r/OnlyChild

I am an only child and every time i come home i find it awkward to have conversations with my parents, I don’t have anything to talk with them about that’s of any interest to them, or worth sharing. The three of us don’t have much in common, and I often feel lonely when we go do things because I don’t know what to talk to them about. It feels like we are all just at an awkward stalemate.

I guess my question is; Does anyone else feel this way? or have a hard time having conversations with parents? I have nobody in my world who can relate because they all have siblings that can be the topics of conversation.

I'm 20. From about 12–17 I was ok going out with my parents. I mostly went with them because I didn't have friends to go with,and I am only child. But over the last couple of years I started getting really bored and restless. My mum likes browsing lots of shops and my parents mostly talk about work while we go in a car.It made me uncomfortable and despite telling them how I feel they would talk more about me or interests I enjoy for only short time

So I got fed up with feeling like 3rd wheel and thought about travelling to another town by myself and felt much more relaxed and enjoyed it.This was my 1st time ever travelling alone and I am quite happier.Sometimes I wonder if I am nuiseance to them while going together on places?What do you think?Share your opinion.

I’m 23, originally from India, and currently living in Ireland. I’m an only child, my dad is 57 and my mom is 55, and I work 5 days a week in IT.

I moved to Ireland in 2024 for my master’s and now have a good full-time job. On paper, things are going well, but emotionally I feel very lonely and disconnected.

I miss my parents much more than I expected. I feel guilty that I am spending these years away from them while they are getting older. I do not even know when I will next be able to visit India. Even when I go home, it may only be for a few weeks or a month, and leaving again is extremely painful. The last time I returned to Ireland, saying goodbye at the airport was very difficult.

I work from Monday to Friday. By Saturday, I am usually exhausted and spend the day recovering from the work week. By Sunday, I start feeling depressed again because Monday is approaching. It feels like my whole life is just work, recovery and anxiety about starting work again.

I also think a lot about what my life will be like when my parents are no longer there. They are the people I feel closest to, and the thought of losing them makes me feel terrified and completely alone.

Because of painful relationship experiences in the past, I currently prefer to stay away from relationships. But that choice also makes me more aware of how emotionally dependent I am on my parents and how empty life may feel without them.

I call them frequently, sometimes just keeping FaceTime on while we all do our own things. I do not tell them how low I feel because I do not want to make them sad or worried.

I don't know how I'm going to carry all this pain and live every day with this much anxiety and all. If anybody has any similar experiences can you guide me on how you managed to cope with this please.

Hello fellow onlychilds! I am 26 F . I have lived my life away from home, mostly in hostels and I have found peace living with unknown people. Had a somewhat difficult childhood. Don’t get me wrong, parents love each pther a lot and they love me too but my father being a narcissist have ruined some things for me. Fast forward to today, I have these weird trauma thoughts as to what would happen if my mum died or what would happen if they die when they are old. How will I live? Who would be there for me. At this point of time I really wished I had a sibling. And the worst fact is when I meet people who are only child, I tend to share this topic which obviously i feel like ruines their mood but I also literally have no one to talk to about this stuff. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want people to find me odd. I’m curious to hear from ya’ll, what should I do to stop this?

I've been alone for what feels like forever, but I don't remember feeling lonely as a kid. Now I do, often.

I always thought it would be different. That one day I'd have friends or a partner that loved me enough that I wouldn't notice. Like Fast and the Furious. I thought chosen family mattered to other people as much as it does to me.

One person who I thought I was going to marry after 5 years, an apartment, a pet, and me taking care of them when they were sick for years broke up with me because they said I was too good for them and that I was too ambitious so it made them feel a way. I got a promotion while dating someone after that who I thought was great, and their entire personality changed over night and no matter how much I brought it up they never were the same with me. I just got an insane opportunity that I worked my butt off for after 4 years with barely any sleep, and a close friend, also an only child who I thought was going to be with me for life, stopped answering my calls the day after I told them.

