What Parents of Only Children Are Actually Afraid Of
Between 2008 and 2024, readers of this site cast 59,910 votes across nine anonymous polls about raising an only child — no prize, no login required, nobody paid to be here. Nobody moderated the results into a tidier story afterward, either: this article is that raw data, unedited, arriving more than a decade late.
The most interesting finding wasn’t the one we expected.
The single biggest worry isn’t loneliness — it’s what happens later
We asked parents directly: what worries you about having an only child? They could pick as many as applied. 5,808 people answered, casting 13,018 votes across six options:
| Worry | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| No siblings | 2,861 | 22.0% |
| Loneliness | 2,791 | 21.4% |
| What happens after we die? | 2,459 | 18.9% |
| What happens as we age? | 2,036 | 15.6% |
| No playmates | 1,636 | 12.6% |
| Acquiring social skills | 1,235 | 9.5% |
“No siblings” edges out “loneliness” as the single most-picked option — close enough to call a tie. But group the two options about mortality and aging together, and they outweigh either of those: 4,495 votes, over a third of everything cast in this poll, went to some version of what happens to my child when I’m not around to help anymore.
That’s a different anxiety than the one most “only child” articles are written about. It’s not really about whether your child has a playmate on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s about who they’ll call when something goes wrong at 60. We wrote about that specific fear years ago — see Only Child With Aging Parents — but the poll suggests it deserved to be the headline, not a footnote.
Who was answering
- 92.9% identified as mothers (4,693 of 5,052 respondents to “I’m the—”); 7.1% fathers.
- The largest single age bracket was 34–38 years old (27.5%), and 70.5% of all respondents fell somewhere in their 30s or early 40s.
- 74.9% described their household as middle-class or upper-middle-class.
- Their kids were mostly young: 62.6% of respondents had an only child age 5 or under at the time they voted.
- The only-child gender split was close to even — 51.8% girls, 48.2% boys.
None of that is a scientific sample — it’s whoever found this site through search and felt like clicking a poll. But it’s a consistent, self-selected picture of the same kind of parent, repeated across nearly two decades and tens of thousands of votes, which is its own kind of signal.
It usually wasn’t a medical decision — it was a choice
The other assumption worth checking: that most only-child families ended up that way because they had no other option. We asked why, allowing multiple reasons, and 6,021 people answered:
| Reason | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Wanted it that way | 1,491 | 17.3% |
| Infertility | 1,286 | 14.9% |
| Spouse didn’t want another | 1,041 | 12.1% |
| Financial | 1,018 | 11.8% |
| Mother’s age | 963 | 11.2% |
| Other medical reason | 764 | 8.9% |
| Strained relationship with spouse | 516 | 6.0% |
| Been postponing | 494 | 5.7% |
| Other | 435 | 5.0% |
| Career | 402 | 4.7% |
| Single parent | 210 | 2.4% |
“Wanted it that way” is the single most-picked reason. Grouped together, medical reasons (infertility plus “other medical reason”) edge it out at 23.8% — so it’s not that circumstance doesn’t matter, it clearly does for a large share of respondents. But choice was at least as common a story as necessity, which cuts against the usual framing that an only child is something that happens to a family rather than something a family decided. If you’re wrestling with that decision yourself, Should I Have Another Child? and Only Child: Family When Not By Choice go into both sides of it.
The “spoiled only child” stereotype doesn’t hold up in the numbers
We also asked parents to describe their only child’s actual behavior around sharing — not an opinion question, an observation one. 5,172 people answered:
| Behavior | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Goes either way | 2,257 | 43.6% |
| Eager to share | 1,735 | 33.5% |
| Reluctant to share | 758 | 14.7% |
| Shares only when told | 422 | 8.2% |
77.2% of parents described their only child as either eager to share or situational about it. Only 14.7% called their child outright reluctant. That’s a direct, if informal, data point against the stereotype we picked apart in Does Your Only Child Fit the Stereotype? — and it’s worth reading alongside An Only Child Needs Friends and Only Children and ‘Alone Time’, since most respondents’ kids gravitated toward similarly-aged playmates (40.5%) rather than playing alone by default.
A poll’s decline can tell a story too
Voting followed an organic curve that had nothing to do with any of the above — it tracked the site’s own history. Activity climbed from 1,194 votes in 2008 to a peak of 10,524 votes in 2012, then declined steadily as the site went dormant, down to double digits by the early 2020s. No single poll was ever “boosted” or advertised; the curve is just what happens when a community site is active, then isn’t.
What the wider research says about aging and eldercare
This lines up with something bigger than our own poll. A 2025 Gerontological Society of America conference abstract, using Health and Retirement Study data on 5,443 older adults, found that parents with more than one child reported higher life satisfaction in old age than parents of only children (Deshmukh & Martin, 2025) — worth noting this is a conference abstract, not a full peer-reviewed study, so treat it as a lead rather than settled science.
A more substantial study, though, complicates the picture in an interesting way. A large British cohort study (Chanfreau & Goisis, Ageing & Society, 2022) found that only children genuinely are more likely to end up as their parents’ sole eldercare provider, and that gap widens as parents age — but found no measurable difference in wellbeing between only-child caregivers and caregivers who had siblings to share the load with.
Put together: the fear our own readers voted for isn’t irrational — only children really do carry more of the eldercare load alone. But carrying it alone doesn’t appear to make them worse off than everyone else doing the same job. That’s a more useful, more honest answer than either “don’t worry about it” or “you should worry about it.”
The honest caveat
This isn’t a scientific survey. It’s an anonymous web poll that ran for sixteen years with no sampling controls, no way to stop someone voting twice, and no demographic verification beyond what people volunteered. Treat the percentages as a genuine signal from a large, self-selected group of parents who cared enough to click — not as a peer-reviewed study. We think that’s still worth more than another listicle of “10 pros and cons of only children,” because at least it’s what real parents actually said, in their own numbers, over sixteen years.
The old poll is closed. Here’s a new one — cast your vote
The poll above ran from 2008 to 2024 and is now closed, frozen exactly as the numbers came in. This one is live: your vote counts immediately, you can see the running results below, and you can select as many options as apply to you — same as the original 2008 fears poll, which let parents pick more than one worry too.