Member-only story
We Chose to Stop at One Child
And that is still sometimes hard for me
Last year, there was one kid in my daughter’s class who didn’t have siblings. Mine. I don’t think the teacher realized this. But when they would talk about playing or home life, they often talked about their brothers and sisters. My kid would come home and ask when she would have one. She would talk about wanting one, I think, mainly because her friends all had one.
There’s no way she understood what she was asking for. She thought she was asking for a playmate. There are many kids shows and movies that stress the importance of sibling relationships. Frozen, for example, centres the relationship of the sisters — the curse is lifted by an act of true sister love, after all. (Sorry for the spoiler, but really, that movie came out in 2013 so you had fair chance.)
My point is that, though we decided carefully that one child was right for us, there is much around us promoting the idea that families should have two or more children. Depictions of only children are fairly uncommon, and where you find them, attention is rarely drawn to it. Especially not to the same extent that sibling relationships are stressed in similar circumstances.
