Large Family or Only Child? What Parents Who've Lived Both Told Us

This site never polled parents of large families — it was never that kind of site. So this isn’t a numbers piece like What Parents of Only Children Are Actually Afraid Of. It’s something we think is just as honest: years of firsthand testimony sitting in our forum archive, written by parents who grew up in big families, ended up with one child, grew up as an only child themselves, or somehow lived both sides. Read enough of it and the “which is better” debate stops looking like two teams and starts looking like a lot of individual, contradictory, honest stories.

Myth: siblings guarantee closeness

The assumption behind most “only children are missing out” arguments is that siblings are an automatic bond. The parents who’d actually lived it disagreed, repeatedly.

One reader, the oldest of three girls, put it plainly: “having siblings does not automatically mean a blissful childhood as I really clashed with my second sister but got along well with the youngest.” Another wrote about her husband, who came from what she called “a really big family”: “He doesn’t keep in touch with his brothers (all of them live far away). They don’t get together even for Christmas… He remembers his best times as an only child, the brothers came after he turned 8.”

Maybe the most quoted-worthy line in the whole archive, from a reader weighing both experiences at once: “my close friend hasn’t seen his sister in 15 years… one of my own brothers lives a mere half hour from me and i see him two, three times a year… RELATIONSHIPS are what are important in a person’s life. friends CAN give more than family sometimes. there is no black and white in this debate. only multiple shades of grey.”

Myth: only children never learn to handle conflict

The other classic argument for siblings is that fighting over toys teaches conflict resolution you can’t get any other way. A reader who actually grew up in a large family wasn’t buying it: “I grew up in a large family and had ample opportunities to ‘fight’ with siblings… Believe me, many adults that grew up with siblings still hate confrontation and struggle with arguing in a healthy way. We have struggles just like anyone else would.”

The part usually left out of the “only children are fine” argument

It would be easy to stack this article entirely with quotes defending only-child families — there are plenty in the archive to choose from. But some of the most honest posts came from people admitting the opposite.

One mother, describing her 19-year-old daughter: “She has always felt she missed out on the big family celebrations, that she didn’t get excited about Christmas because she didn’t have siblings to get excited with, that family things were always very flat.” Another, who came from a large family herself, expected a second child and didn’t get one, and was candid about the adjustment: “having an only child has proved harder as you are consciously mindful of their need for play-mates at home, on days out, family holidays.”

And one reader described being an only child through neglect rather than choice — genuinely alone as a kid, teaching herself to talk out loud for company into adulthood — who came out the other side wanting the opposite for her own life: “I want a large family, adopting 5-6 kids hopefully. I want a home full of kids, animals, people running all over the place, organized chaos.” That’s not a story that fits neatly into either side’s talking points, and we’re not going to pretend it does.

What actually seemed to matter more than headcount

Reading through years of these posts, family size wasn’t the thing that predicted whether someone felt short-changed. Closeness did — and it didn’t require a sibling to get there. One mother wrote about leaning on her own sisters’ kids as substitute siblings for her son: “We are lucky that I come from a large close knit extended family, so he has lots of little kids to grow up with, I know he will never be alone or lonely.” Another described building an entire informal playdate network from scratch for her daughter, calling it “a long process. It takes time and effort.”

And a large-family parent, reflecting on his own worries, made the point that resource anxiety isn’t unique to smaller families either: he “worries that they will not have as much financially as other kids and worries that he doesn’t [have] enough quality time with each child.” Big families invent their own version of the same fear.

One adult only child, tired of being stereotyped by parents raising two kids in the suburbs, put the whole debate in perspective: “most of these people are not raising large families — most families I know have 2 children. Do they really think they would be living totally differently if they only had one child? I think not.”

Where this leaves us

We’re not going to manufacture a tidy verdict out of testimony that doesn’t have one. What we can say: neither family size guaranteed the outcome people assumed it would. Some only children felt the gap their whole lives; others never noticed it was missing. Some big-family parents built the closeness the stereotype promises; others admitted, in writing, that it never really showed up. If you’re in the middle of that decision yourself, Should I Have Another Child? and Only Child: Family When Not By Choice go further into it — and Does Your Only Child Fit the Stereotype? has more on why the stereotypes on both sides tend to fall apart under scrutiny.

Every quote above is a real reader of this site, pulled verbatim from our forum archive, lightly edited only for length. Nobody was paid or prompted to say any of it.