I worked hard to not be mean or selfish from a young age because I heard the tropes about only kids. I was awkward because I spent a lot of time alone (like entire summers with just books and no other kids), and after practice I got really, really good with people even though I'm still pretty nerdy (and I love being a nerd lol). I'm always there for people, have hobbies I love, am always down for an adventure, love to travel, and honestly make friends very easily.

My best friend in the whole world innocently asked to schedule something for someone else on my birthday (it was a reasonable ask considering tbe circumstances) and that was just another reminder that I'm always on the outside. I'm never someone's favorite or their best friend. I'm never going to be a maid of honor. I might be in one wedding party ever. Every time I think I'm there the universe reminds me that I'm never remembered like family. I know this won't be my whole life, but man does it suck sometimes.

That toxic sub keeps appearing in my feed probably because of my activity in this sub and so many of the posts are just totally judgemental and invalidating towards anyone with a different opinion, or total karening over other people merely suggesting giving their kid a sibling. They think being an only child is universally positive for everyone, that having 2+ kids is universally negative for parents, and can't fathom why anyone would want to have multiple kids or why kids would want a little brother or sister, it's absurd. What is the purpose of that "safe-space" which isn't any productive discussion but just perpetual victim mentality about others disagreeing with them being the hardest thing on Earth lol?

I have hated being an only kid all my life despite great parents, childhood friends, financial stability, and can't handle the fact that my parents will likely be gone by my late 30s/early 40s, but I hate the invalidation on the internet about it 3x more. The doom and gloom is rational, it exists for a reason, most of the positives are wild mental gymnastics or whining about the most petty conflicts with siblings imaginable in their families. I don't care that I'm about to get a huge half of inheritance from one of my my grandparents that my dad wants to split with me, losing all my grandparents at a young age totally sucked and I'd rather have to split that money with a sibling or two. I would have rather been fighting with someone as a teenager over using the car than to have been dependent on when my childhood friends were around to not be totally bored, lonely, and depressed playing outside in the summer. I hate that I'll never be able to hold a baby brother or sister without having to actually be a parent (I don't want to be but if I did 2 would be the minimum number), and that I'll have no immediate family agter my parents are gone.

It’s annoying IMO. Cuz one and done parents will be like “oh! my child will have lots of friends and their cousins!”. And I’m like well sure….but they will never truly be a replacement for actual siblings. Especially considering friends can be very temporary and they come and go. Like for example, you could get into an argument with your “friends“ that may not have even been that deep, yet they may cut you off and yall never speak again. Meanwhile you can get into a bad BAD argument with your siblings, and yall will literally start back talking a day or so later like aint nothing happened. Also sometimes friends simply just grow apart from each other, never heard of siblings “growing apart” from each other. Like for me I have great cousins and close friends, but I still know my place and know I’ll never be equal to their actual siblings. So cousins/friends simply cannot replace that “womb to tomb” bond that people have with their siblings, simple.

My husband and I have been going through IVF for a while now and my last transfer failed I’m now getting old and unable to make more embryos. How did people cope with one child and how to stop grieving not having a second?

So here's the info. I'm 10. Like old cars. Especially Holden's. My Name is tybalt. I'm a boy btw

I'm (28F) and my mother wants me to share my location with her. We live in different states and she says it's for safety and she says she won't even look at it, but..

..unless she's constantly looking at it and checking with me I'm not really even sure how it actually would effectively ensure my safety beyond just being a comfort thing for her.. (plus I do think she actually will be checking it)

Also, I'd like to put myself out there more, I'm 28, haven't really dated, and single. But assuming she actually will be looking at it, she'll see if I'm out late/staying the night somewhere else and I don't want to feel like I have to share my dating life with her, especially if I'm discussing someone I'm only just starting to get to know.

Even if she doesn't explicitly ask, knowing she might see it isn't super comfortable and discourages me from pursuing a dating life. It's frustrating and embarrassing and I don't know what to do about it.

I know it seems like I should "just turn it off," which is partly why I came to this thread- I honestly cannot bring myself to do that. Being an only child, we're very close and she doesn't seem to see this as any issue or invasion of privacy at all. But also being an only child, this thread knows what it's like to feel like you're always being watched, even miles and miles away. I'm not sure how to express this to her.

