A recent Wall Street Journal podcast and article caught listeners’ attention by helping perpetuate an inaccurate only child stereotype, describing their story as “What [parents can] do to make sure their only children don’t grow up to be selfish and spoiled,” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that only children grow up to be “selfish and spoiled” unless parents work to ensure otherwise. In the same article, however, one will find the following:
“In a meta-analysis covering 115 studies of only children conducted from the 1920s to the 1980s, Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and her co-author, found that only children were generally as well-adjusted, intelligent, accomplished and sociable as those with siblings.”
This follows on the subject of our last blog post about the Time magazine article about “debunking” the only child “myth.” One superficial difference between these two articles, however, is that the Time article asserts that there is a myth to be debunked, whereas the Wall Street Journal article uses that myth as a teaser for their article. Either way, though, it’s good to see studies that show only children as ‘normal’ getting some mainstream media coverage .
