John Garvey
Every year around this time, I go away with my three brothers to play golf for an extended weekend. Next to Christmas, it is my favorite time of the year. We have taken on greater family and professional responsibilities. Still, in more than 20 years, not one of us has missed our golf trip. It is an important commitment.
The principal attraction is not the golf — although we do all love to play and compete. The reason I love it so much is that, outside of my marriage, my closest friends in the world are my brothers. (My sisters too, but they don’t play golf.)
For five days, we talk about work, family and faith. We can laugh and share our problems. We do an inventory of our children and their successes or issues. Each of us is godfather to a number of nieces and nephews.
I thought about these family connections recently when I read in the report of the National Center for Health Statistics that the U.S. birthrate had declined for the sixth year in a row. American women now have, on average, 1.86 babies over the course of their lives. For college graduates, the number is lower.
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We’re not yet in a class with Japan (1.4 births per woman), Poland (1.33) or South Korea (1.25), but all of us are below the rate (about 2.1) necessary for population replacement. Most developed nations now worry about not having enough young people to support their aging populations.
But an overlooked aspect of the proliferation of one-child families is the effect that a solitary childhood has on children. Imagine a society, not very different from our own, where every child is an only child — no brothers or sisters. Their children, one generation later, would have no cousins, uncles or aunts. How might their perspective on life be different?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in No. 1657 that “the home is the first school of Christian life.” My siblings were my classmates in that school. Our parents taught us the Ten Commandments together — and as brothers and sisters we also broke some of them together and learned hard lessons.
I don’t mean to attach undue moral valence to family size. Let’s not forget that Jesus was an only child. And there are lots of only children in my circle of friends who learned the lessons of Christian life better than I did.
But on an extended scale, the proliferation of the one-child household is surely changing society. Children with no siblings will never share a bedroom or bathroom. Their educational, emotional and material needs and desires get priority at home. Will they find it hard to adjust when they move out and cease to be the center of the universe?
In South Korea last summer, Pope Francis warned young Catholics and their parents about selfish competition and the increasing “idolatry of wealth, power and pleasure.” In that country (and elsewhere), increasing prosperity has led to declining birth rates. This is in one sense odd — parents with more disposable income lavish it on fewer children.
Children in South Korea (and elsewhere) might be happier with fewer things, less pressure and more relatives.
Sometimes the competition becomes intense when my brothers and I compete for the Garvey Cup. But even then, good humor formed by a shared childhood governs our interactions. It never fails to remind me of how important we all were to one another growing up, and still are. It is hard to imagine a world without brotherly love.
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Garvey is the president of The Catholic University of America in Washington.
There are many reasons why a husband and wife have only one child. I was raised with 5 brothers and 3 sisters; my husband with a brother and a sister. Being the second oldest of this family, I had the pleasure of helping raise these children. I was so hands on with the youngest, my mother rarely got to change his diaper. Because of my deep love of children, I decided to enter the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. As much as I loved teaching and having these children wrap themselves around me at recess etc., I knew I was missing something and longed for a family of my own. After years of prayer, and with God’s blessing, I left the convent. After 5 years of praying for my soulmate, I met my husband. I was 35 years old at this time. We married when I was 38 and my husband was 40. Shortly after we married, my doctor discovered that I had fibroid tumors. Surgery was necessary. I remember clearly my doctor coming to my room and saying “i don’t know who you know up there, but if I had been in any other hospital, I would have had to have a hysterectomy”. For someone who wanted a family as much as I wanted one, I was devastated. Life goes on and I became pregnant only to suffer a miscarriage. More devastation and fear that was my only chance to become a mother. God blessed my husband and I 2 years later with a wonderful son. I was 40 and my husband was 42. Because I was high risk maternity, we traveled every 2 weeks to University of Pennsylvania hospital. All we prayed for was a healthy child but whatever our child was we were going to love it (we did not want to know the sex). We prayed that our child would bring something positive into this world. He has. He was such an easy child to raise. My husband and I are so proud of the man that he has become. He is 26 now. We did nothing to prevent a pregnancy after our son was born but to this day we are so thankful to have been blessed with our “only” child.
There were many people who looked upon us as being selfish while they had been blessed with a larger family. One of my son’s teachers had five children and did not look kindly upon “only” children. To this I say do not judge these children or parents and treat them differently because they are “only”. For the reason they are “onlys”, has not been revealed to you.
And today, with my son off on his own, I work as a nanny bringing so much love to the children I am blessed to take care of on a daily basis. In the past 11 years I have taken care of 2 boys form different families, a set of triplets, a set of twin girls and another set of twin girls that I care for every day. I also do children’s liturgy at our church teaching upwards of 30 little ones every Sunday.
My gift to love God’s children is always at work. I am blessed.
My son has cousins and aunts and uncles and his children may not have aunts an uncles but they will have second cousins. My son has so many good people surrounding him and I am sure he will make sure that his children do also.
We never know why a family has an “only” child but God does.
We’re already seeing the fruits of the “great experiment” with limiting size of families to one child — China. Several recent articles, the titles of which I can’t presently get my hands on, discuss loneliness being expressed among college-age students from one-child families in China who don’t have the “luxury” of relationships with cousins, because there aren’t any cousins. There is also a great economic effect being felt from one-child families where there aren’t enough “replacements” by younger workers to support the aging population and those who have died. How silly we humans are to honestly believe that we know better than God!