at a point where I desired that enough. Whenever I thought about a second child, I kept coming back to, “Well I just want to give my daughter a sibling”—and in the end, that wasn’t a valid enough reason for me. Some people may (wrongly) infer this means I must not love my child or motherhood enough to do it again, but quite the contrary. I love my daughter so much that I cannot fathom loving another in the same capacity, nor do I think I want to. And that’s quite okay.

2. “Double or nothing” and the origins behind the only-child stereotypes

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

There’s this notion that if you’re going to have children at all, better to have more than one or just don’t have any at all. Being in the limbo in between is just not acceptable to society and people would rather have double or nothing. I admitted before that I used to be guilty of this notion, but after my experience, I believe that sometimes you really don’t know what you want until you personally experience it.

I think a big part of the “double or nothing” idea is due to only child stigmas that started in the Victorian era, when child psychology started emerging as a field. Granville Stanley Hall was a prominent child psychologist in the late 19th century and the first president of the American Psychological Association in 1892. The ripples of his unscientific surveys that declared “being an only child is a disease in itself” have perpetuated society’s narratives today, even after Hall’s theories were repeatedly debunked by a slew of research in the decades that followed. (Read more from this article in the Washington Post.)

I learned some of this from Dr. Martha’s Talking Sense podcast episode on single children (around 11-12 minutes in), but she also made some important points that this was an era where they needed a workforce and wanted people to procreate. So how timely that the only child stereotypes also came out at this time when they somehow wanted to increase population—almost like an invisible propaganda piece.

Then in the 50s, the idea of what a good nuclear family consisted of was developed as the two parent, two child family. This was perpetuated in media on TV shows and seared into society’s memories. Even by the time in the mid-1980s where social psychologist Toni Falbo and researcher Denise Polit examined the hundreds of only children studies since 1925, it didn’t seem enough to the vast majority of people when they concluded only children were essentially indistinguishable from other children in personality traits. (And actually, only children were found to have some slight intellectual advantages.) But Hall’s stereotypes just stuck, unfortunately.

So, double or nothing? I just don’t know if that’s the most fair way to be rolling the dice on your family size. What Dr. Martha Collado, clinical psychologist says on her podcast is that the greatest impact to social/emotional development of a child is the relationship children have with their parents/parental figures—not the amount of siblings you have.

So more than anything, how your child develops boils down to how can we be the best versions of ourselves to be the best parents that create a safe and loving relationship. Which leads to parental mental health in the next section.

3. “Mental health is not a reason”

Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash

I sometimes think I was stripped of my choice to have another child because of the severe postpartum depression I barely climbed out from, but people will often tell you that mental health is not a “real” reason not to try again if you are physically able.

But why not? If I somehow lost a body part that allowed me to have a child, people will forgive me and say it’s an acceptable reason not to have a second child, but it’s okay for me to lose my mind and try again? Can we also not dismiss that pregnancy is no easy feat for the body either? And is my mind not a body part too?

I think this is part of the problem with mental health—that we dismiss it when we can’t see it and think that being a selfless martyr who sacrifices everything until there’s nothing left is what a good mother/parent looks like. If I tell people I never want to risk being in that dark hole again, they tell me, “Well, you know better now, you won’t get it again.” As if I were immunized completely now. As if I couldn’t catch another cold again after being sick once. But I know better than that.

I never truly factored my mental health into the equation before I had a child, mostly because I really didn’t understand it. Living through depression has taught me so much more compassion and empathy for others and myself. But just as I also factor my physical health since I am older now (because pregnancy will also physically be harder on my body), I think my mental health also deserves to be considered as a player in this recipe of finding balance in life.

Mental health deserves to be a reason. Because I am only the best mom I can be to my child when my mental and physical health are at their best. And my child wholly deserves me at my best.

I know I can’t truly say that I don’t have a choice. I feel for the women who absolutely, physically cannot. I also feel for the women who had to suffer through birth trauma such that the thought of pregnancy again is terrifying. But my experience was definitely tainted and shifted a certain direction that it may not have gone had I escaped getting PPD the first time.

So I sometimes grieve the vision I had always painted of having two children. But more and more, I am thinking maybe that vision was never one I painted myself… rather it was socially pressured, and I never really knew what I wanted until I was writing my story for myself.

4. Fertility and finances are big factors 

Photo by Daniel Jericó on Unsplash

The other thing that ties into mental health that people don’t see behind the babies is how hard it can be to conceive, how hard it can be to afford raising children. It is so mentally agonizing and haunting when you desire a child and yet you cannot get pregnant or you are having losses in silence. I briefly was labeled with infertility after a year of trying, and I’m not sure I could handle facing this potential uphill battle again if I did decide to have a second.

I understand there are other options to growing your family, but none are easy. None are cheap. None don’t involve a lot of mental preparation and mental health consideration.

When you ask a person when they are having their next child, do you know if it was even hard to have the first? Maybe the first child was their miracle. Maybe there were miscarriages involved. Maybe they already spent so much money (and heartbreak) on even having a child, before they even had to pay for diapers and wipes and exorbitant childcare and more.

These are all things to be considerate about when you ask a person when they are expanding their family. Maybe it’s secondary infertility and there’s a sting to that because they sure want to expand their family, but it’s just not happening. Maybe there was birth trauma and PTSD, so considering another seems completely out of the question. So I think we need to be compassionate when we’re being curious about people’s family size. There could be a lot of layers under there.

