When the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was an only child growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, he used to spend a lot of time alone — something he wasn’t happy about.
“There was a disused quarry behind the house that he used to throw rocks into. One time, when he was there chucking rocks, apparently unhappy, he grumbled to one of his aunts that he was going to have a lot of kids so that they were never bored or lonely.”
That story, which became part of family lore, was related to me by Christopher Scalia, one of the justice’s nine children.
It’s a theme I’ve heard from other people as well.
Three years ago, I was asked to write a piece about parents who make the countercultural decision to supersize their family. Except for the post-war baby boom, the number of children born to American women has been in steady decline for two centuries. In 1800, the average was seven babies per mother; now the number is less than two. Whereas only children were once the anomalies, nowadays it’s the large brood that attracts the attention of strangers.
In my reporting for that article, I noticed that many of the parents I spoke with — those who had four or more kids — were, like me, only children who hadn’t liked growing up solo and made a different choice for their family.
Alison Cohen and her husband, Craig, of northern New Jersey, were both only children and now are the parents of six. While members of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community tend to have larger families, the Cohens say they have double the number of children of most families in their community, where private school tuition, in addition to other costs of observant Jewish life, can sometimes serve as a form of birth control.
Why did they take the plunge anyway? “I think that most parents want to give their children the things they wished they had when they were growing up. As an only child, there’s nothing I wanted more than siblings, so having a big family was the greatest gift I could imagine giving my kids,” Cohen told me.
During her fourth pregnancy, Maryland mother Oneg Feuer nearly died of COVID-19, and 25 weeks into her pregnancy, she spent close to two weeks on a ventilator in the summer of 2021. Despite that traumatic experience — and an emergency surgery weeks before her intubation — Feuer surprisingly says she hopes to welcome more children in the future.
It was a decision she made in childhood when a blizzard shut her school for a week. She told me, “Coming back to school and hearing everyone’s fun of going out with their siblings made me jealous.”
A generation of children has now experienced a much more intense version of the blizzard that shaped Feuer’s future: the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Jane Brosseau, a mother of 10 in the Pacific Northwest, told me how difficult having a large family made the experience, but also how much less lonely her children were while schools were closed.
At the start of the quarantine, she kept telling her children about her own childhood and kept reflecting on what the experience must be like for only children. When she shared with her kids what her experiences of only child life were during the pandemic, they were “blown away.”
One word kept coming up time and time again when I spoke to mothers who had been only children. It was a word that Scalia had used: “lonely.”
Aravah, a mother of five in Maryland, told me, “My fondest memories of my childhood was going to my friend’s house who was one of 10. I realized that I didn’t want my children to be lonely like I was.”
For almost everyone I spoke with, the decision to have a large family was a pivot from their own upbringing, but a number of parents also shared their end-of-life concerns. Only children often grow up to be the only support system for aging parents — the only child that parents can rely on for emotional and physical support in their later years. They also grieve the loss of their parents alone, handle their estates alone, and deal with myriad details of that loss without siblings they rely on for help and solace.
I personally felt that pain keenly, having to bury my parents alone, without siblings standing beside me.
Recently The Free Press chronicled the story of the de la Mottes, a family of 10 classical music-playing children learning their string instruments while living in Harlem. Their children’s mother, Amber, herself an only child, told Suzy Weiss, “Growing up, three kids seemed like a big family to me, and that’s what I wanted.”
Her husband, Marc, told Weiss, “We all have one appointment, which is death. You have to think: what are you leaving behind? A pile of money? A software program you wrote?”
This deathbed moment is often considered by those who choose to have a large family. I’ve had the honor of being at the bedside of a beloved relative surrounded by family. Not everyone is able to have such an opportunity, but there is a unique beauty to leaving this Earth in a room full of your descendants.
Conversely, those last years of a parent’s life can be incredibly difficult for only children, who often become the sole caretakers for their aging parents.
Jen Fulwiler is a nationally touring standup comic, bestselling author and mom of six. Fulwiler and her husband were both only children, and the duty of caring for their parents rested on their shoulders alone.
She told me that in larger families “normally you’d gather the family to discuss the best road forward” but for only children, there is no familial brain trust or distribution of caretaking.
Of course, having siblings doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be taking care of aging parents alone. Siblings can be flung across multiple states or in other circumstances that leave the one closest to home to do the work of caring for aging or ill parents. (Research has also shown that daughters shoulder more responsibility than sons.)
Many parents aren’t able to have more than one child for any one of a variety of reasons. Only children are often raised in happy homes and are well-loved and well-adjusted. And none of us have to look far for examples of large families that turn out dysfunctional or discordant. It’s also true that the experience of growing up an only child isn’t negative for everyone. Parents with only one child have more resources and time to spend on that child. Some research has shown that some only children tend to be less sociable as adults, but generally fare as well as people who had siblings. Some people say they loved being an only child, and they’re happy to be among the “one and done” crowd.
Ontario, Canada, mom Jen Dalton told the BBC that she felt societal pressure to have more than one child, but she and her husband carefully weighed the pros and cons and decided to stop with one. “I’m an only child, and I’m very happy. I’m so close with my parents,” Dalton said. She has an Instagram account with more than 24,000 followers and is working on a “One and Done Parenting” podcast.
I don’t doubt that Dalton and many other parents of singletons are happy. But their experience also doesn’t negate that of only children who wished they’d had siblings — both in childhood and as adults. There’s little research in this area, and some studies in the past have shown that only children tend to have smaller families than those who grow up with siblings. It’s often the case that children model the behavior of what they see around them.
But others decide to react strongly against it — and make a different choice.
Large families are becoming a statistical rarity. According to Pew, in 1976 — 10 years before I was born — 40% of mothers had four or more children. By 2014, only 14% did.
A great deal of ink has been spilled about how to reverse this demographic trend, which is contributing to worries about the global replacement rate. Could the experience of America’s only children be part of the solution? I, for one, hope so. Perhaps there will be another baby boom borne of only children who will decide to forge another path for their own families when that time comes.