I was the fourth child in our family. There were three sisters before I was born. And when I was 2 1/2 another brother was born. Then two more came. I shared a room with my brother. Later, when I was a bit older, we moved to a different room in our house where we had a set of folding doors that divided his end of the room from mine. I’ve almost always had a shared bedroom. For two years of my college education, I did have a private room with no roommate. Then I got married and I’ve had a roommate ever since.

I am not aware of anything that I missed by learning to share my space with another person.

A couple of blocks down the street from where we grew up was a family that had only one son. I can remember thinking that he was unlucky to be the only kid in his family, though I don’t really know why I thought that.

There is a stigma attached to only children. Negative stereotypes about only children include the belief that they are inflexible, shy, bossy and antisocial. Decades of careful research have demonstrated that those stereotypes have almost no basis in reality. Children that grow up without siblings grow up to be well-adjusted and productive adults.

At least one of the sources of the negative stigma attached to only children may have some basis in the work of G. Stanley Hall, a child psychologist of the late 1800s and early 1900s he asserted that only children were coddled and indulged and that they turned into hypersensitive and narcissistic adults. He is often quoted saying that being an only child is a disease in itself. His work was in some ways corroborated by that of Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychotherapist who described only children he treated clinically as pampered and wrote that parents who chose not to have more children were inflicting psychological harm on their one child.

Those ideas caught on and have become part of popular culture, which reinforced the stereotype. I grew up with “Leave it to Beaver,” a popular television show with two kids, well adjusted; “My three sons,” with three children, well adjusted; and “Dennis the Menace,” an only child who was a trouble-maker.

Most contemporary psychologists and decades of data, however, have revealed that only children score well in areas such as achievement, motivation, and personal adjustment.Toni Falbo and Denise Polit reviewed 141 different studies about only children and discovered that overall, “the review indicated that only children were comparable in most respects to their sibling counterparts.”

The stigma, and the research, are of interest to me because we have two children. One is the father of three with one more on the way. The other has one child and is likely to only have one child. We get to observe our grandchildren and compare two different families - one with an only child and the other with a sibling group. I am well aware of my bias, but so far, I have to say that all of our grandchildren are demonstrating intelligence, social skills, strong language development and other positive traits. In short they are delightful people. Our only child grandson is polite and quick to use “please” and “thank you” even though he is only 2 years old. Our sibling grandchildren tend to be a bit noisier and occasionally squabble amongst themselves, but they, too are polite and well adjusted socially.

Of course we will have decades to observe those grandchildren and our observations will never be objective. And if we only consider our grandchildren, our sample size is far to small to draw any conclusions about other children. We do, however, have jobs that bring us into contact with a lot of other children and so far, I have not found children to be more or less well adjusted based on the size of their families.

I’m of the opinion that Hall and Adler simply got it wrong. They applied cultural norms in a time when families had less control of family size and when large families were more common than ones with a single child. Their sample sizes are necessarily small because there simply weren’t many families with a single child. Furthermore, their practices led them to study children who were brought to them because of problems, developmental delays, or social maladjustment in the first place. Neither conducted any random studies of children in general.

There are a lot of other factors that have an impact on development and maturation in children. And many of those factors are far more influential and important than the number of siblings.

Having grown up in a family with lots of children, however, I am aware of how much I enjoy having children around. Last night our son and his family were at our house for dinner and the conversation at the dinner table was rich and varied. There was a bit of cross talk and a few times when multiple conversations were going on so that I couldn’t follow everything that was said. But there were also times when we were all listening to what one person was saying. The children were telling us about their report cards, which came home from school with them yesterday. Our son was talking about his week at work, during which he was doing more city work responding to flooding than library work for several days. We all were sharing things that made us thankful as we look forward to celebrating Thanksgiving next week.

There is something very special to me about having the dining room table full of people and the joy of a family meal, where we pass serving plates and share the stories of our lives over our dinner. I don’t know if I would feel differently had I grown up as an only child. I certainly don’t mind the quiet dinners with just Susan and I. I don’t feel lonely when our children and grandchildren are busy with their lives. I just really enjoy it when we do get together.

And I hope that they will continue to enjoy being together for the rest of their lives.