We've been through this before, she's asked me to turn it on, I've turned it on, I've told her I want to turn it off, I've turned it off, and now we're back here again. I've gotten advice before to "just tell her I don't want to" and leave it at that. But, also an only child thing, when I'm visiting town we are together all the time, it would come up again and again and again and she would keep asking about it so there would be no "leave it at that."

So Im an only child. I was born n raised in a South asian country but ion identity with anything regarding the country or culture itself. My entire life I've tried to tie myself with other countries I feel closer too. Though it feels a bit crazy and isolating because I'm an only child with no cousins or people similar to me around. I just feel so ostracised from the society around me because I just can't seem to fit myself into it. I tried, I really tried hard. I just don't like the dresses or food or anything related to the culture, I was raised completely differently on cultural influences from around the world. It doesn't help that I don't look exactly south Asian either. I hate how the people of my country act abroad and locally I hate associating myself with them. I feel like a traitor and even more isolating. I hate it everything about it. Since south asian cultures are so family oriented I am isolated from that aspect as well. Everyday I feel like I wanna go to a home that I've never been too. I have nothing good to say about my culture or country anything like alot of people do. I've met alot of different people and interacted with them as well but I just can't make myself to get too identity as my nationality. I wish I was never born here. So maybe it wouldn't be so isolating.

I (23f) always feel lonely on family vacations. My siblings are way younger than me. We have a 10+ age gap. Neither of them are 10 yrs old and my parents and usually busy parenting. I love my mom but sometimes I can be hard to open up and talk to her sometimes. My stepdad and I close but don’t really get vulnerable with eachother. My aunt and I used to be very close until she had kids. Both are also under 10 years old. My grandpa is my best friend and whenever I go on big family vacations, I usually hangout and stay with my grandparents It’s like I’m their 4th kid. But of course, they are in their 70s and don’t do much except run errands a lot and I join them. My uncle and I have a small age gap so him, his wife, and I are pretty close and they like to be a little adventurous. But they have one on the way so I know that I won’t have the time like I used to. Either way there’s no one my age to hang out with. I do get lonely because I love to venture off and there’s no one to do it with. I miss being in my college city where I had all my friends. We would go shopping, hanging out, etc. I just want a companion to travel with.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I am a bit jealous of my siblings and cousins because they have someone to hangout with

I read that quite a few people in this sub have older parents. So who also did grow up without grandparents? The parents from my father's side were already old when I was born. I don't remember much about my grandpa, just that I didn't understand him for some reason and that he was always grumpy. I was even kind of scared of him. My mom told me later on that he had dementia. I didn't even realise when he died. I was only 3 (almost 4). My grandma died about one and a half years later, I just remember that she didn't talk much and seemed very serious. I was at her house quite often, but I didn't talk much with her and I mainly just ate some food and watched TV. My mother's father was already long dead when I was born and her mother unfortunately already died when I was 7. She wasn't as old as my grandparents from my father's side, but she already died in her 70s. I honestly didn't have a strong bond to her either. She was in a wheelchair and my mother and I visited her sometimes, but that was actually it. When she died, I didn't recognise what this would mean for me. I was just empathetic for my mother and my aunts, because I knew it must be hard to lose your mom. It wasn't until I was like 9 years old, until I realized, what it actually means not to have grandparents. When I saw other kids having bonds with their grandma and grandpa, I started feeling really bad. I was especially jealous of kids who had young grandparents that would travel with them, be happy and loving towards them. I never had that, even when my grandparents were still alive. Nowadays grandparents are always represented in media and you will feel like the weird odd one out, if you don't get spoiled emotionally and materially by your grandparents. It just sucks. Now that I'm 29, I really feel that I missed out on a lot.

