I remember reading sometime late last century that the Chinese were producing a generation of Little Emperors.
The only child of two loving parents was indulged by four grandparents, who directed all their love and spare cash to their only grandson.
Perhaps even competing against each other a bit and seeing who could take their grandson to McDonalds first or most or give him the most expensive gadget.
The end result was a generation of what they called ‘Little Emperors’ or ‘Fat Emperors’.
I only have one child. So I’ve been aware of the spoiling thing, mostly because my friends with two or more children keep mentioning it. But I know we can be free with the love and discipline and hold back on the other stuff, and I ask everyone around her to be the same.
David Koch raised the issue (pardon the pun) of one-child families and a UK psychological study that found kids would prefer to come from one-child families.
I have one older brother, who knew every corporal torture method ever devised. So I sympathise with why some kids might say they’d prefer not to have a sibling. From the age of 12 to 18, I was given dead legs, crows pecks, cheese cutters (not that one, the one where they flick their hand down your backside to sting you) and general bashes, kicks and trips. I was black and blue until I left home.
The ‘only child is spoiled’ myth has been around for some time. Recently Lauren Sandler discussed this in Time Magazine. There is this expectation that, unless you are challenged in the fertility stakes, you will have more than one child because only children are spoilt and don’t get along with other kids.
According to Sandler the myth came about 120 years ago following a few studies by child psychologist Granville Stanley Hall. One of these studies, ‘Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children’, described the subjects, who were only children, as oddballs and permanent misfits.
Despite Hall’s methodology being questioned in future studies, his research pretty much set up the myth about only children. And even when subsequent psychologists have tried to reverse this myth, the media doesn’t want to pick it up.
Why? Dunno. But there are some theories we needed the kids on the farm or in the factories.
Only children fascinate me because I come from a WASP family of two children. It’s my opinion that parents can make as many, if not more, mistakes with two or three or four children as they can with one.
From my perspective, the upside to my brother’s pain management protocol was when I was picked on at school, I knew being called a skinny, white ghost would never hurt as much as a corked thigh or a random crows peck.
There was never any ‘look after your sister’ in our house. It was ‘fight your own battles’. As a result, we didn’t play together. I spent time with my friends and when they weren’t around I would play alone. Similarly my brother spent time with friends or alone.
As a result, I am as happy working in a group as I am alone and without supervision. Something a lot of job interviewers don’t really get.
My ‘little empress’ is anything but. She knows she has to get to my lap before the cat, the dog will probably take her couch and chew her toys if she doesn’t pick them up, and that her mum sometimes works at the computer and her dad in the yard.
And she calls her daycare leaders ‘Miss’.
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