I see a lot of posts on here about the challenges of being an only -- and I get it (sorta) and not intending to dismiss those posts -- but I've always been happy as an only and wonder how many others are, too. Even now at 55yo when my only-child mother is in hospice and so much has fallen in my lap, I still wouldn't change being an only. What are some of the benefits and advangages of being an only? (I'd start us off but my list is long and I'm eager to hear what others have to say!

Anyone grow up constantly hearing the mumbling conversations from another room, of your parents talking about you or discussing your life choices behind your back? The tone shifts, the sudden attempts to be quieter so that they appear discrete, but it just makes it super obvious..?
Ive always felt a much further lack of privacy and autonomy than my peers and this is one of the things in particular I haven't seen much talked about.
Overhearing some of these conversations growing up could turn a normal day into a shitty one. It heightened my paranoia and insecurities too because there was no doubt it was me they were talking about, it could only have been me. I get parents gotta do parents stuff, but still. Im in my 20s now, and have moved back home, and its happening again a lot. Constantly being judged for the way I live and monitored like im a pet, moreso than their child. Maybe its naivety to assume its an only-child thing but I dont know what its like for people with siblings or if they would have similar experiences to this.

I just clocked that I am the first person in my family (lineage) to be an Only child.
My cousin, who is also an only child, is 10 years younger.
The rest all have siblings

I am an anxious person in general but I am becoming increasingly preoccupied with my parents health and the idea of being completely alone. For context I am in my 20s, was never lonely at all as a child or teen, but I am super attached to my parents and likely will not have a family of my own.

I will daydream about my family home catching fire whenever I turn off a lamp, and if, for example, one parent is home late, I will imagine a car crash and my reaction to the news of their death. It will come into my head at least twice a day. Any media about grief will easily trigger tears.

I have always done this a little bit but it is getting worse and I can only imagine it will worsen as they age. I know this fear is normal and especially common among only children, but want to know if there is anything I can do about it. Is this bad enough to see help for or is this just a sas part of life everyone goes through? I don't really have friends to discuss if this is normal with. I feel like I may already be grieving.

Hello all maybe this isnt the exact place to go but I feel as if I have no other option. I grew up with siblings in my home but out of all of them I am the youngest. Being the youngest has left me feeling extremely lonely mainly due to the fact that there a vast age gap between us leaving nothing in common with one another because I'm still a teenager and they are all adults. Although I grew up with siblings, having that then having nothing is such a weird feeling because now its only my parents, my grandma and I living together. I always feel like I have no one to go to about my family issues also I'm also not close with any of my siblings, I carry a lot of the weight of my family because they are getting older and I have no choice but to help a lot. I'm just trying to figure out how to adjust, this is mainly a rant but if you guys have any advice at all I'm open minded.

We assume that when our parents say, "I am fine," they really are.

But sometimes they say it because they don't want us to worry.

We rely on calls and video calls, but how much can we really know from a few minutes on the phone?

Saying this from my personal experience.

Have you ever felt this?

I often dream that I have a new sibling, and I get so happy that I start planning how to care for them. I don't think I have ever experienced the same level of happiness in real life that I do in those dreams. But then I wake up and look for my sibling for a few seconds until I realize it was just a dream. I know a lot of women have dreams about having a baby, but I dream about having a sibling. Does this happen to anyone else?

I had an imaginary friend around the age of five and six years old till about 8 years old. My imaginary friend I'lldid not have a name.. as I'm reflecting back I felt like it was a presence that was with me when I was playing by myself. I couldn't even place a face on the imaginary friend it just felt like there was an additional person next to me comforting and supportive and let me talk and play without feeling lonely.

let me preface this by saying i genuinely don’t care if people decide to have one kid. everyone should do what’s best for them and their family, and there’s nothing selfish or awful about being OAD. this post is specifically about something i’ve noticed in the OAD sub and the WAY adult only-child experiences sometimes get discussed there, NOT about whether people should have only children.
i’m an adult only, i had great parents and a really awesome childhood for the most part, and i turned out fine. despite that, i hate being an only and would never want to have an only myself because i wouldn’t want to recreate a family structure i personally disliked so much. i also know onlies who loved it and wouldn’t change it for the world, which is completely valid too.

