HE an only child.

[be11]

I have a 3 year old and I really dont know if I will be having anymore. Just thought I should find out from those who are HE an only child how its going for you. I know there are pros and cons for everything but do you see yourself having to get out there and having to find other children to socialise with for the sake of your child? Isolation definately is an issue isnt it?

B.

hi i have a ds 2 1/2 and am seriously thinking of HE. guess i have the same thoughts you do ideally i would like my son to have contact through he with other children-sharing trips etc but dont know how possible this is. not much help sorry just wanted to say hi and in the same boat!

I would have thought it depended on how sociable you are yourself. Do you already have lots of friends with DCs the same age-does DC get to mix-have extended family with cousins etc? Is it a friendly neighbourhood-do you know your neighbours.
If you are the sort who holds open house, talks to anyone and joins things yourself then I think it would be fine.
If you say 'no' to most of the above I would have thought that you need to give it careful thought.

A lot is down to the child's personality. My older daughter (an only child for seven years) has always been very gregarious. It's actually one of the reasons I didn't send her to school: she wanted to PLAY with children all day, not just sit near them! There's no way she would have acknowledged that the classroom needed to be quiet sometimes, that worksheets should not be a joint project, or that giggling with friends under the table might be frowned on at times.

So it was always very clear to me that though I am more of a natural loner myself, the key to making my daughter happy was putting myself out enough to help her find friends. In fact I considered that to be my main job. Home educated friends were most convenient since they were available to play much of the time, but she also made friends at the local park (go at a fixed time on the same day of the week and you tend to run into the same people regularly) and through activities such as drama class. She went to several HE childminders while I worked part-time, and played with their kids. By the time she was seven it had all paid off in spades, with frequent all-day playdates and something on most days. She has tons of friends now.

By contrast my younger daughter has never been all that bothered about being with other children very often, and scarcely seemed to notice her sister's daily disappearance during her recent one-term stint at school. I don't anticipate having to make such efforts for her!

One nice thing about HEing an only child is that you can suit the child completely most of the time: she gets to go to the museum that most interests her and have you read her the books she most likes. She never has to go home early for a little brother's nap or hang around waiting for a big sister's football practice to end. Friends with big families have to put limits on how many activities each child can do because of scheduling conflicts and the fact that parents can only spend so much time ferrying them about! That's less of a problem with bigger age gaps like ours, where you can leave older children on their own, get them to take their younger siblings out for you, and send them off to choir on the bus alone.

Piscesmoon said:

I would have thought it depended on how sociable you are yourself. ... If you say 'no' to most of the above I would have thought that you need to give it careful thought.

Unless, as Saracen says, the DC is also not sociable. Children are not necessarily sociable and some of them need a lot of time on their own. One of the reasons our society has the myth that children need lots of ... companions? aquaintances? [I'm not sure what to call them] is because we insist on herding 99% of them into large groups for 30 hours a week. Strangely enough, doing that means that many of them do indeed then need company - but we don't know how much they would have needed the group if we had not forced them into it artificially.

A small number of good friends is, IMO, more important for socialisation (i.e. learning to get on with people and behave in socially appropriate ways) than large-scale socialising.

My ds is seven and an only child and we get on fine with HE.

He does a lot of activities though, so never really goes more than a day without seeing his friends. That takes a lot of effort on my part though as we are very rural, so I spend a lot of time driving, and I have also had to spend a lot of my time making friends with the other parents (mostly to show them we are not strange because we HE!), I am very social, but a bit of a miserable sod as I get older, so that's sometimes a bit draining! I also find the HE groups draining as I have little in common with most of the other parents, but grit my teeth and bear it for ds sake.

Ds is the type of child who makes friends anywhere though, he is so confident with other people it's unreal, so him being an only child and home educated is something i've never had to worry about really.

I would agree with Saracen that if your DC is the sort who will go up to others, talk and make friends then there is nothing to worry about, except that if you are unsciable yourself you will have to grit your teeth and make sure that you sociable DC meets others.
I would worry very much if your DC was shy and reserved. I was extremely shy as a child, I was perfectly happy with my own company and a book-I would have read all day quite happily but I dread to think what I would be like today if I had been an only DC HEed. Very isolated and unsociable, I would imagine. Being in school and seeing DCs everyday was a godsend.

