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  3. The Only Child: Revealing the Myths According to the Gut

The Only Child: Revealing the Myths According to the Gut

游客2024-05-04  15
问题                     The Only Child: Revealing the Myths
    According to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading reproductive-health research organization, 64% of women polled said that with the economy the way it is, they couldn’t afford to have a baby now. Forty-four percent said they plan to reduce or delay their childbearing—again, because of the economy. Meanwhile, friends and relatives continue to urge parents of only children to have another baby. There are certain time-honored reasons for having that baby. And family size can be dictated by biology as much as by psychology. But the entrenched (根深蒂固的)aversion to stopping at one mainly amounts to a century-old public-relations issue. Single children are perceived as spoiled, selfish, solitary misfits. No parents want that for their kid. Since the 1970s, however, studies devoted to understanding the personality characteristics of only children have debunked (揭穿)that idea.
A Stereotype Is Born
    The image of the lonely only—or at least the legitimizing of that idea—was the work of one man, Granville Stanley Hall. About 120 years ago, Hall established one of the first American psychology-research labs and was a leader of the child-study movement. But what he is most known for today is supervising the 1896 study "Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children", which described a series of only-child oddballs as permanent misfits. For decades, academics and advice columnists alike spread his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that children with siblings possessed. "Being an only child is a disease in itself," he claimed.
    Later generations of scholars tried to correct the record, but their findings never filtered into popular parenting discourse. Meanwhile, the "peculiar" only children—"overprivileged, royally autonomous.. .self-centred, indifferent and overly intellectual", as sociologist Judith Blake describes them in her 1989 book Family Size and Achievement.
    No one has done more to disprove Hall’s stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas. An only child herself and the mother of one, Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren’t measurably different from other kids— except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. No one, Falbo says, has published research that can demonstrate any truth behind the stereotype of the only child as lonely, selfish and maladjusted. Falbo later completed a second quantitative review of more than 200 personality studies. By and large, she found that the personalities of only children were indistinguishable from their peers with siblings.
Undiluted (未稀释的)Resources
    Part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there’s no "dilution of resources", as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid, who gets all the dance classes, piano lessons and prep courses, as well as all their parents’ attention. That attention, researchers have noticed, leads to not just higher SAT scores but also higher self-esteem.
    But if only children do get it all, doesn’t that mean there’s truth to the stereotype that they’re overindulged? Psychologist Carl Pickhardt tells us human behavior cannot be entirely reduced to numbers on a questionnaire. "There’s no question that only children are highly indulged and highly protected, but that doesn’t mean the stereotype is true," he says, at least not based on his four decades of seeing singletons— both kids and adults—unburden themselves in his office. "You’ve been given more attention and nurturing to develop yourself. But that’s not the same thing as being selfish. On balance, that level of parental involvement is a good thing. All that attention is the energy for your self-esteem and achievement."
    Researchers have analyzed the numbers from years of standardized tests like the National Merit Scholarship exam to measure verbal and mathematical abilities. In each category, only children performed better than children from larger families. Furthermore, they’re expected to. Falbo tells her class that parents have significantly higher expectations of academic achievement and attainment when they have just one kid. But Pickhardt notes that parental expectations are merely part of the pressure only children can feel. Much of it is self-imposed, he says, because of their notions of themselves as performing at a peer level with their parents.
Will It Make Us Happier?
    As parents, we tend to ask ourselves two questions when we talk with our partners about having more children. First, will it make our kid happier? And then, will it make us happier?
    University of Pennsylvania demography professor Samuel Preston was conducting research to help him predict the future of fertility, and the discovery that surprised him most was that parents felt so madly in love with their first child, they wanted a second. That’s an unusual finding. Talk to parents and you’ll often hear that they opt to have another because they think it will be better for the child they already have. Not many say they do it for themselves, no matter how much they may love the experience of parenting.
    A 2007 survey found that at a rate of 3 to 1, people believe the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual happiness and fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children". There must be some balance between the joy our kids give us and the sacrifices we make to care for them. Social scientists have speculated since the 1970s that singletons offer the rich experience of parenting without the consuming efforts that multiple children add: all the wonder and giggles but with leftover energy for conversation, reading and so on. The research of Hans-Peter Kohler, a population sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, gives weight to that idea. In his analysis of a survey of 35 000 Danish twins, women with one child said they were more satisfied with their lives than women with none or more than one. As Kohler told me, "At face value, you should say that you’ll stop at one child to maximize your subjective well being."
Ascent of the Onlies?
    A paper by Joshua Goldstein, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, represents one of many exacerbating anxiety about the current low-fertility "crisis" that has European economists and policy wonks (用功而严肃的人)in a panic. In the early 1960s, Europe represented 20% of the world’s population. About a century later, those numbers are projected to drop to about 7.5%, despite the rise in minority and immigrant birthrates. Between now and 2030, demographers forecast the EU will have lost 13 million—or almost 4%—of people ages 15 to 64. Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will increase by more than 40%. Questions arise: Who will make up the workforce? Who will care for the disproportionate number of elderly citizens?
    The latter is a question felt even more acutely on a personal level—particularly in the microcosm of the single-child family. A 2001 study found that one of the most consistent self-perceived challenges for only children was concern about being the sole caretaker for aging parents.
    Of course, having siblings is no guarantee that the burden of elder care will be shared equally or even shared at all. But imagining this emotionally loaded inevitability impels many people I know to have more kids, especially if they can afford them. [br] According to a 2001 study, only children consistently perceive an immense challenge of______
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答案 being the sole caretaker for aging parents
解析 同义转述题。文章最后一个小标题由欧洲生育率的降低引出人们对未来老年人赡养问题的担忧，尤其是独生子女要面临巨大的挑战，因为他们是唯一能照顾年迈父母的人。根据原文可以填入答案。
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