Only Children

[sufi]

remarkably no hitlers or napoleons yet though.

being in the middle (i read somewhere) gives you WILL TO POWER... so i guess they have better things to do ...
(altho tbh i'm not 100% certain hitler & bonaparte were both in the category... )

My parents don't like to admit this, but they treated him completely differently than they did me and he lived by another set of (much more lenient) rules.

i've gotta say that i never heard anyone say 'o i was always favoritised', either here or elsewhere,
it's the most subjective situation, surely?

 

[polystyle]

being in the middle (i read somewhere) gives you WILL TO POWER... so i guess they have better things to do ...
(altho tbh i'm not 100% certain hitler & bonaparte were both in the category... )

i've gotta say that i never heard anyone say 'o i was always favoritised', either here or elsewhere,
it's the most subjective situation, surely?

OK, i'll take that Sufi !

Didn't have either of those in our family,
more then made up by me 'Step mom' and her crew that got brought into our tribe while I was between Elementary School and Jr High.
Real mom passed too early...

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

it depends on how I count 'em as:

my mom & stepdad have a daughter, my half-sister, 3 1/2 yrs younger, who I grew up with.

then my dad & his 2nd wife have 6 kids who are, variously, my half-brothers or sisters. Orthodox Jews, breed like rabbits, u know the score. they all live in Israel & I've never met any of them (tho I plan to go & do so someday).

I should probably just answer 2 but I'm going to say 3 or more, b/c, why not.

 

[polystyle]

Hear you Padraig US,
Once our two families er, 'got together' everything scrambled.
Reality included.

 

[nomadthethird]

Hmmm... I dunno. They always made sure we had the same stuff. I remember if there was a cake, my mum would have one of us cut it down the middle and take the smallest slice. Of course it would be the most accurate 50/50 cut you'd ever seen, lol. We were just very different kids, I'd be in my room reading and she'd be on the front lawn with at least 10 mates shouting their heads off.

Right. I'm not really talking about that sort of thing, more about gender role assignment and role assignment more generally (x is the "smart one" y is the "social one" for example). Most parents try to show love to their children in equal measure as far as that goes. What I was thinking of is unconscious patterns.

My theory isn't really panning out I suppose but so far only a couple of the people I had in mind as only children have actually posted on here. Also, this is a very small sample of Dissensians. 10 or 12 out of how many? Too small.

 

[STN]

My theory isn't really panning out I suppose but so far only a couple of the people I had in mind as only children have actually posted on here. Also, this is a very small sample of Dissensians. 10 or 12 out of how many?

name names!

 

[nomadthethird]

Nomad it looks like your theory isn't really panning out.
12 of the 14 people who've taken this poll so far have siblings.

4 out of 22 are only children, which is just about the same proportion as the general pop.

 

[nomadthethird]

i've gotta say that i never heard anyone say 'o i was always favoritised', either here or elsewhere,
it's the most subjective situation, surely?

I've had plenty of discussions about this with my brother, he generally agrees that the rules and expectations were very different for us. It's not that my parents liked him better, but that's how a small child will tend to perceive those kinds of discrepancies--as favoritism...(and, as a matter of fact, I would say in many areas I was the 'favored' one--including intelligence and academics, where my brother was constantly compared to me and told he would never measure up.)

There's an article about birth order in the NY Times this week, it was interesting on the scientific side of this, the difficulties of testing for possible differences, the myths surrounding birth order and gender (e.g. boys and younger siblings always speak later).

name names!

Haha. Can I invoke "trade secrets" here?

 

[STN]

Haha. Can I invoke "trade secrets" here?

Of course, though as the youngest in my family, my first impulse is to hurl myself at your feet and shriek 'pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?' before bursting into tears.

