Busting Myths About Only Children, with Lauren Sandler

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Intro – 00:00

 

LAUREN SANDLER: As an only child, I had a rich imaginary life. And yet, people imagine a kid playing alone in the sandbox and feel sad for them, and then feel angry their parents are doing that to them. Maybe that kid alone in the sandbox is having this incredible experience!

BLAIR HODGES: When it comes to being an only child, Lauren Sandler is an expert. She is an only child. She has an only child. And as an award-winning journalist, Lauren dug deep to answer some of the most pressing questions about singletons.

Are they lonely? Are they more selfish? Would they be better off with siblings? She answers these questions and more in her book, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One. Lauren Sandler joins us to talk about it right now.

I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and this is Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other in order to built a more just world.

 

Looking Back at the Book After a Decade – 01:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: Lauren Sandler, welcome to Relationscapes.

LAUREN SANDLER: Glad to be here, Blair. Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: It's been ten years since you published One and Only. I don't know if you're the type of person who gets nervous about the passage of time, but let's start there. Ten years. What are you thinking ten years after this book was published?

LAUREN SANDLER: I never think about mortality or anything ever. [laughter]

I actually had this interesting experience a couple years ago, peak pandemic is the moment when— eight years after this book was published—the audiobook came up. Someone said, "We would like you to read it." So I had the experience of reading the whole book out loud eight years after I published it.

This sounds gross, but I was surprised at how well it held up and how much I actually like it more now than when I wrote it. I think the passage of time can help you value your work more. There are those elements of grossness you feel about all the little things that maybe stood out at some point, but those weren't quite there.

Also, I feel like a lot of the issues this book is about are so pressing. It's nominally about only children, but it's also about, you know, freedom, it's about climate change, it's about draconian social policy, it's about politics. There were a lot of elements in this book that felt more prescient than perhaps I knew. So it is a publication that time has been kind to in ways perhaps time has not been kind to my increasingly middle-aged body, for example. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: No, no. But is that generally the case with your work? Because some things I look back on that I've done and I'm like, "Okay, I'm still kind of proud of that." And other things I'm like, "Oh, that's really dated. I can see that comes from a particular time in my life."

LAUREN SANDLER: I will say, I am not in the habit of revisiting things all that often, so having the experience of someone saying, "No, you have to sit in a studio for two days and read your whole book" was a great practice for me. It does make me wonder if I should dust off a thing or two.

I think I can imagine exactly the tendencies I had as a younger writer, a less aware writer, that would make me cringe without having to discover them right now. Let's just say there's been an awakening around privilege I really wish I had when I was younger.

That said, I think my politics have generally been in the right place, and that's been my motivation to do my work. I'm a very mission-driven writer. This is a book that was very much packaged as a parenting book, much to my chagrin, because I was like, "Wait, what are you talking about?"

This is really a book about abortion and religion and global warming, but we're going to put it next to the books with the ABCs on the cover. Sure, great. Sneak it in there. Because I'm so motivated by the things I believe in so deeply to do the work I do, and because I know myself pretty well, I think maybe I am less cringy about things than I would fear. Since you actually asked. It was good for me. Thank you. That was a good little therapy moment for me.

BLAIR HODGES: There's one more thing I want to ask about there. That's your relationship with your own child, because they're a part of this book as well. As a parent, I was wondering how it felt revisiting things you wrote about your own family life now.

LAUREN SANDLER: That's an interesting part of that. It's also, to be honest, it's been a decade of therapy since I published this book. The whole world looks different to me in many ways, from a perspective of who I am as a mother, who I am as a daughter, who I am as a partner.

It's interesting. My kid who, in the book is Dahlia, but now goes by their middle name, Sam, and uses they/them pronouns, it was a “she/her” moment with a three-year-old, who is now nonbinary, just total liberation with this incredible fifteen-year-old who I get to live with and feed and pay for. [laughter]

But I think my kid was very much who they were early on, and so feeling the little bits of the quippish moments, the sense of humor moments, and also what it means to be raised in a family that is prioritizing meaningful work and art and freedom and living out social values. I see a direct line between the family I write about in One and Only and the one I am living in right now.

That said, this kid is now taller than me, and can play a mean electric guitar, and has definitely blossomed in ways I'm amazed by. But you know, there are some anxieties in this book. This is in many ways—and we can talk about this—a book that's about some of my anxieties, but more sort of cultural anxieties about family formation choices, and they are anxieties that have deeply quieted for me in the process of actually being this family and not just anticipating the next phases of what this family might be.

 

Lauren the Only Child – 07:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ah, great. I can't wait to hear more about that.

Your book kicks off with a great gag in the opening line. It says, "This book is not a memoir, but to conform to what's expected of an only child, let me start with myself." [laughs]

Let's start by hearing a little bit more about yourself and who you are as an only child.

LAUREN SANDLER: That's a great way to kick things off, says the only child. Like I'm Bette Midler in Beaches all of a sudden, let's talk about me. [laughter]

I'm an only child because it was a very intentional choice my parents made. It was a choice about which my father was ambivalent, but my mother was someone who was very protective of her freedom and her work and who came of age in the fifties. Came of age as a child in the fifties, and then lived through the sixties, and by the time the mid-seventies hit she was a mother, and she was a mother who wanted to travel and wanted to live in an apartment that was “within walking distance from a really good cookie,” is how she would put it. She was like, "I need to live somewhere where I can walk to get a really good cookie." That was in Harvard Square in Cambridge, really without any Harvard affiliation, just the desire to be in a cool neighborhood and feel like a place where things were happening.

Also just a desire to continue to do meaningful work at a time when, frankly, a lot of women even in that liberal community were not working. My mom has stories about dropping me off at nursery school in her trench coat with her briefcase and the other mothers in their pajamas doing drop-off, glaring at her in judgment.

She was a person—and still is—who was not afraid of a bold choice and a little bit of cultural pushback. This choice is one she was always very proud of. Making the choice to have an only child was something that was normalized to me from birth as a move of liberation, a move of self-preservation, a move of trying to be both a parent and an active citizen and someone who wanted to have an adulthood that made space for a lot more than parenting in a society in which, of course, mothers are supposed to do more and more and blame themselves for more and more and have less and less support.

BLAIR HODGES: It's funny to me you say this isn’t a memoir because you’re present in the book. You're on a journey yourself to learn more about the stereotypes about single children and about social expectations and different views. Even though it's not necessarily centralizing your own views about what it's like to be a single child or to make a choice to have a single child, those things are present there because you juxtapose your own experience with what else is going on and with your research.

I think your framing is helpful, and you want people to be able to make decisions about parenting, or about having children based on research and real stories rather than anecdotes and fear. That's something you write at the end of the book.

LAUREN SANDLER: Absolutely. To me the entire purpose of this book is to say, “what do what you want?” It's not to say, “only have one kid,” it's “Find out what you want.”

But if what the thing you think you want is based in anxieties that may not have any real foundation, let's question why the culture is telling us what families need to look like. Who women are supposed to be, in particular. I'm being very gender essentialist about that, but when it comes to parenting, I do think motherhood tends to be a pretty gender essentialist category in the eyes of our society.

BLAIR HODGES: It still is. There's a forthcoming episode of this show where we have a specialist on equal partnerships who talks about, it's a very intersectional book, but it also says there are female-coded roles, male-coded roles that even in queer relationships, nonbinary folks, can still fall into the patterns of what was tradition or typically thought of as “what the woman needs to do” in a relationship, “what the man needs to do,” and trying to move toward more equal partnerships to eliminate those things. It's interesting.