that was just three of us, mom dad and me. then divorce, then i started living with my mom. we got so depent on each other. now im 31 i just moved abroad and sudden rush of complex feelings drowning me every time i think of my mom.. she was a sweet girl who just lived a life in abuse. me? i am all she got from her life! now im abroad she tells me i was the only one in her life that loved her so much and now im not with her. I know that I cannot overcome the situation or the grief, and this truely is killing me inside... my mom sacrificed all her life just to become alone when she most needed me.. i donno what to do.. i can be alone im used to it since i was a child, but i cannot imagine my mom's crying out of loneliness, it's like a knife in my heart.. i wish i could sacrifice my life to her.. no matter the consequences.. society and even my parents expect me to become successful but at what cost... please help me im so desperate

I’m a 27-year-old lawyer moving out of my parents’ house for the first time. They’re both 66, and while I’ll only be about a 30-minute drive away, I still feel guilty. I’m very close with my parents, and I can tell they’re excited for me but also sad to see me go. I’m going to miss them a lot. The move is only for a year but still.

I think it’s probably an only child/introvert thing, but I get really annoyed when ppl can’t entertain themselves and expect me to talk to them for hours on end.

I’ll be spending a week with my mom (I’m in my late 20s and she’s visiting me. She lives 2hrs away by car and I see her often) and whenever I’m not giving her some sort of attention, she does something to gain my attention. For example, I was relaxing in my room and watching YouTube videos on my phone (we’d spent the entire day together and it was about 9pm when I finally started relaxing). As soon as she saw that I wasn’t giving her any attention, she started asking me to do things for her or constantly asking random questions every 5-10mins in order to make me interact with her. She does this all the time and I try to make it obvious that I’m not interested in talking anymore. Eventually she gets the point and decides to talk to her friend on the phone. It’s like she can’t handle being in a room with someone without talking to them. She can’t handle the silence and it’s annoying. Idk if it’s an only child thing where I can entertain myself for long periods of time, but I get frustrated when others can’t do the same.

My wife and I are both working. My parents take care of our daughter when we’re away. She is a good kid, doesn’t throw tantrums, and never cries about going to school. Whenever she’s alone, she either plays with her toys or does role-playing, sometimes pretending to be a teacher.

She is now in KG2. Schools reopened two weeks ago after the summer holidays. I usually pick her up from the school bus, and every day on the way home I ask her questions like, “How was your day at school?”, “What did you learn today?”, and “Did you make any new friends?”

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed that she’s been moody when returning from school. She told me that one of her close friends is not talking to her, and it seems to be making her feel sad. It’s evident on her face, and I feel bad seeing her in that state.

What bothers me is the thought that my daughter may be emotionally dependent on her friend to such an extent that if her friend doesn’t talk to her, it affects her mood so much.

This has made me wonder whether I’m being selfish by not giving her a sibling. Could being an only child be taking a toll on her mental health and emotional well-being? Because she spends a lot of time without children around her at home, is she looking for companionship at school in a way that makes her emotionally vulnerable?

It also makes me worry about the future. As she grows up, what if she doesn’t have someone close to share her feelings with?

What are your thoughts on this, especially from parents of single children? Should I consider planning for a second child? Financially, it would be a bit of a burden for me, but if it genuinely fills a void in my daughter’s life and helps her well-being, I’m willing to take that risk.

Long ass post don’t read it if you don’t want to just don’t comment about the length I get it  😭 btw I’m 20 now

I want to preface this by clarifying that it wasn’t all bad. I lived an objectively comfortable life, and I am very lucky in that regard. I always had food on the table, and my parents went out of their way to buy me various toys, Pokémon cards, and electronics going up. Every now and then we’d vacation to Florida or California too. Obviously, they did not have to do any of this. 