 

[empty mirror]

On a darker note, the prospect of being alone to look after both my parents as they (hopefully not, but, realisitcally, probably) increased ill health of old age, is one of the only things that wakes me up in the night, shivering.

i am an only child, i think. have a possible half-brother that my father (RIP) disavowed since his (the child's) mother was a prostitute that my father left upon finding her in bed with two men (at once). w/r/t being the sole caretaker for an ailing parent, i've done that. it is as bad as you think.

debating whether or not to have a second child, myself. i am rather inclined to. i like the idea of children creating their own little society. i especially like the notion of twins creating their own language and such. so yeah, i don't miss not having siblings (how could i?) and i think it made me rather resourceful and creative; but i would like to see how the other half lives, so to speak----i'd like to be a gulliver of sorts, waking up bound hand and foot by little homunculi.

 

[Mr BoShambles]

Eldest of 3. It's a good arrangement.

Same as ^^.

Had another brother who died aged 3. I was 5 at the time. Consequently there is a large-ish age gap between me and my brother (6 years diff) and my sister (7 years). Works great these days but there were times when i was younger that I felt a little resentful of my siblings for taking my parents attention away. They were difficult times as we were all dealing with our grief in different ways. But despite this my folks felt that it was important for me to have siblings to grow up with and for us to have a "whole" family. They did the right thing and nuff respect to them for that.

 

[hucks]

Middle of 3. I think my older brother would say I was the golden child but it never felt that there were any particular favourites to me.

Growing up me and my younger brother were really tight and formed a (wholly pointless) alliance against the oldest, despite the age gap being bigger (I'm two years younger than my older bro, three older than my younger bro)

Also my mum definitely wanted a girl by the time son number three came around.

 

[nomadthethird]

To be honest what I was thinking was that most of the really music/media obsessed people I know are only children. They also have a sense of being special/having a special destiny a lot of the time, ime. Which can be a good thing.

But it looks like a lot of 3s here...

 

[poetix]

Older brother of a younger sister.

 

[Tentative Andy]

1 brother, 5 years younger than me. He's actually going to be moving into a flat with me in the coming weeks, I reckon it'll be either wonderful or terrible..
Parents were quite a bit more lenient with him, and he got lots of stuff that I was denied the first time round, like more access to television/games consoles, sugary and other foods that kids like, etc. But on the other hand, my mum always gave him a bit of a hard time about school and would compare him unfavourably to me in terms of exams and so forth, 'why can't you be more like your brother?' etc. Which I thought was kind of bad craic, esp as I still reckon that in general my brother is smarter than me, he's just less focused on book-knowledge.

 

[mistersloane]

I was the youngest of six - by 11 years - but the only child of my mother and my father, they had been married previously, mother had three, father adopted two, so I was kindof both an only child and the dowel of a new family unit.

Father, mother and one sister now deceased. I'm increasingly glad that my parents died early (see baboon's comment), I see alot of people now just starting to deal with the fact that their parents are getting old, and it must be really weird, even though it's a fact of life I guess. Actually maybe it is weird, maybe its a fact of being in now-ness.

My nephew makes really cool music, see 'Hollow Tree' on here

http://www.myspace.com/thecellardoorsound

 

[nomadthethird]

Polystyle and Sloane-- "blended families" are a growing segment now, I want to read more about the dynamics of these from a theoretical pov.

My brother and I are "irish twins" and all but if I count my cousins, with whom I grew up as if they were siblings, I have 18 brothers and sisters. (And the younger ones have all found me on social networking sites. No more comments about freebasing and orgies, then.) I suppose that counts as a blended family, the whole immigrant thing where you all live on the same block and stay in the bubble.

Zhao is an only child. Amirite?

 

[luka]

Oldest of two. But one of the youngest in the year at school - late August birthday, which is something I never thought about until recently.

This is me too, exactly. i think this does make a difference.
i also have a step sister, who i don't know very well becasue she had her own flat, and a step brother i am very close too. all younger than me to varying degrees.
i got my brother at about 16 and it was great. i always wanted a brother.
my sister is a big acheiver type, cambridge etc, lots of qualifications. frighteningly well adjusted.

i have the weight of the world on my shoulders.

 

[...]

And yet, somehow, you manage to cope.

 

[luka]

Craner is an only shild!