LAUREN SANDLER: I totally see that. A lot of my friends who are in lesbian couples—and I'm using that pretty arcane word right now because all three of the couples I'm thinking of use it to describe themselves—are in the most traditional pairings. The most Leave It to Beaver situations. Yet, I think that feeling of opting into it means it's not quite laden with the basic expectations. This is maybe for a different episode, but it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

BLAIR HODGES: Absolutely. One other caveat before we continue is you also mentioned that singletons often ascribe things about themselves to being an only child, there's a totalizing narrative that can happen, like, "Oh, I must be this way because I'm an only child." You've noticed that yourself. You've even perhaps been tempted to do that about yourself.

LAUREN SANDLER: Oh, definitely. We as human beings—this is a very Jungian way of thinking about things I suppose—we are both told what our archetypes are and we search them out ourselves. For example, since I've written this book astrology has become huge. In 2013, it was still a little like, "Oh, really, you're into that?" Now it's like, "Oh, really, you're married to a Gemini?" And I am! And lived to tell the tale, and I also don't believe in any of it except when I do!

I think we all have these framing devices we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. Maybe it's that your parents had a tough divorce, maybe it's because you're queer, maybe it's because you're six inches taller than everyone else, or just whatever it is that helps you understand yourself to yourself can be helpful.

Or sometimes it's not helpful, because sometimes those ideas are really trafficking in stereotypes that might not have a lot of grounding and are pretty self-negating. I have found that is often the only child's story: these things about myself must be true because the world is telling me these things are true. When in fact when you go to the literature, there's not a lot that bears any of it out.

 

Selfishness and the Shrinking of the American Family – 13:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so taking a broad view, your book gives us a little historical overview, to think about when families started having fewer and fewer children. The rise of industrialization and urbanization meant kids went from being a plus for family economic circumstances to more of a cost. Instead of having a lot of kids that can help out on the farm or do whatever, now you're living in an urban space, the work opportunities are different, child labor laws are on the rise, and things like that.

During the nineteenth century we start to see some families having a smaller number of children. And then you take us to the turn of the century. We're going to talk about a man named G. Stanley Hall. This is a fellow who helped ingrain this idea of the spoiled, selfish single child. “If you have one kid they're definitely going to be spoiled and selfish.” So take us there with G. Stanley Hall.

LAUREN SANDLER: This dude is the worst. [laughter] Before I tell you how much I struggle with him, I want to tell you about his influence. He was one of the founders of modern psychology in the United States. When Freud came to America this is the person he wanted to talk to. This is a person of great influence. He is also a person who grew up in a whole idealized scrum of farm children in Western Massachusetts. Lots of boys, lots of excitement about there being a lot of rough and tumble boys around in his family, and he had this notion that was founded in no research at all that an only child was inherently flawed. He even referred to those of us who do not have siblings as “unteachable eagles,” as though we're these bizarre creatures that are so stubborn and fixed at birth that there is no way we are anything except lonely, selfish, and maladjusted.

BLAIR HODGES: He probably had a neighbor like “little Jerry” or something that was just like a terrible person who happened to be a single child, and he's just like, "Oh, this is what they all are." [laughs]

LAUREN SANDLER: It's so funny, like those neighbors, you think about sitcoms through the seventies and eighties and nineties. Isn't there always that—there’s always Skippy on Family Ties. There's always this, “what's he still doing in our house” weirdo only child. So you're right. I bet Stanley Hall totally had that guy one farm over, or maybe it was a girl and she read all the time and she wasn't really interested in him and all of a sudden let's decide an entire category of person should not exist. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: You point out this unteachable eagle theory was debunked really early, yet this stereotype persists. In 1928 a researcher called Norman Fenton tests these ideas, finds out they're bunk. What was happening, and why has that stereotype persisted, even though research started to say “no, this actually isn't true”?

LAUREN SANDLER: This is the big question I would love to be able to answer and can only kind of half-ass my way around. Forgive me, but this is, of course, the central question when people talk to me about this book. If this has been debunked, if there is not research that proves only children are lonely, selfish, and maladjusted why is it we persist in the stereotype? Why is it that the simple exposure of information has not changed things?

I think it has a lot to do with who people accept women to be and what women are supposed to be as adults. I'm going to sound a lot like I'm a college freshman who just got out of my “Marxism and Patriarchy” seminar. But the fact is we live in a world that relies on women's free labor as parents and as spouses. We live in a world that relies on women being too busy, stressed, self-effacing, to gain the political control and equality that would shift the way the world works. Frankly, the more we are mothers, often, the less we can be anything else, at least within the way labor and parenting actually tends to break down.

I also think there's another element, and I always feel gross thinking this and I often don't say it, but you're you and I love talking to you, as I have before. I think there's this element of larger social control questions and how those questions emerge, but I also think there's the parent-to-parent feeling like, "Wait, you only had to do this once? Are you kidding? Your laundry is done? Your kid is already commuting themselves to school? You only have one college education? You guys actually went out last night?" [laughs]

I think there's that feeling that gets prickly too. I think there is an element of maintaining, looking askance at other people's family formation decisions, that can feel a little bit like, “How come you get to have that and we don't?”

BLAIR HODGES: You've got a quote here from this author in 1933, Catherine Carswell. She wrote, "It's a wretched woman who has no children, but the more pitiable object is the married woman who has only one child."

I think you're right. I do detect a little bit of sublimated jealousy in that kind of a judgment. “She is to be more pitied—"

LAUREN SANDLER: She's the one who's making a choice that's bad for her existing child. This notion that if you have no children you can't be a bad parent, but if you have one you automatically are.

It's interesting. When I was recording this book I was really aware of the similarities and differences between being child free and being a parent of an only child. I first wrote a Time cover story about only children, and then I instantly went on to write a second one about the child-free choice and about examining who we think adults should be, what liberation looks like, how we judge other people's choices, and there is a lot of overlap. I do think the difference is this notion of, “You chose to become a parent, so look at what you're doing to your child by not giving them a sibling.”

Most people have their first kid because they want to become a parent. Most people have their second kid because they want to give their first kid a sibling.

 

Does Having a Sibling Make Better People? – 20:04

 

BLAIR HODGES: That was my primary interest, frankly.

LAUREN SANDLER: I get that. I do get that. Many of my friends have siblings. Many of my friends have kids who have siblings. I see those advantages. I see that affection. I see that lure. But if it's something you're doing because you think you're not going to have a messed-up kid because you give them a sibling, that just doesn't bear out at all!

BLAIR HODGES: The research doesn't hold it up. I have to say, one of the biggest things that surprised me reading this book is the research contradicted that stereotype. I love my two kids, I’m glad to have them both. But one of those considerations was, I want them to have these experiences with a sibling, I think that's important. They'll get to learn certain things at home they wouldn't otherwise learn. It's good for sociality, or whatever.

But even back in 1920 when Norman Fenton was doing his research, he found measures of generosity and sociability were high with only children, and they were likely to be more truthful, they showed greater initiative and leadership abilities, they were more self-assured. He found benefits of being an only child that, for me thinking about having an only child, I guess I had ingested the regular old stereotypes that if they don't have a sibling, “where are they going to learn all these other things or have these other experiences?” And the research just doesn’t prove that.

LAUREN SANDLER: If you're homeschooling an only child in a rural area—and most only children are not homeschooled, most of them go to school—in that situation, yeah, you're probably not going to have a very well-socialized kid. But if you send your kid to school, if your kid has playdates, and all the things, which is where a lot of that socializing happens, that'll happen. It's just different. It's just a different choice.

BLAIR HODGES: Plus kids have their own temperaments and styles they bring to the table as well. All those variables. Again, you suggest we can't simplify everything down to whether they have siblings or not as being this totalistic way of shaping a kid. There's a lot of factors that go into who people become.

LAUREN SANDLER: There is plenty of research that shows siblings do help children learn about conflict and competition far more than the companionship we tend to idealize, and that's really important. But it's not the only way that it happens.

