Among social and economic considerations, more parents are choosing to have only one child.
Jen Dalton created a spreadsheet when she became pregnant in 2018. She planned out when she would have each of the four children she thought she wanted, taking into account maternity leave, family-spacing health recommendations, and even potential family holidays. “I look at it now and then and laugh at how naive I was,” Dalton, 31, says.
That’s because she and her husband decided they were ‘one and done’ just two months after her daughter was born. Their struggle with sleep deprivation and mental health was a factor; Dalton had a traumatic birth, postnatal depression (PND), and postpartum anxiety (PPA). Even when things got easier, the decision felt right.
It wasn’t just Ontario. Canada-based Dalton and her husband didn’t want to put their daughter’s – and their family’s – health at risk by going through it all again. It was also because they knew there was nothing “wrong” with their child not having a sibling. “I’m an only child and I’m very happy,” Dalton says. “I’m very close to my parents.”
Then, in 2022, Dalton stumbled. She and her husband moved into their “forever home”. Close friends had a new baby who resembled their daughter. She believed that if she developed PPD or PPA again, she would have more tools to manage it. And social-media algorithms continued to push content featuring large, beautiful families. “It made us think, ‘Yeah, we could do it again,'” she says.
It’s not surprising that Dalton began to doubt her decision. Even though having only one child is becoming the norm in many countries, there is still pressure to have more than one. Despite repeated debunking, stereotypes about only children being spoiled or lonely persist. Parents report feeling pressure to have more children from everyone, from family members to complete strangers. On social media, mothers post adorable moments of their broods with captions like, “This is your sign, give them the younger sibling” and “I never met a mama who regretted having that one more”.
Even as the decision to be one-and-done becomes more common, this background noise means that parents who make this choice frequently have to convince others – and even themselves – that they’ve made the right decision.
More common, but still judged
Particularly since the mid-century contraceptive revolution, which gave many women real control over fertility, the decision of how many children to have has been a personal one. However, there have been clear social and cultural trends as well.
In many countries, the trend is toward fewer children. The majority of all families with children in the EU (49%) have one child. Only-child families make up the largest group in Canada, increasing from 37% in 2001 to 45% in 2021. Looking at mothers nearing the end of their childbearing years – arguably a better way to measure the popularity of only children because census data only provides a snapshot in time – 18% of US women had one child in 2015, up from 10% in 2010.
The fact that women are having children later in life is an important factor. However, there is an element of choice involved, according to Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One. “A lot of people will say that no one wants to have just one child – that [the rise in only-child families is] all due to delayed fertility,” she says. “Well, isn’t that another way to make this decision? ‘There are all of these other things that are really important to me as well, and I’m going to prioritise them, and hopefully I’ll get there,’ you’re saying. in place of, ‘Those things don’t matter; what matters is my motherhood.'”
Popular beliefs about the ideal number of children are also evolving. For millennia, it made sense to have more than one child. Even just two centuries ago, more than four out of every ten children died before reaching the age of five. Having multiple children assisted the family in completing the numerous tasks required to survive. Of course, in the absence of reliable contraception and with women marrying at much younger ages, having only one child was not only unfeasible. It wasn’t always possible.
Why is the world telling you that, if you make this choice, you’re a terrible parent, and you’re a terrible woman? – Lauren Sandler
Today, however, the picture is very different in many (but not all) cultures.
Portugal, where 59% of families with children have only one child, is a good example: while the average age of first-time mothers increased from 26.6 to 29.9 years from 2001 to 2019, nearly one in every five women now believes that one child is the ideal family size. In the United States prior to the 1970s, only 1% of poll respondents thought having only one child was best. While still a small proportion of the total, it has more than tripled. (There is, of course, still a big discrepancy between what people say is the ideal, versus how many kids they’re actually having – but some of it has to do with how these data were collected. Respondents in both the Portugal and US numbers, for example, were as young as 15 years old in Portugal and 18 in the US, and were not necessarily parents themselves; many people, like Dalton, change their minds as they get older or start their own families. In the case of the US data, respondents were also asked what they thought the ideal size was in general, rather than what an ideal size would be for them personally.)
Nonetheless, the stigma attached to parents who choose to have only one child persists. “I found myself with this kid who I was crazy about,” Sandler says of becoming a mother in 2008. But she also enjoyed other aspects of her life, such as her job. Despite being aware of issues such as the’motherhood penalty,’ having one child seemed like the best way to have it all – or as close to it as possible.
“I was very excited by the prospect of being able to love and raise this child in a dynamic in which I was also true to myself,” she says. “Yet all of this cultural noise kept infiltrating. People would approach me on the subway and in the supermarket, asking, ‘When will you have another one?’ And I’d say flatly, ‘I’m not going to’. And it’d be as if I were an abuser, like, call the Department of Social Services on this person. What is this calculation, I wondered?… Why is the world telling you that if you make this choice, you’re a bad parent and a bad woman?”