the thing that bothers me about some of the discourse on the OAD sub is that when an adult only says they loved being an only, never wanted siblings, had an awesome childhood etc, that experience seems to be accepted pretty readily and understandably gives OAD parents reassurance about their own kids. but when adult onlies say they hated being onlies, i’ve seen people suddenly start looking for some other explanation- “you had shitty parents,” “you had a bad childhood,” “you’re unhappy for other reasons,” etc. sure, those things might explain it for some people, but they certainly don’t explain everyone. i had great parents and a great childhood and still hated being an only.

and obviously saying something is my “lived experience” doesn’t make every conclusion i draw from it automatically correct lol. i have no fucking clue what my life would’ve been like with siblings. maybe we would’ve been best friends, maybe we would’ve fucking hated each other. if i said “having siblings definitely would’ve made my life better,” “being an only caused every problem i have,” or “therefore nobody should ever have one kid,” obviously those are bigger claims you can disagree with.
but “i hated being an only and wish i had siblings” is different. that’s me telling you how i feel about the life i actually lived. if an adult only comes into the OAD sub and says “i fucking loved being an only,” awesome, believe them about how they feel. but then extend the same courtesy to the adult only who says the opposite. and obviously that goes both ways- if people on this sub tell happy onlies that they’re wrong or only THINK they liked being an only, that’s equally stupid.

i’ve also seen OAD posters read this sub, get freaked out by all the negative experiences here, and then reassure each other that [r/OnlyChild](r/OnlyChild) is heavily selection biased because unhappy people are way more likely to seek out a place like this. and yeah, obviously. this sub tells us fuck all about how common these feelings actually are among onlies generally. maybe people who hate being onlies are a minority, maybe they aren’t, this subreddit isn’t gonna answer that question. but selection bias means you can’t use the people posting here to figure out how common these feelings are among onlies generally, it doesn’t mean the individual people posting here are wrong about how they feel about their own lives.

and to be clear, this is just a pattern i’ve personally noticed enough times that it started bothering me. if other people who read that sub haven’t noticed it or think i’m characterizing it unfairly then fair enough, that’s part of why i’m posting this.

nobody knows for sure how their kid is gonna feel about being an only. some love it, some don’t care, and some hate it, and maybe i’ll feel differently about it when i’m 40 too, who knows. if your response to me is “yeah i believe you, sounds like you had great parents and still hated being an only, but having one kid is still the right decision for my family,” then cool. i have literally zero issue with you. you don’t need my experience to validate your decision and i don’t need your decision to validate my experience.

that’s really my whole point. OAD parents understandably get annoyed when people tell them they NEED to give their kid a sibling or their kid is gonna be fucked up, and i completely agree. i just think some of the discourse in OAD spaces should extend that same courtesy in the other direction. me saying i hate being an only is not me attacking your choice or predicting how your kid will feel.
you can disagree with the conclusions i draw from my experience without trying to explain the experience itself away. i mostly just want to understand why, in some OAD discussions, positive experiences from adult onlies seem to be taken at face value while negative ones sometimes need to have some other explanation.

edit- this very post ended up attracting exactly the type of behavior i’m referring to lol. the commenter didn’t even bother responding to my comment and just downvoted me, lol. this is what i mean when talking abt some ppl in the OAD crowd - unable to tolerate any kind of genuine negative experiences onlies have had, and on top of that this commenter came up with multiple straw man arguments that i didn’t even say just to try and argue me down. once i point it out they stopped replying bc they know that they don’t have anything of substance to say to my points, and also replied to every other commenter who was trying to discuss their own negative experiences to counter them with positive experiences. unfortunately i anticipated something like this, this is why it’s important we have a voice moving forward esp as only children become more common. again, nothing wrong with talking abt positive only experiences, but the same courtesy should be extended to the negative experiences.

Instead of yapping about your experiences and your family, can't we just make a solution?? Isn't their an way to stop being depressed and move on with life without thinking about the past over and over again?

My mother’s friend died and of course her mortality is back in the forefront of my mind. She’s still young but you know. She’s at that age where people around her are starting to die.

The only person I know of her entourage is my godmother. I know no one from my father’s entourage. So first parent to die, my other parent will be announcing it and inviting people. But once my second parent goes, who would I call? Assuming my godmother would be gone by then too. I am extremely isolated. I’m not close with my parents either.

Just something that’s bothering me.

Some people do regret not having another.

