So you think you've got pressure? Try being an only child. Then add to that the fact that your parents can't have any more children – BY LAW.
Robert Siegel from NPR spent some time with an only child in China, before the devastating earthquake. The piece goes a long way towards confirming the stereotype of the overworked Asian child and parents who push them to study non-stop. "Like other Chinese high school students, she typically rises at 6:30 a.m., hits the books at 7:30 a.m. and doesn't knock off until 9:30 p.m." Sounds fun.
Another component of only-childness is indulging certain desires, at least in the case of this particular 17 year-old girl. When Luo Meng turned 17, she did what she refers to as a "Barbie shoot," creating a photo album of pics that would probably cause parents to flip if they had been taken from Miley Cyrus' myspace page.
So this kid works hard, she plays hard. But it's mostly work -- at least it is at school. Here's a line from the parent of a 10-year-old in China: "If you want to guarantee the quality of children, then you shouldn't have too many births…Children here don't have a very happy childhood." The parent goes on to say that "childhood is hard work," but at home, kids have it easy. "Mainly because they're the only one, their parents will do most of the chores for them…So comparing their generation to ours, their living skills are very weak." Work all day at school, come home and put your feet up. Hey, not bad! Sounds like there's not too much more pressure being the only kid, at least not as described here. And there are some benefits, like no chores.
It got me thinking: there are single-sex schools in the United States. What if there were an only-child school? Is the only-child experience that much different from the sibling experience? At one particular private music school in China, all "300 students are only children." I wonder if that shared experience makes any difference to the kids.
image: NPR.org
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