de-thronement

One Child or Fifteen (and counting..)?

When ever there are article’s about only children in the newspapers or programmes about people who have many children; like the recent programme  ‘Fifteen Kids and Counting’ on  Channel 4, it givs rise to a great deal of media coverage e.g. news papers such as the Guardian and Telegraph. I then often get phone calls from journalists writing an article or I am asked to give an opinion on local radio somewhere in the country.  What I find interesting is some of the parallels that arise in the choice of having only one child compared to choosing to have many children. One of the most common questions I am asked on local radio is why do some people choose to have only one child? Well there are, of course, a number of reasons but for many there was no actual choice. This may be because of fertility issues, death of a [...]

Read more…

The negative side of being special: How a lack of de-thronement, by a sibling, can affect us in adulthood.

All children need to feel special particularly from their parents. In fact one of the advantages of being brought up an only child is often considered to be the extra attention you receive. The assumption is that the more attention the better and this can lead the only child to feel particularly ‘special’. I mean special in the old fashioned sense of a child who is very much loved and nurtured. However the special child can also be the child whose parent’s are blind to behaviours the child acquires as a result of their attention, which are not useful as the child moves from childhood to adolescence and finally to adulthood. With no siblings to counteract the sense of specialness that an only child experiences within the family, it can be a rude awakening to enter the real world where people are not going to treat you in this way. [...]

Read more…