The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being an Only Child

2845 Words6 Pages

Introduction (Personal Statement) As individuals grow older, face encounters, and endure numerous experiences, they have a tendency to eventually discover an inclusive sense of security in their daily life. Keeping a blind eye open to anything outside of our comfort zone, often times we see no reason to think about how different our lives could have been if particular events had not occurred. For instance, take a second to meditate about your life now and imagine how differently it would have been if you eradicated or altered something else. These are some of the same thoughts that drifted into the mind of the writer as she prepared for this assignment. Through it all, she became further captivated with the notion of how different her life would have ended up, had she remained an only child in her family. The researcher is an African American female college student with two younger siblings who will be interviewing an only child Caribbean American female college student. The researcher originated from an enormous family full with a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Her parents informed her that for the duration of her grandparents’ period, having several offspring was a symbol of affluence and it added a sense of pride and dignity to the father. The researcher was born to a West African mother and father from Sierra Leone. In her culture, having multiple children is seen as a mark of blessings and it is very seldom that one will encounter others from this same region that have just one child. Growing up in the late 1990s, she was the only child to her parents. Yet, she was well aware that someday her family of three would become a family of four and possibly five. Conceivably if it had reached six, this would be no epiphany... ... middle of paper ... ...ned readers on the matter of being an only child while merging both the symbolic interaction and the social exchange theory. As far as quality goes, the interview was slightly more effective than the research primarily because the research was mainly centered on stereotypes. Individually, these theories to a certain extent reassure that, social interactions and emotional being play a crucial role in the human and family development. These theories help to reinstate the value of the two kinds of research used by showing the variety of answers. This allows readers to see that there is no one answers and there will always be outliers in studies that are done. Once a lucid understanding of the quality of different types of research is completed, people will be able to make their own judgments on matters, rather than solely basing their thoughts on one type of evidence.

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