With that being said, ever since I was age 2 (almost 3) I’ve had a screen thrown in my face. It started out being the PS3, and I was introduced to my first ever taste of the internet: LittleBigPlanet. For a little while my dad and I would play it together (I’m an only child). By age 3, almost 4, I was playing it online with people on the internet, often while my parents would be upstairs doing whatever. Doesn’t seem that bad on its own, right? It’s a kid’s game. Now, pair in family computer access. I was hopping on that shit at 4 years old lmfao. And my parents didn’t know how to check search history—and clearly had no inclination to find out—so I was basically free-roaming random ass websites, some of which showed gore or nudity, at age 4. Anyone who was on the internet back in 2009 knows that shit was no where near as sanitized and moderated as it is today lol. So, not great. But I also had a Nintendo DSi at the time. Which was actually fairly safe all things considered, but it also officially established a pattern for me: When I would get bored after playing PS3, I’d go draw or play with toys. When I’d get bored of that, I’d hop on the computer. When I’d get bored of that, I’d hop on the DS. Not great either, right? That’s a lot of exposure to technology for a four-year-old. But I still had playdates and friends at that time, so it wasn’t too bad.

Enter age 5. This was the year I officially “graduated” from preschool, and also my father’s PS3 account. I could now have My Own™. And man did I play the absolute hell out of that account. Not only was I playing LittleBigPlanet (and starting to date on there with people older than me) but I also now had the newfound ability to get called slurs on Call of Duty Black Ops and GTA 4 lmfaoo. Surprisingly enough COD and GTA weren’t actually detrimental to my development in any way, I had some fun times on there despite them being “M”-rated games. The bigger issue for me was LittleBigPlanet, the kid’s game. Age 5 was also the year that I entered a majority-white private school, which wasn’t great for me as a little black girl. Public school was out of the equation for my parents, simply because private schools allowed parents to look inside classrooms while public schools didn’t (yes, that was their only reason). Despite having a small grade size of around 18, I was one of two black kids, and the darkest kid in the class (despite being mixed)—and the kids made sure I knew it. Not only would they compare me to slaves, monkeys, and compare my skin to shit on more occasions than I can count, but there was one boy who would also kick me and hit me literally because I was black—his words—when I was 7 (I was at that school for 4 years). He would leave bruises on my body too—but the teachers said he did it because he “liked me” LMAO. these were the same teachers that would get an easy laugh out of the class by comparing (to be fair, the color brown in general) to poop on several different occasions, so maybe they weren’t necessarily the benefactors of empathy. But anyways school sucked so obviously I was gonna go on the internet lol. So from age 5-9 I would play LittleBigPlanet after I got home from school for hours everyday, talking to pedophiles on the internet. I can count on one hand the amount of play-dates I had at that school (5) and I can’t possibly count the number of hours that I spent playing that video game, voice chatting with 40 year-old pedophiles (that would sometimes use the built-in PS3 voice changer to act like children) about my body and seeing pictures of their dick that they took with the grainy Playstation Eye camera. On top of that, at age 7 I inherited my mom’s iPhone 3G as she moved to the iPhone 4, and when that stopped working at age 8 my parents got me an iPad. So I literally was an iPad kid lol. But I would argue that I’m a PS3 kid at heart. 

I’m not going to get into all the grooming shit but it happened for 4 years obviously from Kindergarten-the end of 3rd grade. At one point I was also considering meeting up with someone I met on the game (just because I thought he was “funny”) at age 8, and I was strongly considering at age 7 getting rare Pokémon cards sent to my house—by another grown man I met on the game—who told me that he loved me, and offered to buy me “anything I wanted” and have it shipped to me. Thankfully common sense kicked in and I eventually decided not to have either happen. Then sometime when I was 8 a news story came out about a kid who got kidnapped after meeting somebody online, and my parents told me not to play LittleBigPlanet online unless they were there. Obviously since that was my only lifeline to a social life that wasn’t happening lol but what I did do—just to be safe—was unadd the vast majority of my 170-something friends on the console, the vast majority of which were above age 20. I actually still kind of feel bad for doing it lol but that’s besides the point. After purging my friend’s list I left around 12 people. But that didn’t matter anyway, because absolutely nothing changed. For about 2-3 weeks after that article came out my parents would come downstairs for maybe 5 minutes to glance at the TV, then go right back upstairs once they saw that I was playing alone. After those 2-3 weeks were up, the status quo returned and I could safely play online for hours on voice chat without my parents ever touching the first stair that led downstairs to where I was. 

