Two interesting pieces in the news last week pertaining to onlydom:

One on China:
China: Reining in the Rich on One-Child Policy

And one that reflects on work/family policy here in the US:
The Motherhood Experiment

Very clever the way this second piece, by Sharon Lerner, links women’s work/life issues, fertility rates, and national policy. Lerner notes that the U.S., with its largely hands-off approach to family policy, spends far less than other wealthy countries on child care while guaranteeing no paid parental leave–all of which leads women to feel that they must choose either work or motherhood. “As a result,” she concludes, “being an employed parent may be more difficult here than in countries now experiencing even the most severe baby droughts.”

Now here’s the part I love: Counter to the rhetoric of family-values champions, the promotion of larger families and the promotion of women’s careers may go hand in hand. Keep an eye out for Lerner’s book–it sounds smart.

Having survived the JetBlue fiasco of February 2007 (yep, I was one of those passengers stuck on the JFK tarmac ad infinitim), I am happily back in NYC. Only children may crave a crowd, but being holed up with 200 angry, hungry travelers was hardly this only’s idea of company. The best part was meeting Marco’s parents for the first time, when we finally landed in Tampa, even if a day later than planned. And the alligators at Silver Springs were pretty cool too. Oh – and the guy we met in line after our flight was cancelled, who flew biologists, environomentalists, and politicians into remote wildlife areas for an organization called Lighthawk and offered to charter a plane for a group of us. He was cooler than the alligators.

Two OC readings coming up next week:

Tuesday, Feb. 27 – KGB Tuesday Night Nonfiction Series
7pm
85 East 4th Street (betw 2nd and 3rd Ave)
New York City

Contribs Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn (“Becoming an Only Child”) and Janice Nimura (“Mother of Two”) will be joining Daph and me at this far-hipper-than-we-are LES locale. (Thank you, Kelly McMasters! We heart you very much!)

Wednesday, March 1 – Barnes and Noble, Upper West Side
7pm
2289 Broadway at 82nd St.
New York City

Contribs Kathyrn Harrison and Sara Reistad-Long will join us on this one. (Huge shout out to Jainee McCarroll here!)

Grab an only child — or come as a party of one — just come!

We’re in the Style Section of today’s paper. As you can imagine, Daphne and I are jumping up and down with delight.

From Leisl Schillinger’s “And Baby Makes Three”:

PITY the only child. Rattling around in a cavernous house like the last Tic Tac in a box, he (or she) has no brothers or sisters to play hide and seek with or to diffuse the high-beam glare of parental attention. What an unenviable fate! Or maybe not.

In “Only Child,” Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller gather the reflections of 21 writers and other creative types (including themselves) to demonstrate the ups and downs of “growing up solo.”…

Read the rest here.

This just in: There will be a mention of Only Child in the March 15 issue of American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines.

Ted Rose’s essay in the anthology, “Air Only,” was prescient!

On Friday, Daphne, contributor Amy Richards, and I were guests on “The Judith Warner Show” (XM radio). I’m a fan of Judith’s book, Perfect Madness, and many of her feminist inklings dovetail with mine. Things I wished I had said but did not have a chance to on the air:

In the 1970s, the mother who chose to have ‘only one’ was sometimes stigmatized for selfishly privileging her desire to have a career over her desire to raise a brood. I wonder how the stigma Boomer women may have felt different from that experienced by today’s mother-of-one. *Is* there a strong stigma today, and if so, is it perhaps differently inflected? Parent friends who ask us about our experience as onlies often seem so anxious – is this related, I wonder, to the intensive parenting Judith writes about so eloquently in her book? That is, the imperative to do-what’s-best-for-your-kid at the expense of personal fulfillment, and the return of a new kind of feminine mystique.

I’d be curious to hear what others think.

PS. Check out Daphne’s new website!

