To ask why you have just one child?

Because I don’t care much for my siblings and didn’t want to inflict siblings on my child.
Because I had a horrible pregnancy and was left disabled by it.
Because I can give more time and energy to one, and both our lives are better for it.
Because I wound up being a single parent when my husband left.
Because I miscarried. Twice.
But most of all because she arrived and she was everything and I didn’t feel the need to do it again.

Broke up with ds dad when he was a baby and didn’t meet anyone else I liked enough to have more with.
would have liked one more in an ideal world.
Hated the thought of my children being separated to different houses every weekend.

Money/childcare mostly. If I were to have another child, I would have to pay for childcare this time around (my DD is almost 13 so grandparents are a lot older now/ill health) which would mean there'd be no point in me working and then we'd struggle with money. We're happy as a family of 3 with some fur babies.

@Gingertam @Piglet89 @Threetrees745

The way I saw the baby group thing was that for some women (many of whom may be perfectly intelligent) “mum-ing” became their hobby. For example, they actively enjoyed things like researching which buggy to buy & discussing it at length with other mums. Whereas for me I was just happy to buy whatever second hand buggy I could find (assuming it was safe, clean & comfortable for my baby, obviously). The same way that some people are really interested in cars whereas other people don’t care as long as the car gets them from A to B.

My NCT group was full of these women who were perfectly intelligent but had no real hobbies or interests so being a mum became their hobby and full time topic of conversation so they would talk at length about baby meal ideas, because it had become a hobby for them.

whereas I would just feed DC whatever DH and I were having (modified as appropriate) and spend my free time doing my actual hobbies (mainly sport).

Don’t get me wrong, I love my child more than I ever thought possible. But my child is my child, not my hobby.

I thought it was an excellent post which really resonated with me. Some people are just easily offended. There are intelligent women who become total baby bores unable to talk about anything else.

Had infertility and went through several rounds of IVF to have dd. Had a traumatic birth then complications which would impact on a future pregnancy/birth.
Sometimes think about what it would be like to have another but parenting is full on even with just one and I just love our life as it is.

This is so me and my son, he is absolutely my little buddy still at 12. Love our family but equally love time just the 2 of us. People have said ohhhhh you only have 1 and it’s a boy what a shame. He has introduced me to rugby, we strongly support a team something I thought I would never be into but I absolutely love it and love going to games as a family. I have friends with girls who are jealous of my shopping buddy, wow can he shop. Absolutely loves a day trip to London where he can shop for hours!!! We leave dh to work as he gets bored of shopping in minutes where ds and I love just spending hours browsing the shops, then we meet up with dh as our other shared love between the 3 of us is a really amazing restaurants so after an epic shopping trip we make sure we have booked a really special restaurant to try.

I just saw this on the Guardian article about the NCT. This is a horrifying statistic.

According to an evidence review by Nice, up to 49% of women who plan vaginal births will have urinary incontinence and up to 15.1% will have faecal incontinence for at least a year after birth.

So, to those of you who think it's "selfish" to "only" have one child. Yeah, I was selfish because I didn't want to be incontinent (among other things, as mentioned above)!

I am going to save this and copy and paste it on every stupid thread about mums "only" having one child.

I hit the jackpot with my dd after ivf. Did explore ivf a few years after dd (I was 28 when I had her), but it didn't seem worth it (cost, pain, potential heartache) so we didn't try. I'm extremely happy with how things turned out. We all have a great life. Dd loves being an only.

I still get asked and I'm 42. People mean well but it can get tiresome.

@Threetrees745 that’s not what I meant, so let me rephrase.

I found baby groups incredibly dull because the sole topics of conversation seemed to be babies’ feeding, sleeping and approaching milestones. Mind-numbing. I’m sure many of these women were intelligent and so it flabbergasted me that they seemed unable to speak of anything else. Maybe it’s because that time is so intense, I dunno - but I suspect I’m not alone.

Plus not wanting to take the increased risk having a child with complex needs as I had my first mid 30s so by the time we considered another the potential risks were much higher.

@Ljcrow , this should have been listed in my reasons, too. I was 37 and my DH was 43 when our DS was born, so I think we were already skating on thin ice, in terms of our ages, at that point. We were very lucky that DS is healthy.

I find it a bit bizarre that people still ask if we would consider a second now that I am 40 and DH is 46.

Adoption

Late baby (PCOS)
DP wasn't keen to have another (lazy f&cker and was SAHD and realised that once DS was in nursery/school it was a lot easier than with a baby
finally got pregnant and had a miscarriage
lost job day after miscarriage and as breadwinner there was no way i could get a job and get maternity rights within a decent time period given age....
Found it really hard as i desperately wanted more - probably only stopped in last couple of years (DS is 14!)