'A small number of good friends is, IMO, more important for socialisation (i.e. learning to get on with people and behave in socially appropriate ways) than large-scale socialising. '

Exactly. School gave this. I didn't socialise on a large scale-(this is why I think whole class parties are madness!)I started off with one close friend. We got on from day one and saw each other everyday in a non threatening situation. We weren't put together by our mothers for a couple of hours several times a week and expected to do things together.We were free to mix or not mix.I had worked up to a very small circle of friends by the age of 11yrs. I went to secondary school without a friend and made 2 very close friends at the start (still close friends today)and worked up slowly -only to about 6 friends which was fine for me. For the shy DC I think that the everyday meeting of the same people is essential. If you like me, shy and self contained it is possible to have a parent who thinks that it is OK to leave it. It took me a long time to get there-I think that I was about 26yrs before I could comfortably chat to anyone or talk in front of a big group. I am thankful that I was put in a position of having to try at 5yrs old.

I agree with saracen that it is often better with an only DC than more because you can just do things at their own level. My youngest nephew was the one to miss out. He couldn't go to toddler type things because the other 2 were home. He spent large amounts of time in the car and then hanging around while his brothers did things.

Schools give a pool of potential friends. It is very obvious that DCs are choosy, they pick the ones they will get on with-they are not herded together and forced to socialise. Mine were all different. DS had 2 close friends at 5 yrs-a boy and a girl, DS2 had one friend and DS3 had a little band of 4 boys. They worked up from there-some changed and some remained constant. There are DCs in the class that they had very little to do with but it was good to have to interact with them at some points. DS2 who was the quietest is now the most sociable of the 3.

@piscesmoon: "I was extremely shy as a child, I was perfectly happy with my own company and a book-I would have read all day quite happily but I dread to think what I would be like today if I had been an only DC HEed. Very isolated and unsociable, I would imagine. Being in school and seeing DCs everyday was a godsend."

Hmm, for me it was the opposite! I was a very shy child who found school stressful. It was loud. I didn't really have friends there. I wouldn't have minded that, except that at school you are expected to have friends so I felt there was something wrong with me. It was not OK to sit in the corner with your book when you wanted.

It was in my neighbourhood that I found friends. It was good to be fairly free from relentless teasing and to have the freedom to associate with older and younger children, including boys, and to go home when I'd had enough. When I was ten, the six-year-old boy over the road didn't criticise my fashion choices, he worshipped me. The older ones took a protective interest, or ignored me. I remember one slightly odd lad who was picked on in my class at school. To my shame, out of self-preservation I avoided him there. But he lived just nearby, and we played together often at home. Nobody was going to tease me for it.

Despite not having had good experiences in large-group situations at school, the minute I left school I flourished. I could seek out people with whom I had something in common, and wasn't expected to behave or dress like everyone else.

So I think I would have enjoyed being home educated. I agree that seeing the same children repeatedly is helpful for a shy child who wants friends. Unlike my older daughter, I seldom make new friends in the supermarket. As an adult, I've always preferred to study and work with small groups of people so I can get to know them. But for children this can be provided elsewhere besides school: local parks if you go often enough, cousins, Brownies, home ed groups.

Sacaren - most of your post rang true to my experience of school as well.

I was an only child (well half siblings who are 15-20 years older than me, so effectivly an only child) and I only had a handful of friends through primary school, and by secondary school was such an outcast that I spent every breaktime/lunchtime hiding in a toilet cubicle. I was very sociable, I had many friends outside school at drama groups I attended, I just never clicked with anyone in school (was bullied as well for being fat which didn't help). There was part of me that liked being alone as well. I think I found it quite stressful as I have never been comfortable with being in a group and hanging round with them all the time, and at school, that's what everyone did.

Never had problems since school, moved out of home at 16 and started my own business, once I could socialise on my own terms I was flying.

It sometimes makes me chuckle when people ask me if ds will be lonely not going to school when I think back to five years of sitting in the loos at lunchtime myself! Or, more to the point, when I think back to ds time at school when he was surrounded by 30 kids all day and didn't have one friend and was the loneliest I've ever seen him - I can keep track of them all now.

I think that the different experiences show that you shouldn't worry about it OP and just do what you think suits you and your DC. We are all different. My nightmare as a 5 yr old would have been my mother getting friendly with a woman with a DD the same age and saying 'we must get together with the DCs', that put on so much pressure to have to talk and think of activities, made worse by well meaning adults saying 'show Annie your.... ' or 'perhaps Annie might like to play.....'.
At school I was free to observe, pal up with those who looked similar to me, join in a game but leave it. The friends that I made in the neighbourhood went to the same school Saracen so there wasn't a split.
I just found that school left me to do it at my own pace. I am helped greatly that I never wanted to one of the 'in crowd'-those that are not part of it are generally much more interesting.
Take the lead from your own DC.

Since she is only 3 yrs old perhaps you could start HE and see how it goes. These things are not set in stone-you can opt in or out at any point.