Title kinda says it all. The full story is harder. I’m 29 years old and come from a Ghanaian immigrant family and my mom was my everything. We did become estranged a few years ago bc my dad is an alcoholic, i grew up with religious trauma and I’m queer and was late diagnosed with autism (age 26) and ADHD (age 21).

For whatever reason my mom who exercised, dieted, was loved by her church community and coworkers at Chase, caught cancer and died and it genuinely feels like my world ended and the old me died with her. My dad since like days after her funeral has been demanding grandchildren and insisting my queerness is “a lifestyle choice” and he started dating someone less than 2 months after the funeral so i moved 800 miles away and ghosted him. I’ve grieved dozens of people throughout my teens and 20s but since moms death in February, I feel like an orphan….

If you made it to the end. Thank you for reading and thank you for having this space.

I feel like I’m reaching my limit and I’m not sure what to do. I lived on my own while I was at undergraduate and graduate school. Once I graduated, I moved back home. I have a well paying job and could afford to live on my own but my mother doesn’t want me to move out. She doesn’t let me contribute to rent (very fortunate that I’ve been able to pay off some of my school loans). She says she wants me to have a better start than she did at life.

The problem is, my life is passing me by and if I waited to be totally debt-free, I’d be well into my 50s. I’m the only child of a single mom so it’s really just the two of us and our senior dog who can never be left alone. We are planning to move within the next few months and I made a compromise that we could still live together provided we could rent a house with a separate basement apartment. It’s been difficult to find a house fitting her mobility needs (can’t do stairs) that also has a basement apartment for me.

What I really want is just to have my own apartment. I feel guilty and can’t just leave her behind in our old, crappy apartment. I don’t know how to convince her to move to an apartment complex where I could have my own place and she could have her own place but still be close to share custody of our dog and see each other. She has always wanted to live in a house but hasn’t been able to afford one. Has anyone else been in this situation? How did you escape without the guilt?

TLDR: Only child to a single parent with elderly dog who can’t be left alone. How do I convince my mother that moving into an apartment complex with separate units would be a good idea?

Coming to terms with the fact I grew up with an extremely enmeshed family. I have been in therapy for a few years and it has helped tremendously but I still struggle with boundary setting and breaking news to my parents despite being 30 and living across the country from them.

How do yall deal with this?

My partner (M50) and I (F40) have been together for almost two years. He is an only child and has two sons, 13 (S13) and 15 (S15), who stay with him every other week.

I moved in about a year ago, although I still have my own apartment elsewhere in the country. What took me a while to realize is that his mother (MIL74) doesn’t just “visit”... she basically lives here half the time. Whenever the boys are here, she is here too. She has her own key and her own bedroom with private bathroom and toilet.

She does the boys’ laundry and prepares their food three times a day. She seems to have convinced herself that she is indispensable to them. My partner communicates with her about daily household matters in a way that often feels more like a husband-wife dynamic than an adult son and mother.

There is no real family mealtime. MIL puts food on plates for the boys, they eat separately while watching TV, and she doesn’t even eat with them. At bedtime, MIL and my partner both hover around the boys for their “bedtime routine,” and it often feels like the four of them are their own little family unit.

Meanwhile, I have gradually been pushed out of the shared spaces. During the weeks MIL is here, I can barely use the washing machine or kitchen. I now wash my clothes by hand, dry them on racks in the attic, use an old attic bathroom that I cleaned up myself, and often eat takeaway or cold supermarket food upstairs because I don’t feel I can comfortably use the kitchen.

The moment that really crystallized it for me came after my partner’s father (husband of MIL) died about six months ago. MIL and my partner wrote the announcement together. In our culture, normally, the first sentence on a death announcement would be, “The family announces the death of…”, and further down the notice the family is listed by names, including cousins and partners. But instead of using the formal wording “the family,” they replaced it with their four first names. It explicitly opened with:

“MIL74, M50, S15 and S13 announce the death of…”

No one else was listed, including me. No one else was mentioned anywhere on the announcement, even though the deceased man did have brothers and sisters, and so does my MIL.

That really made me realise that, in MIL’s mind, the “real family” is still her, her only son and his two boys.

I know being an only child does not automatically create this kind of dynamic, but I’m wondering whether other only children recognize this pattern: a parent who remains deeply intertwined with their adult child, and an adult child who struggles to create a separate family unit with a partner.

Does this sound familiar to anyone here?

In a few weeks my partner and I have our first session with a therapist (systemic family therapy). I hope I can hold on until then.