Single children show more hyperactive behaviour than children
with one or more brothers and sisters. Albeit to differing
degrees, they may move constantly, be unable to concentrate,
show compulsive behaviour, have difficulty waiting in line
in a group and have short attention spans. “This is
especially true of boys aged four to nine years,” notes
Jacques Marleau, whose doctoral thesis, recently submitted
to the Faculty of Medicine at Université de Montréal,
deals with behavioural characteristics of children based
on family size and order of birth.
However, when a child has a brother or sister, he shows
more symptoms of aggressiveness than if he lived alone with
his parents. He gets involved in more fights, threatens
the others and tries to hit, bite or kick them. In other
words, single children are less aggressive than non-single
children. In two-child families, the symptoms of hyperactivity
attach to the younger sibling, whereas symptoms of internalized
problems (distress, worry, sadness) are observed most often
in the older child.
To reach these conclusions, Jacques Marleau, assisted by
Jean-François Saucier, a Professor in the Department
of Psychiatry, studied data from the National Longitudinal
Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), which gathered information
on 23,000 Canadian children aged 0 to 11 years
between 1994 and 1995. The sample used by Dr. Marleau
for his various studies included 9,400 children, of
which about 8% were single children. The survey was limited
to children born of the same parents who were still living
together. The NLSCY, a veritable goldmine for researchers
like Jacques Marleau—he has training in anthropology,
demography and biomedical sciences—, contains highly
accurate information the children’s behaviour and relations
with their parents. Using questions on the mother’s
attitude toward the child, the researcher discovered that
mothers have, on average, a larger number of positive interactions
and fewer hostile or punitive interactions with single children.
In other words, they tend to congratulate these children,
play, laugh and share leisure time with them rather than
raise their voice, mete out corporal punishment or get angry.
For Mr. Marleau, single children have a special place in
modern families. “My study did not seek to explain
the observed phenomena. However, I do have some ideas. In
my opinion, when parents have a single child, they are less
inclined to be authoritarian than if they had more than
one. Boys and girls both adopt less structured behaviour,
and become more hyperactive. Perhaps we could even attribute
the increase in Ritalin prescriptions to the tendency of
modern families to have single children…”
Mr. Marleau, currently a researcher at Institut Philippe-Pinel
in Montréal, is himself a single child.
Researcher: Jacques
Marleau
Telephone: (514) 648-8461, extension 627