In hindsight, they should have done better. Not only should my lack of a social life have been a red flag to them, but the fact that I came home from school crying for hours because the color my skin looked like shit also should have raised suspicions. Nothing that my parents said to try to change my mind would help. There was also one day when I was 6 that I showed my father how to be “popular” on LittleBigPlanet, and I made him a white guy. When he asked why he couldn’t make his skin brown since he’s black in real life, I said something along the lines of “why would you do that? Just because you’re brown in real life you don’t need to be brown online. It just makes things easier.” 

When I was 8, I actually managed to make a neighborhood friend. Our parents met while out on a walk and they decided to have us meet up. She was pretty cool, we had opposite lifestyles. Her parents didn’t allow any technology at all, I was allowed a lot of it. She was homeschooled, I wasn’t. And we got along just fine. We had about 5 play dates, then one time when I was at her house her mother let us go out on a 15 minute walk in the afternoon in our safe suburban neighborhood. We had walkie-talkies to be able to talk to her mother. It was the first time I had ever been somewhere (outside of my own home) without parental supervision. It was fun. I told my mother about this, and she barred me from seeing her ever again that same day. Meanwhile I was allowed to do whatever the fuck I wanted on the internet.

While I could free-roam on the internet, I wasn’t allowed to be in my own backyard alone until age 15. We’d go through cycles every few months where there’d be cameras in our house starting around age 8 (there were none in my room or in the basement where the computer and Playstation were, but that’s beside the point). There would be times where I would be obliviously playing on my iPad after school on the couch when suddenly I would hear my dad’s voice through the camera ring “I see you! I’ll be home soon.” I would tell my parents that having cameras in the house was weird, and they’d flip-flop between “you’re right, let’s get rid of them” and “no, actually they’re staying.” When I turned 15 we moved into a house that had cameras pre-installed, and not only did we keep those but my dad installed 3 additional cameras on top of that (and 2 more outside the house, even though there was already two out there). Whenever I had people over as a teenager and we’d go to the basement, my father would conveniently be doing something down there for the hours that we would be down there talking or watching a movie. If we’d go upstairs, he’d conveniently be doing something up there too. 

And in my household, you don’t even think about being depressed for a damn minute because I’m spoiled rotten, and we’re financially stable, and I’m ungrateful for even saying I’m depressed. My parents had it so much worse than me, they don’t even whoop me or hit me, so how the fuck am I depressed? That’s what I heard pretty much every day after telling my parents I was depressed at age 11. Aside from the fact that I had dealt with racist bullshit and somewhat severe social isolation from the kids at school during formative years from age 5-9, I was also improperly being given enemas from my parents from age 3-10 whenever I had stomach pain or would go two days without shitting LMAOO. I was given adult size fleet enemas regularly while my parents pinned me down and my dad often improperly inserted the nozzle, so my ass would bleed sometimes and at least twice he put it up the wrong hole. When home alone with him when staying home from school due to stomach pain he would often say I was faking, and on one occasion—while giving me the enema—he said that I wouldn’t have to get it done if I didn’t skip school. My mom would also put her fingers up my ass to get shit out. So aside from the online grooming I would argue that I had stuff to be depressed about 💀.  I had very brief therapy stints at 2 therapists when I was a kid. After 2 sessions the therapist said I was depressed and suicidal and my parents took me out of that shit immediately. The second therapist said the same thing after one meetup and my parents never took me there again. 

I’ve come to realize that the dominant feature of my childhood was control. My parents provide me with toys and food, and in return they pick the type of school I go to, whether or not I get an enema, whether or not I get to go outside (or if they’re just happier with me inside), or whether or not there’s cameras in the house. If you are currently raising your child like this, stop. You may think you are protecting your child, but you are not. In fact, I actually had a sexual assault experience at 4 years old with my babysitter’s 5 year old daughter and two 6 year old boys we met while under parental supervision at a waterpark (behind a tunnel). Bad situations happen to everybody—and while you should absolutely try to minimize the harm done to your children, over-policing them only leads to future resentment and ill-prepares them for life. Harmful situations will also happen right in front of you, and you’ll gloss right over them. Do the best you can, but let your child live.