And you know, there are also other advantages. There's a lot of research that shows only children tend to be more generous in many ways and more careful in their relationships because they know those relationships depend on their behavior and their actions. Unlike a sibling. You can be a total jerk to your brother and your brother's still going to be your brother. They're still going to have to sit down with you at dinner, they're still going to have to be in the back of the car on the family road trip, they're not going away. But if you're an only child, if you want to have that chosen family relationship—and we do tend to have very deep friendships in a chosen family mode—you're going to have to nurture that relationship, because no one has to be there. They have to want to be there.

 

Demographics and Racism – 23:08

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to mention something before we move away from the selfish stereotype thing that connects to what you already mentioned about selfish parents, this idea the parents themselves are flawed if they're deciding to do this. There have also been some very ugly and racist undertones here, a sort of race panic we're seeing a reemergence of today, yet again. The “Great Replacement Theory,” the idea that if white people in particular aren't reproducing at a certain rate they will be replaced, there won't be enough of them. So there's also historically been an undercurrent of racism with opposing having only children.

LAUREN SANDLER: I'm so glad you brought that up. I became somewhat unexpectedly obsessed with demographic conferences when I was reporting for this book. It's not a world I ever thought I would become a part of, briefly, but the people who are usually doing research around fertility—“who's having babies, where, why, et cetera”—they're usually white men, usually meeting in halls in Europe and talking with a lot of panic about how we get fertility rates up. But no one's saying how do we have more Black babies? How do we have more Latin babies? How do we think about a culture that can accommodate a history of big family sizes?

BLAIR HODGES: Or celebrate interracial couples.

LAUREN SANDLER: Totally. Or how do we make gay adoption easier? All the different ways you can have a family. How do we think about co-housing and blended families? It's this notion of, “We need more cis hetero white consumers. We need to have families that look like what we think a family should look like. We need to perpetuate the norms that have existed oppressively for a very long time. We need, in late capitalism, to make more and more people who are going to perpetuate not only those norms, but our markets, who are going to become not even just workers, but consumers. Consumers of ideas, consumers of objects, consumers of everything.”

It's been interesting to trace this, not just in the racist US, but in Europe, especially where there's so much anxiety about refugees. There's so much anxiety about losing traditional culture, et cetera. There's so much emphasis on, how do we get white people in white countries to have more babies?

Just this nativism, which has had a few fringe benefits. Northern Europe has definitely figured out how to require paternity leave and how to have great free childcare and to figure out social policy that will allow people to say, “What if parenthood wasn't as much of a sacrifice? Would I have another kid?”

That's great. I wish we could have a lot of that here. I wish we had the social policy of Sweden, of Denmark, of Norway. But the impetus for these social policies, it always seems to be anchored in a racial anxiety that I have a big problem with.

BLAIR HODGES: It's important to keep that in mind as we promote progressive policies, to think about race. We need to be aware of the different intersections and be aware of where some of the ideas come from, too.

That's Lauren Sandler. We're talking about her book One and Only.

 

Only the Lonely – 27:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to talk about loneliness. This is what chapter two is about. Because some parents of only children might wonder whether they're dooming their child to loneliness if they don't have a little companion. I have to say, during COVID when things were shut down, we had two kids and they were able to be buddies.

They don't get along sometimes, but I have to say I saw that as a benefit during that time and I've heard from parents who said that time was difficult with an only child, maybe a little bit more than they anticipated, because there was an increased loneliness factor. That was a unique circumstance, though. So we can talk about that.

But talk more broadly about the worry of loneliness.

LAUREN SANDLER: Since you brought up COVID, Blair, it was brutal. It was brutal for everyone in different ways. But specifically around this question of an only child. In 2013 when I wrote this book, I wrote it in an era—this is part of the privilege I'm thinking about right now. Lots of different types of privilege, but the privilege of control. I wrote this in an era in which it felt like I am going to be able to determine how much my kid gets to be with other kids, how much they will be with chosen family members down the street, how much they'll be enrolled in lots of different after school things where they might not be with kids who they would choose, but they're going to learn, and I'm going to make sure there are sleepovers all the time. We go out of town with other families. All the things, all the things.

Then something very unexpected, to me—which in retrospect now feels naive. Something changed. And that was the pandemic. I think about this book, I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but this book is also very much about thinking about climate change and the carbon footprint of every child and really thinking about not just COVID, but of climate change. I live in New York where the skies were orange and filled with ash. I wore an n95 Mask outside but not inside. It was like reverse COVID.

Sam's friends were supposed to have high school graduation, and high school graduation was canceled and shut down and rescheduled because of this climate emergency. It felt like COVID flashbacks.

To me it was this notion of, increasingly things will be out of our control. We live on a planet where we have been hubristic in so many ways, and those ways have led us to this brink. But life on Earth right now is one in which there will be periods of time where it's not going to be business as usual. That is going to be really hard in many, many different ways.

If you are an only child under lockdown, that can be hard in different ways, and if that lockdown lasts for months or a year or more—man, we went through it. But we also still—again, privilege— were able to make choices that were maybe unexpected ones. Early on in the pandemic we bought this total wreck of a foreclosed house up in the mountains, like a murder house. We did it with friends, we did it with another family with the idea being, we are going to make this house livable and beautiful, and we're going to do it as a project with this other family.

One kid who's Sam's age, and her older brother, and we're all going to live as a unit and do something tough together, but do it as a larger chosen family. That was at a time when you couldn't walk down the street in New York City without a mask, but we could tent out under tarps in our animal-filled wreck of a house. I think I'd probably put this in the category of “supposedly fun things I'll never do again,” to quote David Foster Wallace.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you wear a t-shirt tuxedo?

LAUREN SANDLER: I'm going to go right online and find one of those immediately when we're done talking!

There are still choices to make, and honestly screentime is not the answer, but being able to have a way of talking face to face, if not in person with friends. There are all the ways in which kids who have siblings still stayed in constant touch with their friends during that time. Sam certainly did that too, but it was different.

Honestly, as a person who needed to keep working, needed to continue to be a professional person, I had a book that came out at the very beginning of the pandemic, I still had work I had to do. Having an only child in the house and a husband who is a photojournalist who was out covering the whole thing, it was like, I guess it's just the two of us now. I guess I am all the in-person support, the distraction, you name it, that this kid has got during a scary time.

I would say it was not easier with one child. I do not see it as just something in the rearview mirror. But as we get used to, unfortunately, these sorts of crises I think we can start to plan for them differently. There was the unexpectedness of COVID that I think made parenting an only child such a shock in so many ways.

BLAIR HODGES: You looked far and wide at research on the subject of loneliness. As a journalist you dug deep and spent time on this. You couldn't find research that showed only children were more lonely than anyone else on average. Loneliness didn't seem to be any sort of chronic issue for only children.

But you did find research that suggested only children built certain solitary skills. Solitude as a way to develop a “richness of self.” You can become more of your own friend, you can learn to be alone more, and so there are also some opportunities for growth and strength with an only child, and you say you experienced that yourself growing up as well.

LAUREN SANDLER: We live in a world that demonizes solitude, and especially children's solitude. As an only child I read a ton. That was really important. I had a rich, imaginary life, and yet you imagine the kid playing alone in a sandbox and feel sad for them and then feel angry at their parents for doing that to them. Yet maybe that kid alone in the sandbox is having this incredible experience!

Or maybe they want someone else to come play in the sandbox, and guess what? That's what playgrounds are for.

There's this other element of, it's hard as public spaces erode, as we bring what used to exist in the larger world, in the public square, into our own homes more. We're more backyard-oriented instead of playground-oriented, the places where those collisions can happen seem to be eroding. I think it's important we are intentional as citizens, as parents, that solitude is something that is chosen and respected, but also that the exciting collisions of unexpected relationships can exist out there.

That’s why I love raising a kid in New York. I love having a kid who's used to being on the subway with a million different people and who knows what conversations we'll strike up and what sort of adventures might happen? I do think the ability to just sit by yourself without a constant distraction and without some need for relationship outside yourself, it's an important part of becoming a human being.

