The Only Child

      The status of being an "only child" was a great deal more common
among the ranks of the love-shy men than it was among the self-confident,
non-shy respondents. Only seven percent of the non-shy men had grown
up as only children. In contrast, 25 percent of the younger (university
aged) love-shys and 31 percent of the older love-shy men had grown
up as only children.
     A note of caution is in order here. The vast majority of research
studies in both psychology and in child development that have looked
at only children have found them to be better adjusted than children with
siblings. Indeed, this is especially true for only male children. Boys
without any brothers and sisters normally enjoy significantly higher levels
of self-esteem and social self-confidence than do the large majority of
boys with brothers and sisters.
     So how come this research study revealed a strong relationship
between only child status and severe love-shyness? My suspicion is that
the experience of growing up an only child serves to increase the chances
of extreme shyness if and only if incompetent parenting and inhibition
genes are involved. It is quite probable that most people who have only
children turn out to be at least slightly above average in parental com-
petence. In contrast, the data collected for this book strongly suggest
that severely love-shy males tend to have had a history of less than
adequate parenting.
     Thus, for those with parents of normal effectiveness growing tip
an only child can be an advantage. However, when the mother and the
father are less than adequately competent, the only child with the inhi-
bition gene is left with no one around to mitigate the psychoemotional
blows that often come to pass. When brothers and/or sisters are around
they will usually incur at least some of the parents' wrath and bizarre
behavior. And even though many families with more than one child do
make a scapegoat out of one specific individual, siblings very often do
protect one another to at least some extent from the behavior of hostile,
capricious and bizarre parents.
     With virtually no exceptions, all of the love-shy men I studied who
had grown up as only children recounted a large number of bizarre,
erratic and capricious incidents perpetrated by their parents, and par-
ticularly by their mothers. Words like "irascible", "abrasive", "trucu-
lent", "tense", "high strung", ,"cantankerous", and "petulent", were
typically used by this group to describe their mothers. Even now as
adults, virtually none of these only children seemed to like their mothers
to any extent.
     The love-shys' mothers seemed to have conveyed an extremely
frightening and obnoxious image of womanhood--an image that is any-
thing but attractive or alluring. For those who grew up as only children
this type of obnoxious behavior had to be dealt with alone and without
any help from anyone. Many of the men I interviewed had learned to
accept their mother's behavior on an intellectual level. On an emotional
level, however, virtually none of these love-shy men had made any
headway at all in coming to grips with commonplace events of their
formative years.