I’m in Chicago — town of my roots — and had two very fun readings. One was at The BookStall, in Winnetka, and the other at Congregation Solel in Highland Park. I was touched that so many people I knew came out to show support, including childhood best friends and some of their siblings, tons of family friends, my grandmother, two great aunts, and my high school English teacher Sherry Medwin. Felt like a minor local celebrity – thanks, guys!! Some pix, including a mystery shot of me and Marco at the top of the John Hancock (guess who’s who), Marco and the lion, me at The BookStall.

Yesterday Daphne and I were guests on “The Wendy Williams Experience” on WBLS radio – and what an experience! After parking us in an office with hot pink walls decorated with life-size photos of dazzling Wendy (left), the producer, Nicole, shuttled us down a hallway, opened a door, gave us headphones, and there she was, behind the mike: The queen of radio, wearing Uggs and a tiara.

Daphne and I fielded calls from listeners, lots of moms asking for advice on how to keep their onlies from being lonely/spoiled. Wendy, herself mother to an only, brought up the “selfish woman” stigma. And the conversation also veered toward the subject of women “starting later,” as my friend Rachel Lehmann-Haupt calls it in her forthcoming book on the subject. Wendy has 12 million largely African American female listeners, and I wondered how the stigma of the only child seemed to them….

A serious shout out to Wendy for plugging our book so thoroughly and so graciously. (And for being, well, Wendy! I seriously wish I could be her when I grow up.)

When Daphne (my coeditor on Only Child) and I are asked in interviews why there’s been such an increase in onlies in recent decades, the answer is that women are marrying later, having children later (and therefore generally having fewer), the divorce rate, and economics (it’s never been more expensive to raise a child – and not just here in NYC). We’re asked about the stigma that still seems to exist in spite of the fact that single-child families are increasingly common. Feminism has allowed women to feel more comfortable having only one, but women who have “just one” kid still often seem pressed to defend their choice.

This quandary is interesting in light of Linda Hirshman’s recent advice to women who want to stay in the labor force: Have a child, just don’t have two, she tells women in her book *Get to Work.* While I’m not so sure that the single-child family is the ultimate solution to the work/life crunch (it’s companies, not American family size, that clearly need to change in my opinion), there’s no doubt that life is easier for the working woman who just has one. I can’t speak (yet) from personal experience, but I’m pretty sure that my friends who have more than one would agree. Is it possible that, after all these years, women who choose to have an only because they want to continue with their careers are still seen as somehow “selfish”? Is this what the stigma is still partly about?

Last week’s Boxer-Rice exchange makes me realize all the more the furor around those who chose to have none. Boxer’s comments about how Rice is not paying the direct price for the Iraq war (as measured in lost children) was quickly spun as unsisterly speculation about Rice’s childless, unmarried life. Since I’m generally a fan of Boxer’s, I’m loathe to believe she was going for the jugular in the way all the spin suggested. And having just turned in a book on feminist in-fighting, the rush to turn this into a catfight made me, well, tired. But I did perk up when I read that Condi (regardless of how I feel about her) was also an only. As Broadsheet reminds us today,

in December, First Lady Laura Bush told People magazine that Rice probably wouldn’t run for president, in part because she is single and has no immediate family. “Dr. Rice, who I think would be a really good candidate [for president], is not interested. Probably because she is single, her parents are no longer living, she’s an only child. You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job.”

So, wait, an only child can never be President? Hmm… Not so sure about that.

I’m still recovering from our book party blow-out bash — which was, Daphne and I agreed, more fun than we had even imagined it would be (and we had imagined some pretty huge fun). The gallery was packed with around 300 people, and all but one of our NYC-based contributors showed up. Check them out – not only are they stellar writers, they’re gorgeous (photo on the left, from the left: Sara Reistad-Long, Molly Jong-Fast, Kathryn Harrison, Lynn Harris, Janice Nimura, Sarah Towers, Alissa Quart; next row: Daphne, me, Betty Rollin, Peter Terzian). Thank you to all — friends, family, contributors, others — who came out to help us celebrate!

Folks have been asking where we’ll be doing readings and such. I’m keeping an updated list of appearances and events (like readings with our contributors here in NYC and a workshop with my mom, a child psychotherapist, in Chicago!) on my website.