America is coming around on smaller families and destigmatizing the only child, The Washington Post reported.
"The smaller family is definitely here to stay," only-child researcher Susan Newman told the Post. "One child is a family."
Late 19th century researcher Granville Stanley Hall had studied single-children families and once declared "being an only child is a disease in itself" because of "Only Child Syndrome" — symptoms include social isolation, narcissism, and general delinquency.
But Newman suggests we no longer live in the world Hall had studied.
"His study was done in an era where children were quite isolated, they lived on farms with great distances between them, they had great workloads, and they didn't interact with other children the way children do today," Newman told the Post. "He concluded that only children are selfish, they're lonely, they have more imaginary friends than other children — which is absolutely not true."
The Pew Research Center has found the percentage of mothers who have just one child has doubled from 11% in 1976 to 22% in 2015, and census data shows that to continue since, according to the report.
That cultural shift is also changing perceptions of only children, after years of self-fulfilling prophecy, according to Newman.
"Hall's ideas just stuck," Newman told the Post. "As a culture, we became so mired in the stereotype, and it's very hard to change our thinking.
". . . It's changing because there are more and more only children, and people are seeing for themselves that only children are not lonely, they're not odd, they're not selfish."
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