Because solitude is also unavoidable and to have a strong primary relationship with yourself instead of always needing the presence of other people—relationships break up, or people don't live forever. There are all these different ways that, no matter how we structure our lives, we do end up being alone often.

 

Fear of Parental Loss – 35:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: I actually wanted to ask you about that because it seemed to me perhaps the most anxious you became in the entire book was when you talked about the anticipated loss of your parents as an only child. Am I right about that?

LAUREN SANDLER: You are so right. It's what I call the Greek tragedy of the only child. My parents were healthy when I wrote this book, and that is not necessarily the situation right now. This is something I am really sitting with in the moment.

And yet it is not unmanageable. I have a number of friends who have told me the real reason they feel like they had a second kid was so their kid would not be alone through their own demise, their own care, their own loss. I have a number of friends who are dealing with ill parents right now with a sibling who is a great partner for that. I also have friends who have a sibling who's not a great partner, where there's conflict.

There's research about this. It is going to be the closest residing female child who does the elder care, and probably the bulk of the resenting too. These things are not uncomplicated, but then my question is, so there will be this period of life and it will be hard. But do I make another person exist for that purpose? Is that a choice I make for my own life? For my own finances, for my own resources? Is that a choice I make for the planet?

If it feels unbearable then yes, that's a choice you make. But again, it's yet another one of these things, to ask questions. What is being idealized? What is being demonized? What is real? What is imaginary?

BLAIR HODGES: And a lot is left up to chance, even then.

LAUREN SANDLER: Totally.

 

High Achieving versus the Freedom to Fail – 37:13

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about achievement. Some parents say they choose to have one child because they think it'll give their child better overall possibilities and education, or maybe economically. Does the research bear that out? Did they tend to be more intellectually inclined? What did you find in your research?

LAUREN SANDLER: Only children and oldest children tend to be the highest achieving.

I'm saying the words "highest achieving" and wanting to do a little spit take afterwards. Gross, right? Whatever the hell that means. It is something that is measurable to researchers in a way that's like, "Oh my God, is this how I want to think about my kid?"

BLAIR HODGES: I imagine they set benchmarks, like how much salary they make, what level of education they get, these kind of things—which doesn't necessarily correlate with happiness or health.

LAUREN SANDLER: Totally. They're things I wish people thought about less, frankly. But there's this other element, I found this interesting, which is, only children are both oldest borns and youngest borns. The hallmarks of an oldest born is to be responsible, high-achieving, blah, blah, blah—

BLAIR HODGES: High expectations. Maybe more intense parenting.

LAUREN SANDLER: Exactly. It's often about the number of words that a parent will speak to a child. And then how that is halved once there's a second child.

BLAIR HODGES: If you have another one, they just don't talk at all to the youngest. [laughter]

LAUREN SANDLER: There's a tremendous amount of freedom in that. The research about youngest borns is they are the kids who have the freedom to be whoever the hell they want. They can rebel, they can self-direct in a totally different way. But because only children are both youngest born and oldest born, there tends to be this incredible sweet spot of having that more traditional high-achieving element while also being able to think a little bit more radically, which I find interesting.

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned “resource dilution,” this is the idea that there tends to be more resources when there's one child. More money, more parental attention, more time perhaps, and overall quality of relationships can be impacted according to how many resources you have to spend.

LAUREN SANDLER: That is the overall reason a lot of people who study this sort of thing think only children are better off, is because of resource dilution, and all the different—whatever "resource" means to you. Is it money, is it attention, is it energy?

Whatever you can devote becomes divided by each child. Which doesn't mean there aren't other ways to account for that, or that siblings don't give things to kids. I don't want to be essentialist about any of this. But those things are really real, and I feel it raising an only child. I'm very aware of how we are able to live with this kid in a way that Sam can experience things. Sam has traveled a lot. Sam has gotten to do a lot of cool things and meet a lot of cool people and live in a place where we would never be able to live otherwise. We're not as terrified about college as other people are. It goes on and on.

BLAIR HODGES: I also noticed you said only children tend to be wildcards. The research doesn't show necessarily there are definitely better outcomes or worse outcomes. It's case by case. Some people excel. Again, how we define excelling can change. Some people might have a smaller income but a happier life and they work less and that's how they wanted their life. So measuring things is difficult. You do mention the pressure that can be felt by an only child.

I’m thinking of writer and comedian John Hodgman here. He's a favorite podcaster of mine, The Judge John Hodgman Podcast, and he talks about choosing to have two children so his children would be able to “fail freely.” As though you won't feel this pressure to do everything for your parents. I know not every only child will, and it's funny because Hodgman himself is an only child and decided to have two, but what do you think about that idea of being able to freely fail?

LAUREN SANDLER: I love it. And I don't know that you have to have multiple children for that to happen. I mean, John Hodgman is a national treasure. He wrote his first child a letter upon the birth of his second child, basically saying, "Here's why I'm doing this." It's an incredibly charming piece of writing and, unsurprisingly, super smart. I also disagree with him. I think maybe it's about Hodgman's own parents not raising him to feel he could freely fail.

That said, my kid is so tough on themselves, like so much tougher than Justin and I are on Sam. In part because we are very intentional and aware about the pitfalls of raising an only child. I wrote a book about it! I spent time thinking about how intentional parents are about raising an only child, about how parents are so intentional about every different type of family situation.

Parents think about raising twins if they're going to have twins. Parents think about being in divided families if there's a divorce. By the same token, parenting an only child is its own thing. Justin and I tried hard not to shine that light too bright, not to put too much pressure. It's always a tough line to walk. We have found that no matter what we do, our kid is always tough on themselves and feels it deeply. Maybe Hodgman's right? 

BLAIR HODGES: That can be based on temperament, too. I've seen that happen sometimes where the oldest kid in the family might feel that kind of pressure.

 

Family Dynamics and Cocooning – 43:58

 

But family culture in general makes a big difference. You talk about this in chapter four where the types of marriage relationships can impact an only child. You talked about individuated marriages, enmeshed relationships, disengaged relationships. These types of relationships, how parents relate to each other and to the child, can have a big impact on that child's experience.

LAUREN SANDLER: It's huge. That's what your whole family is. For example, I have parents who have been madly in love with each other for fifty-three years. They are an enmeshed couple. They are the parents who never stop talking. One can be on the other side of the house and you'll just hear them yelling, "Jim!" Whatever is on Judy's mind is going to be yelled to whatever side of the house Jim is on.

We're also Jewish. These are people who all they want to do is travel together, talk to each other all the time. They're so about each other, which is so beautiful. But then, where do I fit in? I'm not saying they messed that up. It's just that's a powerful dynamic to grow up in, is feeling like there's your parents and then there's just little you.

In other families there are parents who can't stand each other and so there are all these alliances which are made with an only child. When there are siblings there's like "Kid World" and "Parent World." In a three or two-person family, all those things are intensified, the math is different. Because we don't really talk about how to parent an only child, we just say you shouldn't. It's not like there's a conversation that exists about best practices around this. It's intense. There's a psychologist who told me it was a very amplified way to live in a family, and that's a word that has really stuck with me.

BLAIR HODGES: There's this idea that only children for single parents can become substitute partners, and sometimes that can be healthy or unhealthy depending on the relationship, but there's an expectation of being more mature, being more of an adult because an older only parent needs a partner like that emotionally. Parents want to pay attention to those kinds of dynamics. You also mentioned an only child having to play mediator between parents who are battling each other and being stuck in that dynamic. Overall, you emphasize the importance of only children learning to self-differentiate, to be able to establish boundaries, but also have that connection. This is where you raise the concept of “cocooning.”

