Mar 13, 2026
I am the only child of my family. However, it didn't make me realize until I moved to the US that it's so rare of me being the only child in my family[1]. The good thing is, I had hardly even sensed anything unusual before that. The bad thing is, it did make me feel I've missed something in my life, what could life be like if I have a sibling?
Just like people who have siblings can't really experience being the only child, I can't really experience what it's like to have a sibling. Maybe the biggest difference to have siblings is, they have shared parents, while I don't. Will this make a difference? Definitely, and I think siblings are the only ones who can hold similar memories with me about my parents. However, in retrospect, the time really came to me when I feel I need siblings is probably when I feel lonely or think about success.
From my individual memory of my childhood, my cousins and my father's friends' sons, served as the role of my "siblings". We spent time together after class or in weekends. In fact, I would just call my female cousin as my sister and my male cousin as my brother, which most peers in where I am from did. To a large degree, although the number of kids in a family had decreased dramatically in China, the number of kids I was surrounded with didn't decrease that much.
To discuss about loneliness, we need to know, what causes loneliness? I think it's caused by not having somebody to accompany with you and share your experience and emotional feeling with when you want to. Siblings, due to the shared experience in childhood, naturally have this unparalelled advantage to be the people you can trust and talk with. Meanwhile, the connection is very likely to continue since you have shared parents who serve as a bond between you all. Thus, there is a decent chance that siblings can be the ones to ease your loneliness, whether in childhood or in adulthood.
But, thinking about the recipe of easing loneliness, it's totally possible to achieve that without having siblings. You just need to find the people, they can be your parents, cousins, friends, or anyone. The issue underlines loneliness is not about having siblings or not, rather, it's about finding the individual, and siblings are just often the very few people you are close to.
I want to success, of course, and I think most people want that, in different forms, too. When I looked at all fields' celebrities, what surprised me is almost all of them have siblings. But I soon realized it's me caring too much about "success" that I obsessed every factor of "success". And my even bigger mistake is, I neglected the fact that most people in the world have siblings.
Luckily, there never lacks evidence that only child can success. The answer still largely lies in China, how could China have become so prosperous in the past decades if that's not due to the contribution from people who are the only child? Almost all notable people under 50 years old you can think of in China, are the only child, for example: Zhang Yiming, Wang Xingxing in technology and business, Yao Ming, Zheng Qinwen in sports, Yang Mi, Xu Song in entertainment industry, and numerous others. And there will even emerge more in the next couple decades.
It would always be a wonderful experience if I can have some siblings. But it also makes me realize that I am so unique as an individual in this world. As discussed, whether having siblings or not will not be an real obstacle to achieve what you want, and so many only child people are continuously changing the world now. Keep going, and good things are yet to happen.
[1] During 1979 to 2015 (roughly corresponding to generation Y and Z in western society), in order to control the problem of overpopulation, China's one-child policy had restricted most Chinese families to only have one child. ↩
Last modified on Mar 15, 2026