Plus, it’s pretty wild how expensive it is to raise a child in America now. This article states it is nearly $240,000 to raise one from birth to age 18. And that number is supposedly a bare minimum which doesn’t include sports and other after-school activities and extracurriculars. The things we do to try to check all the boxes of what the average adult should be doing with their lives…

5. Single children traits debunked

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash

There’s a lot of single child traits that people believe are truth based on those “studies” from the 1800s that stuck. They’re characterized as “selfish” or “spoiled” or “lonely” to name a few. Other articles will do a better job debunking these myths, so I won’t do that here except to say that these stereotypes have been demystified. I recommend this BBC article and Dr. Susan Newman’s article if you want a deeper dive.

For me, the biggest one I couldn’t help worrying about was potentially raising a “lonely” child. And I came to realize that perhaps one of the biggest reasons people worry about having only one child is that there’s this overarching fear of loneliness.

So maybe if adults themselves are afraid of being alone (I’m guilty), then they project that fear onto their child(ren) too. Maybe it’s a survival instinct to live in a pack and so we’re programmed to not want to be alone. But the older I get, the more I’m learning that being alone can also be healthy, and I am better at enjoying alone time now. It’s in the solitude that we can recharge, reflect, and spark our creativity.

Our guest on the podcast tomorrow is also an only child, and she brought up a good point that people often seem to mistakenly picture only children just playing alone by themselves. But why is that the image? She says she played with plenty of friends, neighbors, cousins, classmates, her parents, etc. And then she had opportunities to recharge in her own space too—she never felt lonely.

People associate being alone with loneliness, but they’re not the same thing.

I had also worried my child may not learn how to share as much without a sibling in the picture. But I’ve actually noticed over time with my own child and other only children I know that they are actually quite the opposite. What Dr. Martha described in her podcast episode I had mentioned was that it makes sense that only children are actually good at sharing because they have more opportunity to have their needs met by their caregivers at home. So when it comes to sharing outside the home, it’s a lot easier because they’re not always competing for resources, as compared to if they had a sibling at home.

I often notice my daughter sharing the last piece of candy or snacks with her cousins or even offering to grandparents—without prompting. And I’m totally not trying to say kids with siblings might not do the same (they can!) because each child is so different. But I just want to highlight that we should stop trying to box only children into stiff, unkind stereotypes without getting to know them first. We should stop assuming and judging, period.

Parenting also plays a role in how our children turn out. So I’ve decidedly poured myself into learning how to parent in ways that align with my values, as well as worked on building a community for my child to lean on. I’m proud to hear from my child’s teachers that she is always the first one to help a classmate who is hurt. And if I’m honest, she’s probably more empathetic and generous than me.

6. Reframing it as “One and Won”

PC: Hannah McFall

For some people, they just know upfront that they only ever wanted one child. And that is so amazing. I love and envy that confidence to know what you want—whether it’s one or two or more kids—or even none! It took me a little longer to feel more definitive in my decision not to have another child because I had always grown up imagining a family of four.

I sought out a PMH-C therapist almost 2 years ago to help me untangle my feelings and also to have a support team in case I did decide to proceed. I read “What Am I Thinking: Having a Baby After Postpartum Depression” by Karen Kleiman, who I highly admire for the work she has done in the field of perinatal mental health and her other books. This book operates on the premise that you do want to try for a baby post-PPD though, so keep that in mind that it’s not exactly for people on the fence. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to read and try the exercises to see if I could imagine myself doing this again, so it was still helpful.

It’s interesting, but for a brief moment, I decided maybe I would leave it up to chance. And then I thought maybe I wasn’t being as fair if I did that because I didn’t “want” the unborn baby as hard as I wanted my first. I also kept going back to the sibling reasoning. Strangely, it was like there was a moment where I almost had to give myself permission to even want another…before I could let the idea go. Afterwards, there came a grief period, where I often came back to that crumpled childhood drawing of the family of four.

But slowly, I found myself wanting to let go of the decision agony. I wanted to just be present with the child I had now and savor her existence. And what a joy she is. How exquisite this life is with her. What a lottery I had won. I was “One and Won”—not “One and Done.”

The word “done” seemed so final, so definitive, so closed off. Whereas I started to paint a new picture and dream of what my family of three could be—this life of hope and openness and unlimited possibilities. A picture where I realized I was actually winning here and not missing out on something I thought I needed, or what society wanted to push me into. It also helped to think in an open-ended way in case I ever had a tiny sliver of change of heart. Either way, if I had more or not, I had won.

So, this reframe really helped me move forward. And that’s why I’m sharing it with others now too, in hopes that it might help another person out—whether you have a single child by choice or not. I can’t include all scenarios of why people’s families look the way they do; there’s too many variables and reasons. But whatever they are, no one is owed an explanation. You only have do what’s best for your family—mentally and physically.

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If you made it this far, I applaud you and I also thank you sincerely for putting up with the lengthy piece! I hope it gives single children a better name or it normalizes that it’s okay if your family size is a trio. You’re not doing something wrong; you’re not depriving your child. You’re just simply One and Won. =)

Check out our Healing the Tigress podcast for an episode on this tomorrow (EDIT: the podcast episode is live now!), and we’ll also have future guests on the show to talk about secondary infertility too and being One and Won but not by choice. Lastly, I hope people realize they should just stop asking when people are having another kid. A fun retort I’ve seen is, “Mind your own uterus!” :) Thanks for being here.

xo, Jasmine

P.S. Another article that was a great read is this BBC article by Amanda Ruggeri about “The Rise of One and Done Parenting.”