I’m Lauren Sandler, a journalist and author. I’m also an only child, and the mother of one. As a reporter I wanted to investigate what it means to have more of us, and why we seem so damned for it, as parents and children. In my new book ONE AND ONLY—and here online—I question our assumptions, and consider whether stopping at one might be liberating to parents everywhere.
Both fathers and mothers pay dearly for the miracle of parenthood, but in most cases, it’s women who pony up for the bulk of those costs, even fifty years after Betty Friedan lambasted what she titled The Feminine Mystique. I often think of a Census Bureau report released last yearon who provides care for our children. Suzanne Bianchi, who clocked in sixteen years as a Census demographer, discovered, stunningly, that mothers actually spend more time caring for a child today than they did in 1965, back when sixty percent of them stayed at home full-time. In her book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, Bianchi reports that married mothers devote about thirteen hours a week to childcare, up from about …