LAUREN SANDLER: Modernity is super isolating. I was certainly talking about this before, the way we have taken what would exist in public and very much brought it into our own homes. That certainly increased since the pandemic as well. Now we work from home. Now we don't go to movie theaters. We do all of these things that were some of the last vestiges of where we would be out in the world with other people. Just think about getting our groceries delivered, Amazon, you name it. We've receded from living in public and so we form this cocoon around our homes.

That can be cozy and sweet, but it also can be incredibly isolating. It can also be part of what gets amplified in these family dynamics. I also think it's part of what affects us as citizens who are less active and engaged than people would have been in prior periods.

It was great that mutual aid societies had a comeback during COVID, because that is actually how people used to live. We had a little moment where it was like, this matters again, the idea that you live in community outside your family is something hard to find. I live in Brooklyn. I live on a block where you'd think I know all my neighbors, and we're all playing stickball or pinochle, or whatever people used to do when the carts were coming by. But even here it's not like that. I think the more we cocoon, the more our social fabric frays, the more our involvement in citizenship frays and the more pressure it puts on a family to be everything to a kid.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. When you have that pressure to be everything to the kid, that's a good recipe for getting discouraged and feeling like you let someone down, or all of the negative side effects that come along with that. I appreciated that your book talks about how having only children really emphasizes the power of community.

You've mentioned this, doing the house thing during COVID, where you all went up with other people and worked together on that. Basically finding ways to plug into larger networks, soccer teams, and the parents at your kid's school. There are ways to connect and avoid that cocooning.

 

Parental Self-Actualization – 49:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's also look at parental self-actualization. This is something you focus on in chapters five and six. The question that comes up here is this: Are parents of only children more happy generally? This part stood out to me. I drew a little chart in the margin, a little graph based on what you said, which is you can chart one kid, and parental reported happiness levels are pretty high. You have another kid, it starts to dip. You have another kid, it starts to dip, it's dipped. You have another kid, it starts to go back up!

It's really interesting. Maybe that's because people that have that many kids are self-selected into genuinely enjoying that. But there's also this general pattern that happiness and well-being does tend to decline overall the more kids you tend to have, and then it goes back up again, which I didn't expect.

LAUREN SANDLER: I also think there were elements of self-reporting culture in here. The more children you tend to have—in America at least, but this is pretty true around the world—the more religious you tend to be. So the fact that that tracks, and if you feel you are fulfilling your commission, that you've been fruitful and you have multiplied as directed, that you have the family happiness that is supposed to look a certain way, you're probably going to report you're happy within all of that.

BLAIR HODGES: Maybe even less happy if you've only got two or three. Maybe there's that.

LAUREN SANDLER: Religiosity significantly declines as the number of children declines, so if you're someone like me who's a total atheist, and I've written a lot about evangelical culture—I'm even writing another book now. I've been very interested in gender and Islamic Sharia. I never intended to write a book like One and Only. I remember when I got pregnant I said to Justin, my husband, I was like, "My god, please do not let me be one of these women who has a baby and then just writes about having a baby all the time." I don't want to just write about motherhood. I write about war and religion, and then my joke is and then I became a mother and I realized it is war and religion. [laughter] That's very much why I wrote this book was to think about these questions.

If what your notion of happy adulthood looks like is having dinners out with friends, or going to the movies, going to rock shows, having more solitude—whatever it is, then that's something you're more likely to get to do if you just have one kid. If your notion of family happiness is I want the big scrum in the yard, and I want us all to walk into church and impress with the cohesiveness and confidence of our family, and I want to exist in a way that feels like maybe a past America, et cetera, then that's going to be how you're happy.

We can talk about this later on, but I do have a dear friend who is in this book in the environmental chapter who now has five children, as a total liberal, progressive, nonbeliever, daughter, only child of two environmental journalists, and her version of family happiness is to have five kids. There are always exceptions and I believe in those exceptions. I hate essentialism. I hate these generalities, and yet it's hard to report a book like this without being like, whoa, what does any of this actually mean? 

BLAIR HODGES: Another thing from this part of the book was where you talk about how people who are having only children are often delaying fertility results until later on, so they're having a kid when they're older. So they're usually seeing a bigger disparity between their more free life before they had so many obligations, and then how radically that changes. Whereas if you start having kids right away, you're not as aware of the difference of that free life. That was one point you bring up.

You also talk about how mothers or the female role tends to carry more of the household load right now, so self-actualization becomes more and more challenging the more children you have, or if you have children at all. This was a concern for your mom, as you pointed out, and for you.

 

The Invention of Family Time – 53:58

 

BLAIR HODGES: Then you also mentioned the rise of American family time, this idea that “family time” even exists, or we should dedicate this time to kid activities like going to the park or going on a bike ride or going to a movie that I wouldn't want to see if I didn't have kids—I saw the Super Mario movie and two thumbs heavily down other than the Jack Black song which was delightful. [laughter]

But there's this whole family time thing now. So when it comes to parental self-actualization, you do talk about how having more kids tends to require more self-sacrifice, or more leaning into, at least for a period of your life, sort of giving yourself over to it in a way that especially for women can lead to self-erasure and lead to putting dreams away and not fulfilling things you really wanted to.

LAUREN SANDLER: I mean, you said it. You want to write a follow up to my book? Because I feel like you just nailed it. [laughter] It used to be, and I think there are pluses and minuses to this, it used to be adults would live their adult lives and kids would have to deal with it. No one expected Betty Draper to be hanging out at Chuck-E Cheese, even though she was a stay-at-home mom. There's obviously been a whole industry that has completely exploded around things you spend money on, for your kid, with your kid, et cetera. That's a whole kid world and that increasingly is where parents spend their lives. That can be anything from some sort of activity to, I don't know, listening to Taylor Swift on repeat—nothing against the Swifties. I know and love many of them.

BLAIR HODGES: They're going to come for us. We're already getting emails and this episode isn't even out yet. [laughter]

LAUREN SANDLER: I have so much respect for Taylor Swift. I am so glad my kid was never obsessed with Taylor Swift. Someone asked me via text a few weeks ago if I wanted to spend $1300 on two extra Taylor Swift tickets they had and I was thinking “I'm so glad that there's like thirteen shows I actually want to go to with my kid because they have such good music taste.” I think that feeling that parents are going to live in kid world has really shifted things.

I have a really dear friend who has three kids and is always the only mother reading at the playground. People look at her like, "Why are you sitting on the bench with a book instead of engaging with your kid who's on the swings?" It's also not just that we live in those spaces, but we're supposed to be so fully present in those spaces. So what happens—

 

Fear of Regret – 56:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: My fear is am I going to look back on this and be like, "Dang it, I was reading a book when they wanted me to push them on a swing and now they don't want me to be around." That's my fear too. It's not just the societal judgment, but also the internalized view of, am I going to regret this?

LAUREN SANDLER: I totally relate to that. Last week I had cleared out three days to write. But you know what? I was alone with my kid before they went off to summer camp. I had this moment of like, Sam actually wants to hang out with me right now. How much more time is going to feel like this? 

I think in the past I might have felt like these are my dedicated writing days, I have to work, I have to think, I have to make the thing. Instead it was sort of like, do you want to go to a thrift store? You want to go just take a really long walk and talk? Or do you want to make some banana bread? Just giving myself over to that felt like that stuff is delicious.

I think so much of how we parent is about anticipating regret. What if we didn't? What if we did what we wanted to do, and sometimes that means baking banana bread, and sometimes that means being like I'm going to go over here and be an adult on my own or with my friends or with my partner, and everything's going to be fine. What if we weren't ruled by such anxiety and such fear and then could more freely choose instead of having those shoulds, those moments of dread encroaching on how we are on a day-to-day basis.

BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me of a passage from the end of the book here where you write, "While my motherhood is fluid, sometimes consuming, other times more hands off, it's my most constant, permanent purpose. That's the reality I chose for myself. I'm being a good mother, not just when I'm running around the playground or making dinner, but also when I'm staring at the ocean or yelling at a newspaper editorial. By thriving as the person I want to be, I'm teaching my child that they can too."

