FOr a few years ago, I kept several vials of strangers' sperm on ice. Let me be clear: it's not just hanging out next to frozen peas in the freezer. They are stored in a fancy cryobank, and every six months a $285 charge appears on my credit card statement for the storage privilege.
I've justified the high price tag as the cost of keeping my options open. My wife and I have a perfect 3-year-old girl, and we've been umming and ahing about having another baby. (I won't go into the details of assisted reproduction, but for same-sex female couples, sperm is key.) We keep our infant baby's stuff on hand in case we have a second child. I left it there. My basement is full of boxes of old toys and clothes. But it looks like we need to wipe out and stop sperm storage. We have finally decided to firmly belong to the “one and done” club.
Choosing not to have a second child shouldn't be a completely surprising decision. So is choosing not to have children at all. But how many kids you have, and when and how to have them, is still a subject on which people have an odd number of strong opinions. It's still a topic that women are made to feel guilty about.
After all, there is no way to win as a woman. Because some people (including the Pope) will call you selfish if you don't have children. People will call you a bad parent if you have multiple children and can't spend enough time with each of them because you're too busy with work. Some people decide that if you stay home with your kids, you don't have a career.
And if you choose to have just one child, as more and more families are doing, you're too self-absorbed to give, and that's the tired old rant about how you raise a narcissistic monster. There will be a lot of stereotypes about them being brothers. There is still a disturbingly widespread belief that a family of three is not a real family and that only children are destined for a lonely life.
Granville Stanley Hall, an influential 19th century child psychologist, is largely responsible for these stereotypes, which, by the way, have all been thoroughly debunked. Over 100 years ago, he said: The only child was a disease in itself. Hall himself seems to have suffered from a severe case of old misogyny. Do you know what other weird little ideas Mr. Hall had? He said, “What is a purely intelligent woman… biological malformationadvocated suppressing girls' education through a process called “.late”.Yes, really.
In the years since Hall mocked his only child as lacking; numerous Research concludes that it's actually only children.doing well”.Nevertheless, the negative tropes about only children persist because they are so deeply buried, so deeply buried that even though I have spent countless hours reading them, regardless of, Through all these studies I still feel a little guilty for not giving my daughter a sibling, to make sure I wasn't dooming my child to a miserable life and that being an only child wouldn't affect her growth. I am. And I also feel that something is missing.
Sometimes, no matter how self-aware we think we are, it can be difficult to untangle what you really want from what society has taught you to be. And from a very young age, we have been taught in many ways that the ideal family is two parents and two children. That's what you should want.
But I'm going to stop feeling that guilty. Because it's very clear to me that having an only child is the best possible decision for my wife and I. We are a very happy family of three. This may sound totally cheesy, like what you see in cushion crochet, but in reality, everything you say “no” to means you say “yes” to something else. Not having another child means you can devote more time and resources to the children you do have. It means more flexibility. More money. The ability to not only spend quality time with your child, but also spend quality time for yourself. For me, it means being able to live a balanced life.
Of course, we're not alone in making that decision. One-child families are on the rise: in 1978, about 11 percent of American families had only one child. By 2015, that number had doubled to 22%. And one-child families now it's standard In Europe.
You don't need to be a genius to understand why families are becoming smaller. The cost of living is astronomical, Western society is not designed to be family-friendly, and the world looks increasingly dire. Elon Musk may be on a mission to repopulate the world with his own spawn, but for some of us, one is the magic number. I'm certainly one of them, and I'm done listening to anyone's judgment on this issue.
