I grew up in a family of nine children. I was number eight.
There were a lot of us, and we grew up with very little. When I say little, I don’t mean that we simply went without luxuries. At times, we didn’t even have some of the basics, including the security of a stable roof over our heads.
So when I saw the question, What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?, my answer came quite quickly: I chose to have one child.
Part of that decision was very practical. In this economy, one child was what we realistically felt we could afford to care for properly. A Brookings Institution estimate from the United States put the cost of raising a child to age 17 at about US$310,000 for a middle-income family, before college. Broader calculations that include education can push the figure beyond US$400,000 per child. Of course, those numbers would look different elsewhere because wages, housing, childcare, education and living costs vary from country to country. But the larger point is the same: raising a child properly costs a great deal over many years.
For us, one child was what we felt we could manage without constantly compromising on the basics. Not just food and clothes, but a stable home, education, attention, the things she needed and, if we could manage it, a little extra when she needed that too.
Of course, one of the things people sometimes say about an only child is that she might be lonely. But having siblings does not automatically protect anyone from loneliness. I grew up with eight of them, and I know that very well. A large family can bring companionship, but it can also bring complicated relationships, toxic family dynamics and even arguments over things like inheritance.
I would rather not treat siblings as a kind of insurance policy against loneliness. My daughter has friends, and I hope she will continue to build relationships with people who genuinely care about her. Family is something we are born into and cannot choose. Good friends, at least, are people we can choose — and who choose us back.
My parents never owned a house. There was never that feeling that somewhere underneath everything else that might go wrong, there was at least something solid. My daughter will have that. The home we own will eventually be hers one day, and that matters to me more than I think I would have understood when I was younger.
It is not really about property. It is about security.
I know that owning a home does not guarantee an easy life. Neither does having parents who plan carefully. I cannot protect my child from every disappointment, every bad decision or every difficult period she may face, nor do I want to remove every struggle from her life. But I do not want her to have to begin adulthood already trying to repair the broken pieces of her childhood. I want her to be able to move forward.
That is probably the biggest difference between the way I was raised and the way I have tried to raise my own child. When we made important decisions, she was part of the calculation. Can we afford this? What does this mean for her? Will she have what she needs? Are we leaving her something to stand on?
I am sure we have made mistakes. Every parent does. And one day she may tell me about things from her childhood that I understood completely differently at the time. But I hope that beneath all of that, there is one thing she will always know: she was considered. Her future was considered. Her security was considered.
Perhaps that is what I wanted most to give her — not a perfect childhood, and certainly not a life without problems, but the kind of foundation I never felt I had myself.
For me, doing things differently meant having one child and trying to give her enough room, enough attention and enough security to build from there.
Not everything. But enough.