LAUREN SANDLER: I love that you read that. That to me is the entire purpose of this book. It's also the entire purpose of my parenting. I couldn't believe in it more.

It's really interesting to have written that when Sam was three, and now they're fifteen. The book is ten years old, but publishing takes a while. And I reflect back now on how those choices and way of being has influenced my kid. In retrospect, I do think I'm a better parent for it. I do think I have a kid who sees the world not just in terms of expectations of what a mother should be, or a family should be, who I think is capable of self-actualizing in ways that blow my mind all the time, like really have developed their own tastes and interests and politics and live those things out loud all the time. And can also be deep with themselves, have their own tastes, have this rich inner life.

I think allowing myself to have a rich inner life, allowing myself to have my own tastes in politics and front-load those things in how I was witnessed as a mother by my own kid, and also having a partner who has done this himself but also is very much an equal partner, very much an equal parent, a lot of how we have lived very much reverses norms in what a family can look like. I think it has made a teenager who I think is quite incredible. Who knows? If I had been a very different person would Sam be who they are right now? If the math had been different, but we never know, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Just take credit for the good stuff. I'll tell you what's nature. Nature is everything bad they do, nurture is everything good they do. It's very simple. [laughter]

LAUREN SANDLER: So true.

 

Gender Roles in Parenthood - 1:00:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioning Justin is really helpful there because I want to say how incredibly gendered this ends up being. Being raised as a male, a cis heterosexual guy, a white guy in particular, what you're describing just seemed my birthright, honestly. This idea of being able to develop a rich inner life and matter and develop myself.

Now, there are other pressures, though, being a provider, being economically successful. So there are other things that come along with toxic masculinity, but there's also a sense of, I'm kind of expected to do that. I have to pay a lot of attention.

I have not done a good enough job over time with my own partner at doing enough of that. We've prioritized each other's education, so we've done it in some ways, but that's definitely been a big goal of mine, to do better. COVID is what brought things to a head in realizing the imbalances that existed there that were based on gender expectations.

LAUREN SANDLER: I think COVID was such an awakening for so many families like this. When there was an imbalance all of a sudden it was like, "Whoa, you've been doing this stuff all along?" COVID was interesting in this regard in my family in sort of a reversed way. Justin's always been the only dad on the birthday party email lists. Justin has always done a lot of the things that tend to be coded "mom" things—which is absurd they're coded "mom" things. Anyone can write an email, anyone can be on the text thread, anyone can go buy the birthday present, all of these things. It's not baked into my womb somehow. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: It's genetic!

LAUREN SANDLER: Yes, of course, of course. [laughter]

But we've always had, and not in this like spreadsheet, let's check off who does what kind of way, there are some things that are more typically gendered that have broken down where I tend to cook more and he does the taxes, because he doesn't hate doing the taxes. I mean, he does, but I hate it more and I would do it worse. I love to cook. They're these things that in some ways seem typical, but they're actually just based on what we want to do.

But then COVID hit, and he is a news photographer. So all of a sudden, we were in New York City living in, the only thing that I can compare it to is when we were both in Iraq together living in a conflict region. It was that sort of breaking terrifying news. He had to be out all the time covering it. Then Black Lives Matter protests started after George Floyd was murdered. Then it was another election. All of a sudden, we went from being this family where it's like, we're both journalists, we share in the equal parenting, etc. to like, you have to be out all the time and we have this kid who needs me, and what's going to happen?

All of a sudden I found myself in a role I had worked so hard not to be in. He didn't see it as much as I needed him to, in part because he was dealing with the trauma of covering mass graves in the Bronx and morgue trucks in Brooklyn. He was in something really deep, but it was hard once we were in those gendered categories to break out of them.

I've had this conversation with a number of friends where we thought we had worked this out and then COVID happened and we all became stay at home moms, which we've never chosen to be, and we couldn't get out of those patterns. Even three years later, a number of us still feel the residue of it. It lays bare how deeply baked in a lot of these things are and how even when we're super intentional there are always extenuating factors about how you can't plan for everything and you can feel super proud of yourself for breaking the mold, but the mold can often still be there.

 

Is it the Economy – 1:04:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: It's still there because it's also bigger than what happens in individual couples and individual relationships. Your chapter on economics has a lot to say about this.

A lot of people say financial considerations are behind their decision to have one child. The United States culturally claims to love big families, but also provides some of the least social supports to make them possible of any similar country. You talked about the fact that parents on average in the United States are working fifteen hours a day if you factor in what they're doing at work and then childcare when they get home. We have the longest work week. We don't have guaranteed parental leave—very little for women, practically none for men.

The biggest thing during COVID economically was they did this child tax credit and it was a huge boon. People used it for their kids and their families and for immediate circumstances. Of course we're going to take that away. The larger economy puts in these boxes of expectations and then provides so few social supports to even make it possible for them to have a big family.

If you do have a big family, like my dad, he was hardly home. He wanted a stay-at-home partner, so my mom stayed home, and he was at work all the time. I barely saw the man. He died when I was fifteen. A lot of my relationship with him was robbed because of these societal expectations.

So this chapter was eye opening.

LAUREN SANDLER: There are so many women who end up stepping out of the marketplace because childcare costs are so exorbitant that they can't rationalize having a work life.

BLAIR HODGES: You end up paying to have a work life oftentimes.

LAUREN SANDLER: I stopped teaching at NYU because I was making less than I would have to pay for childcare. To be a professor at an internationally renowned university that has entire centers around gender studies, workplace family dynamics, it's like, let's helm all of these studies but we're not actually going to pay you to do your work.

Honestly, that's the best-case scenario. The opportunity costs and then the way those decisions amount up, the way women's earning power erodes, everyone knows what all of this is, and every other country looks at us and thinks we live in madness.

The fact that childcare costs are what they are and that they are not supported by the state, the fact that we are one of three countries, the other ones are Papa New Guinea, and now I'm forgetting the third, but it's small and far away and not considered to be an industrialized country. We rank with them in terms of family policy.

Yet, of course, we have an entire government that talks about family values all the time and actually doesn't value families, it turns out. What they value is women doing free labor and having no role in the marketplace, no space for political voice, and no earning power. When you look at the divorce rate, it's like, okay, the fact we expect families to stay together is a fallacy for half the people. What happens for the people who have given up their careers and their bank account? Where are we left? It's a bad scene.

BLAIR HODGES: You just look at the tax credits you can get for children. The amount of money you get won't pay for childcare for a month out of the entire year. It's almost comical how little support people receive. You even suggest you might have even considered having more kids if these things weren't a factor, like if you didn't have to worry about economic factors and childcare costs, and all of these things. That was a factor for you in deciding to have an only child.

LAUREN SANDLER: I think it's a factor for everyone. We have a lot of people in this country who are really struggling financially because they decided they couldn't have an only child, and they have needed to basically go broke to house and feed and buy soccer uniforms and get a bigger car and do all the things that is involved in having larger families.

It used to be, as you mentioned earlier in this episode, having large families allowed you to survive. They were your insurance policy. You needed to work the farm. There was a high child mortality rate. Then all of that changed. All of a sudden, children were something that cost you and not earned something.

There are a lot of demographers and sociologists who I have found to be generally men and generally have women doing a lot of their own childcare at home who talk about if we were to look at children the same way we look at major appliances, what sort of economic model blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's like that's not how anyone actually makes these choices.

We make them based on desire. We make them based on fear. We make them based on anxiety. We make them based on cultural expectations. We make them hopefully based on love. And within that complicated stew we try to make our best choices. Why don't we have a world that's trying to support those best choices?

