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Welcome to familywisdom.com, a website dedicated to informing and inspiring couples and families. Each week you will find a new article, story or essay about parenting, marriage or life. Suggestions for articles and questions to Ellen Terich are welcome. You can contact her at e.terich1@verizon.net |
MOTHERS OF ONE; MOTHERS OF MANY 2006-03-19 Families come in many sizes. A mother with one child often wonders if life would be better for her child if he or she had siblings, while a mother of many children sometimes longs for the imagined quiet of the home of an only child. I have frequently written about how difficult it is to raise two or more children. Having to divide one's time between siblings, mediate fights, create an atmosphere of fairness, keep up with chores and shopping, and in that whole mix find time for oneself and one's marriage, all are tasks that the mother of more than one child has to master, or more realistically, muddle through. But while mothers with more than one child may suffer more parenting stresses than mothers of only children, the children who have siblings actually have built-in advantages that only children don't. This may seem counterintuitive in that the extra time a mother can give to an only child is usually seen as advantageous to the child. Don't children always benefit when mothers can attend to their needs more readily, enroll them in lessons and sports, help them with their homework, and volunteer at their schools? Perhaps, but only children also lose out on lessons in patience, accountability, sharing, and empathy, things that are often naturally learned in larger families. In fact, the very things that drive moms of several children batty are the things that can teach children how to get along with others. Those of us who are mothers know that our most natural tendency is to nurture, and to respond to the needs or wants of a child sooner rather than later. And every mother knows that, given a child's ability to whine, nag and beg until she comes to make things better, it preserves her sanity to respond quickly and cut off the drama. Mothers of only children are freer to do this than mothers who must attend to several children. When I'm visiting my daughter, for example, she is continually asking her five year old to wait while she takes her two year old to the bathroom, or asking her two year old to wait while she comforts her crying infant. These things teach children patience and what psychologists call the ability to delay gratification. Mothers also help children learn to be accountable for their behavior when they have to scold one sibling who has hurt another. Older siblings also learn to share as their younger siblings are lured by possessions such as multi-colored legos or glittery princess dolls. Of course, wise moms allow older siblings to keep some of their more precious or fragile things away from younger siblings, but they also encourage their older children to share some of their more sturdy toys with the little ones. Younger siblings also learn to share, both from the example of their big brothers and sisters and from the reality that by the time they are born, nothing belongs exclusively to them anyway. Their clothes and their toys are often hand-me-downs. Finally, it is simply impractical for moms of siblings to continually enforce private property laws in the home. Empathy is another quality that can more naturally emerge in families with multiple children. While siblings love to fight and frequently seem to have no compassion for each other, it is also true that siblings stick together when one is hurt by someone outside the family. Recently Sean and Grace were playing with a couple of Sean's friends when the three boys became very loud and frightened Grace. Sean became protective and told his mother he didn't want anyone to "hurt my best friend Grace." It is by living each day with his sister, knowing who she is and thus being able to put himself in her shoes, that Sean is developing the quality of empathy. Only children, on the other hand, have mothers that are more capable of attending to them right away. While it may not always be true, it is more likely that the mother of an only child can respond more immediately to her child's request or need for attention than a mother who is nursing the younger sibling, or changing a diaper, or settling a sibling dispute. This means an only child won't learn patience as effortlessly as he would within a larger family. The mother of an only child, therefore, will have to be careful not to be as accommodating as her instincts might lead her to be. I have known some wonderful mothers of only children who knew they needed to deliberately create the circumstances in which their children could learn the lessons that happen almost automatically in larger families. To that end, they frequently invited other children over to play, offered to babysit for relatives or friends who had younger children, encouraged their children to "share" by giving some of their older toys to charity, took their children to visit patients at convalescent hospitals, and simply made a determined effort not to fulfill their child's every wish, nor always take their child's side in disputes with other children. There are advantages and disadvantages to mothering only children as there are to mothering two or more children. In families with many children, there may be more chaos and frustration for mom, but the children (usually) learn natural lessons of patience, delayed gratification, accountability, sharing and empathy. In families with only children, it is more work for mothers to teach some life lessons, but there is usually (though not always) more order and serenity as well as more individual time between mother and child. From my perspective, mothering is the toughest and the most rewarding job in the world, no matter how few or how many children you have. |