Letter Never Sent

Jody sent me this link about a “study” on only children done by Dr. Toni Falbo, an ed-psych professor at UT, Your One and Only:
Educational psychologist dispels myths surrounding only children.

I’m not impressed with any of her conclusions here, although I have not had the opportunity to read the actual study itself. There’s just nothing compelling about them, at least as described by this article. There are also a number of weaknesses in Falbo’s approach. For one thing, Dr. Falbo makes it sound as if the entire field of psychology was against only children and families who have only children. As an only child herself and as the mother of an only child I get the sense that she has too much at stake personally to achieve anything of real value here. It’s almost as if she went into her project looking to overturn certain assumptions she found personally negative. She mentions the work of G. Stanley Hall and Freud and puts the blame on their heads for spreading negative assumptions of only children into the easily influenced mass of society:

Hall, in fact, went well beyond simply calling the only child experience damaging and is credited with stating, “Being an only child is a disease in itself.”

Despite a scientific study in the late 1920s that clearly refuted Hall’s assertions and proved only children were as normal as other kids and a steady string of similar studies through the 20th century, Hall’s proclamation held sway, with the same appeal as a National Enquirer headline.

I find this assertion rather tiresome. It is implausible that widespread ideas on the subject of only children originated wholly in the discourse of Psychology. If anything, it is more likely that Freud, Hall, etc. lifted their ideas from the external culture and added them to their hackneyed theories of psychological development. I find the following admission telling:

“If my research had shown that only children were sick, sick, sick,” says Falbo, “we’d be talking about Nobel prize-winning type results. My career would have taken off like a rocket. But conventional wisdom is wrong, and it seems that finding out kids are normal is not quite as exciting.”

I have never seen anything on birth order that describes only children as prone to being “sick”.

Falbo’s findings were published in a book called “The Single Child Family,” in which a century’s worth of scholarship revealed that single children are not disadvantaged. They, in fact, seem to enjoy slight advantages in certain areas.

Again, nothing I have read on birth order describes only children as being disadvantaged. In fact, full parental attention is an obvious advantage in many obvious ways. However, it is also not outrageous to assume that receiving such full, unshared attention can have disadvantages as well. This is the main problem with this piece is that it assumes that birth order study and societal assumptions are aligned against only children and families with only children.

“It’s important to note that, overall, the differences between only children and other children were very slight,” says Falbo. “Factors like education level of the parents, the financial state of the family, emotional health and values of the parents, individual parenting styles and the genetic predisposition of the child have far, far more to do with how a child turns out than birth order and family size.”

I agree here with two caveats. There is no explanation of how you can measure genetic predispotion in terms of the only child / sibling dynamic. Also, Falbo here does not outline what sort of differences she is measuring. Is she comparing social interaction with only children and youngest/oldest children? Achievement? Neuroticism? What exactly is being measured and how?

Later she goes on to laud supporting data she gathered from China where the one child policy was in effect for many years, yet again this brings up more questions than answers. For example, how do you account for cultural and economic differences between China and the West? Differences like the role of the extended family in relation to the individual, the rural and tribal makeup of China, as well as influences like the social teachings of Confucianism (which emphasizes place and duty) and Chinese Communism? Clearly, comparing only children in China with only children in the United States brings up a number of problems, which makes the data of questionable value. Without seeing the study itself, there seems to be little ground broken here. There may be problems with birth order theory, however I think it has more to do with a general problem in psychology and related fields; the tendency to think only in terms of dichotomy and trying to see things as black and white.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.