BLAIR HODGES: You point out this idea of the gray tsunami, the idea that as a population grows older and there are fewer young people to support them, we're going to hit this real problem where we're going to need more support for older folks, and there won't be babies. But as you point out, people aren't having babies to boost the economy, they're not having babies to think of these macro issues. They're really basing it on what they desire, and also what they can do based on their finances.

Your book is a strong advocate for increasing social support for parents, for families in ways that would boost everyone. Everyone has been a child at some point. People that grow up and lead single lives, this affects them just as much as it does for parents that have children. Having better social supports isn't just for parents and people that decide to have children. It's for everybody, because everybody's been a child.

LAUREN SANDLER: Vote for Blair! Hear, hear. [laughter] That's the platform we need.

The notion that all of a sudden everything would cost more, this fear of taxation, this fear of governmental support, it really isn't born out in terms of any economic model. It makes me crazy.

 

Environmental Concerns – 1:11:30

 

BLAIR HODGES: You're going to love the next topic then, because we're going to talk about the environment now, which is a totally relaxed and chill topic here. But it's the idea a lot of people are questioning whether they should have kids at all because of the impacts on the environment, and especially in the United States, you point out one child consumes as much as thirty children in a developing country. Having children is a way to generate waste, it's a way that can exacerbate climate change, and all of these different things.

Back in the seventies there was this environmentalist movement, Zero Population. It was this idea that we need to stop having kids, zero population. Let's just stop. We're breeding ourselves into unsustainability.

That didn't actually stick around very long. You still will hear that specter raised maybe by more conservative voices, but you will find few liberals that are preaching zero population now. I wondered what you thought about that, because that idea has just sort of gone away in the environmental movement.

LAUREN SANDLER: I think about this a lot. I talk about it a lot still. If you're not like Exxon, if you're not Nissan or Amazon, some major corporation, let's say you're just a human being. Let's just say you're not a massive, world burning operation. You're a person.

BLAIR HODGES: But I do use plastic straws sometimes. [laughter]

LAUREN SANDLER: I mean, I hate how LED bulbs look and I am not surrounded by them right now. We have made so much of it about our individual choices. If you recycle, that'll save the planet. It's not working that way.

However, the most effective thing you can do as an individual is to have fewer children. If you look at the carbon footprint of every kid, specifically every American kid, it's really kind of terrifying. The notion of having fewer children to try to save the planet is something that just feels anathema to people. For good reason, right? There were really bad things that came out of these ideas.

Like in China, and China was doing this around questions of starvation and climate change, in fact they've pushed global pollution to a bad place, but the one child policy, as draconian as anything in human history, the way it's actually been enacted, when we look at forced sterilization in India and Puerto Rico—

BLAIR HODGES: It's going to tend to fall on minorities, on oppressed and marginalized communities.

LAUREN SANDLER: Exactly. “Poor brown people should not have babies. Wealthier white people should have as many as possible.”

It all gets back to this nativist argument, but ideas of population and of fertility as it relates to global environmental crisis, they feel bad to people. Babies feel good. No babies feels bad. I get that. All I ever want is an eighteen-month old chonker on my hip. I just wanted to eat Sam's cheeks when they were little. Now I'll be walking down the street and whisper to Sam, "I want to eat that baby's face." It's gross. It's weird. I love a baby. What can I tell you? But babies make people feel good. No babies make people feel bad.

But no one is saying no babies. What I am saying, as someone who really wants to bring this back into the discourse is, instead of our default being multiple children, instead of our philosophical question being is it a bad thing to raise just one? Why are we not saying if you want to parent, fine, have a kid, have that experience, but it's really got to be a high bar to opt into any children at this point. We should opt into having children, there's no question about it. But I just feel like the philosophical onus needs to be reversed.

We need to really consider the global cost and not just the cost to our lives as individuals, as people who want to seek pleasure and freedom of each individual child, instead of saying “what a terrible thing you've done by having one kid.” This has happened. We've tipped over the edge here.

I wrote this book in 2013, when the UN estimates were radically different than they are right now. I had not imagined the smoke I would be breathing in New York City, from wildfires in Canada just a couple of weeks ago. We look at California, it's all very, very real.

BLAIR HODGES: One fear is, the more people believe that, the more who are going to be more likely to vote for politicians that are concerned about climate change. There's a self-selecting problem we might face where people who are willing to do confront climate change are going to be demographically lesser and out-voted at that point. [Ed. note: I was trying to say people who are not worried about the climate impact of having children may choose to have more children than people who are worried about the climate impact of having children, possibly impacting the future voting populace, who would be more likely to vote for politicians who downplay climate dangers.]

LAUREN SANDLER: That's a real thing. There's a book that came out a little bit before I started recording this one called, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth. This balance between religiosity and deep political conservatism, which also means something different than it did ten years ago, and family size, it's a very real thing.

I remember when I was reporting my first book on the young Evangelical right, and a since disgraced pastor named Mark Driscoll on Father's Day was saying, "My goal is to repopulate Seattle. We have a really low fertility rate here in Seattle and as Evangelicals we can totally shift those numbers and own this city." This is a real thing. And yet I do not believe we should be having children to tip that balance.

BLAIR HODGES: An arms race child, basically.

LAUREN SANDLER: It kind of feels that way. I mentioned this friend of mine, the daughter of two environmental journalists who was an only child and now has five—one, two, three, four, five kids. I remember having these arguments with her. Her name is Justine. She's the best. I love her. I remember talking to her when she had just had two kids where she said, “I want to have more people in the world who are going to make the world a beautiful, loving, inclusive place.”

Now she has five of them. I don't know if all five of them are going to carry her politics. She doesn't either. But that's the choice she made. I do know she owns a very big house and a number of cars and things I think her parents probably have to hold their tongue about. That said, she has made a wonderful community. She's someone I adore and venerate in terms of her values.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book does a good job of this, of talking about the broad strokes but then zooming in and showing the variety and then trying to look at the principles underneath that. You really want people to be politically engaged, to be thinking about what we can do collectively for the environment and what we can do individually. Not saying any parent has to or has to not have a particular number of kids, but giving people views and options. You even say if you have a lot of kids that can consume so much time and energy that you can't be as politically engaged as you want. Or if you have a lot of kids, they might be politically engaged and offset that. There's a lot of things you give people to chew on in this book.

It is called One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One by Lauren Sandler. I haven't mentioned a bunch of this stuff yet, Lauren, but I just want to let people know you're an award-winning journalist there in Brooklyn and your other books include Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth movement, and a book called This is All I Got: A Mother's Search for Home. You've published stuff all over the place, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, and you've been on staff at NPR where you worked on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. You're currently collaborating on a Broadway musical about homelessness and all sorts of stuff. Of course, you're also a mom of one kid and partner of Justin and a friend of many.

I have a few more questions before we go. But I do want to just pause for a second and say, Lauren, how much I enjoy talking to you and how much I enjoy your work. So much of you comes out in the stuff you write. It's like I've spent a lot of time with you recently just by reading your words.

LAUREN SANDLER: Blair, thank you so much. As you know, I'm a super fan of yours. I have the great privilege of talking to a lot of people about a lot of things and talking about my books. It's something I really love to do. But you are absolutely one of my favorite people to talk to about the things I care about. I'm so glad you have another podcast. I will come on anything you ever ask me to do!

BLAIR HODGES:: Oh, thank you. That means a lot!

LAUREN SANDLER: Totally genuine.

 

Learning From Different Family Models – 1:21:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. We've got two questions before we go. The first one is this: I'm interested in any advice you've learned as a parent of a single child, some tips you've got, or tricks you've got from families that have multiple kids. What are some parenting hacks? To use really crappy, sort of cliche language. What have you learned from families that have more than one kids? And what do you think families have learned from you, looking at a family that has an only child? What are some back and forth things we learn from each other that you've noticed?