Cost, I had enhanced maternity for my ds and then I took voluntary redundancy after maternity which meant I had an extra year with ds (financed by redundancy) - my next job only had statuary redundancy so we could not afford it, plus we had a tiny cottage. By the time we got a bigger house and a new job with enhanced maternity my dh had decided another dc would be too stressful for him along with work - I would love one but short of a lottery win (meaning dh could give up work) I won't get my second.

Ds has also always been adamant that he doesn't want a sibling.

@piglet89

I find point 4 incredibly rude. It's fine to say that you didn't enjoy maternity leave or spending time at home with your baby but to imply that women who did are dumb and unintelligent is very offensive.
Why would you say something as unkind as that?

It also is just loads calmer and easier!
There is definitely guilt there worrying that she's lonely and thinking ahead to when we, her parents, are old/dying, and it's all on her, but as a pp said you make the choices you make. This thread has made me feel a lot better about it.

Just didn't want another one, very happy with the one I've got 😀

Room in the house (we'd have to move) which is linked to expense, mental health implications of childbirth/sleepless nights with a baby. Plus not wanting to take the increased risk having a child with complex needs as I had my first mid 30s so by the time we considered another the potential risks were much higher.

This (can't find the up arrow)

1. Our boy is extremely high energy and takes quite a lot of management and “running out”. Suspected SEN of some kind, about which my husband is still in denial.
2. No support village: I am an only child, my husband has a brother but he’s useless and hundreds of miles away in any event. Both sets of grandparents also hundreds of miles away, but even if they were round the corner, they’d still be shit. Any time for us as a couple, we need to buy - and I mostly need to source and organise.
3. Husband is “good” by the low-bar standards of many women on here but honestly, still does nowhere near an equal share of parenting. Most of the mental load is also on me. He thinks this is fair enough as he earns much more than I do - but I also work.
4. Did not enjoy maternity leave: what intelligent, cerebral woman really enjoys talking about feeding and sleeping habits of their babies? Ended up with PND, from which I’m only just emerging. Husband dealt with that poorly. No interest in doing that again.
5. The “Young kid” stuff: the playgrounds, soft play etc. Dull.
6. As PPs have said: the menial dogsbody work of parenting - there’s so much of it. Have so much less time to myself now and I really miss my pre-kid self.

DP and I were together for 15 years before we finally made the decision to have a child, when I was 37 and he was 43. We‘re now very happily ‘one and done’ with DD. I never really had that strong biological urge to procreate that others often describe, so deciding to have any child at all became a very long drawn-out, deeply considered, ‘pros and cons’ type decision, arrived at over many years.

Aside from the financial and practical factors that always come up in these discussions, the main reason we finally took the plunge was that both of us loved the idea of nurturing a new human and introducing them to everything that’s amazing about our world: the different landscapes, nations and cultures; awe-inspiring nature; wonderful art, music, theatre and literature and meaningful relationships with others. We’re both very much into education (for its own sake, not just to increase earning potential) and love sharing our knowledge and learning alongside DD. I also knew a fair bit about child psychology and development due to my own education and work, so we felt like we had a lot we could offer a child.

As other pps have mentioned, it’s also about self-knowledge; having just the one child was, for us, the best way of ensuring that we had the resources - both financially and in terms of time, mental bandwidth and energy - to provide all of these experiences and opportunities for DD. Any more than that and we’d both have been frazzled and spread too thinly - we both like calm and focus, and dislike excessive noise and chaos.

DD is now 7 and we’re currently on a two-week self-drive holiday in the Black Forest and Alsace. We’ve swum in lakes, climbed waterfalls, whizzed down summer toboggan runs, tried all manner of different foods and practised our French and German skills. We would never have been able to manage this kind of holiday with more than one child due to affordability (we’d have needed to pay for an extra hotel room for a start) and the sheer logistics of travelling with multiple DC.

Wasn't expecting to have any dc due to surviving a serious accident when I was 19 and unexpectedly became pregnant with ds at 39. Due to my painful pregnancy caused by complications from the accident 20 years before I was voluntarily sterilized at the same time as ds was born.

Otherwise I'd probably be surrounded by at least 7 dc and several gc.

I simply meant she doesn't have a brother or sister. Like if anything happens to her there's no spare and we'd be quite heartbroken! It's more a dig at people with more than one really. Obviously if something does happen to her we'd be devastated - not because we'd be childless but because we would've lost our daughter.
I certainly don't expect her to look after us in our old age and go to great efforts to ensure she's independent and doesn't feel in anyway tied to us. She can't wait to learn to drive, go to uni, fly the nest ect and I wholeheartedly encourage it.
I'm not an "only" and I already feel the pressure from my parents as they get older and I'm expected to do more for them - I don't want that for her. I want her to live her life.