LAUREN SANDLER: That is interesting. That is something I do not know I've thought about before. It's a really interesting question. I actually don't think I have an answer to it—

BLAIR HODGES: That's fine. I'll offer this, then. One thing I learned from your book is from the part about solitude. Having more than one kid, I don't know that my partner and I have spent enough time cultivating solitude moments or opportunities for our kids. We've talked about this off and on, that we need to have separate time with our kids. So they have one on one time with their parents and stuff. Looking at the value of solitude, and the inner life that can be cultivated made me think about that more and encouraged me to try to find some more opportunities for my kids to be able to do that. Especially because COVID became a pressure cooker for them. Especially for my oldest, who bears the brunt of that. I don't have a single kid, I'm not a parent of an only child, but this is something that a parent of an only child has taught me that I'm going to bring home.

LAUREN SANDLER: I love that. This idea of how we cultivate parenting and experience outside of what our family model is, is a really interesting question. I think we tend to think of kids outside our immediate family or our extended family as the ones who you're supposed to get along with. The ones who are your favorite. They're your friends, so they're the ones who everything should be good with. If you don't like them any more then fine, we'll move on, et cetera.

I think that's something I have really learned through spending a lot of time with families with multiple kids and, frankly, reporting this book, is the importance of conflict and competition, and the importance of needing to stick it out when you decide you're done with someone. Maybe having friends who don't always feel like they're your friends. They might feel a little bit more like family sometimes. I think about this family we have this house with, Sam and Zoey go through periods where sometimes they're really tight and sometimes they can't stand each other. But they still have to show up at this house together. You know what I mean? We have a number of people in our lives who obviously we chose because we liked them, but you go through periods with people, especially if you're a kid who sometimes will go through phases in different ways than other kids.

BLAIR HODGES: You're trying out identities.

LAUREN SANDLER: Totally. Sam is a nonbinary, super political, indie rock kid. Some of Sam's former friends Sam would call a little “basic,” or maybe aren't as politically engaged or seem a little more normie. You're going to still love them and figure out where you're going next and where they're going next.

Or sometimes some of Sam's friends are way more punk rock and make more, shall we say, adventurous decisions, than Sam does and it's like that might be really weird. You're going to have to get a little comfortable with that and see where that goes. I think notions of chosen family feel like either they're idyllic or they aren't, but I think cultivating chosen family in friendships for only children is essential.

 

Navigating Gender Identities – 1:25:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's perfect. One more little footnote question that will connect with other episodes, I wonder if you have any advice for parents as they're learning more about their own kids who are developing their identities, maybe discovering nonbinary identities and working with that. If you have any advice for folks.

One thing, for example, is changing a name. People can take that personal, like you chose that name, you love that name. And here's a child making different decisions. I just wonder if you have any advice for parents who are dealing with this.

LAUREN SANDLER: I have a whole episode on this if you want. I don't want to sugarcoat it. I'm someone who has studied and reported on gender forever and is very, very invested in shifting norms, very invested in the process of self-actualizing for anyone and living life according to what you believe and who you are. So in many ways, I was set up to have a kid who was going to live out all of those things.

It still has been a process. The idea of the name you give a kid all of a sudden being a dead name, that's tricky. Adjusting to pronouns, that's tricky. Needing to explain this to people, that's tricky. Teaching a kid to love their body and then having them have a complicated relationship with that body, it's tricky.

All this stuff, it's complicated. It's complicated even for someone who is unusually well equipped for all of this. I think you really need to believe your kid and you need to accept that your kid might be on a bit of a journey and that these things aren't fixed and be able to roll with that.

Sometimes things will swing farther than they're going to land. Some of this stuff is developmental. There's a process here and when your kid tells you “This is who I am and this is what matters to me,” you've got to trust them and believe it, and I think you've got to let that unknown be a part of it. That's something that has been a real process for me.

I also personally, and if you ever want to have a much longer conversation about this—having a kid who's assigned female at birth, who's a super feminist, then reject the female about themselves and go through a process around that, that's been really complicated for me.

BLAIR HODGES: It seems to resonate with the themes of your book, which you're advocating for more privacy so that people aren't always intruding on other people's lives. "When are you going to have more kids?" You're advocating for more understanding and curiosity about people who want to have more kids, people who want to have fewer kids, or people that want to have no kids. You're advocating for openness, curiosity, being flexible, being open to other people. You're advocating for more choice so people can feel freer to make the decisions that fit with them, which would require better social supports as well. So you're also advocating for that.

I think all of those things also resonate with some of the advocacy and activism that surrounds gender identity and sexuality as well. A lot of this comes back to these same ideas.

LAUREN SANDLER: Hear, hear. I'm advocating for people to think critically and question their own biases and embrace their own desires. That is a huge part of why I wrote this book. If anything that might be the most significant reason why I wrote this book. I think those themes carry over into how we self-actualize in any way, what all of our choices are, who we believe we are and who we can be, and why the world makes us question those things.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 1:29:36

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's wrap it up with regrets, challenges, and surprises. You can speak to one, two, or all three of these, and it's just about anything you'd change about the book today, what you found most challenging about writing and reporting it, and perhaps an example of something you learned that's carried with you now having done the project.

LAUREN SANDLER: I would say living through COVID definitely made me want to write a new foreword or post script about being the parent of an only child in lockdown. The arrogance that I could control the world, at least to a greater extent, is something I have certainly reflected on.

There must have been like an element of this, why did I write this book? This book is something that is often shelved in the parenting section. I tend to write about big cultural politics and big tough issues. It's something I have felt ambivalent about regarding this book ever since I proposed it. Who am I as a writer writing this book? What are my values? What is the purpose of this? On the one hand, I feel the packaging of this book is something that is a parenting book, is something that has really slipped the questions and the politics into readers' hands and minds that they would maybe not discover on their own. I feel like in terms of movement building, I'm proud of that.

On the other hand, I wonder if there's a different version of this book which is much less about only children and much more about the larger social questions if this could have been weighted in a different way. I often tell people when I talk about book publishing that it's all heartbreak and compromise. This is a book that went from being much more of a screed to much more of a "Hey, Moms and Dads!" I think there's power in that, and I wonder about those choices in retrospect.

BLAIR HODGES: That's fascinating, because I think—I don't want to contradict or erase any of that, but I do want to say I think one of the biggest powers of the book is the personal angle. Because you write it from a place of personal experience it really packs a punch. When you can be perspectival like that, I do think there's power there. I wish we could all be everything to everybody and be the big superhero that just writes the book that changes the world. But I think there needs to be a lot of books to try to change the world and I really value the one you wrote. I really do.

LAUREN SANDLER: I really appreciate that. Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. The book is called One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One. Lauren Sandler joined us to talk about it today. Lauren, this has been so much fun and I really appreciate the extra time you spent as well. Thanks for doing it.

LAUREN SANDLER: I love talking to you, Blair. I will come back anytime to talk about anything.

 

Outro – 1:32:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. Have you by the way recommended the show to a friend yet? Send them a link. Send this one to all of your friends who are single children, or all your friends who have like twelve siblings. Either way, I really think it'd be interesting to them.

Thanks to Camille Messick who edited the transcript for this episode. You can find transcripts of every episode at the website familyproclamations.org, and there's a lot more to come on Relationscapes.

If you're enjoying the show, please, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. I read the reviews. I cherish them all. Like this review from FanoftheSun.

It says, "I really enjoy the variety of books and subjects that have been covered so far, I've been able to incorporate some valuable aspects from each episode into my personal life. Blair's a fantastic interviewer, he knows the material, he asks engaging questions, he digs deep, he is also able to give listeners a well-rounded interview."

Thank you, FanoftheSun. Thanks for taking time to write a review. Please—if you haven't done that yet, it means a lot to me.

As always, thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges and I'll see you next time.

 

[End]

 

Note: Transcripts are lightly edited for readability.