When I spent the night at my best friend McKenzie’s house, her little brother Seamus and little sister Nora kept breaking into her room while we were hanging out. After escorting Nora out and throwing Seamus out for the umpteenth time that afternoon, McKenzie asked me, “Didn’t you at one point want siblings?”  At one point I did.

I am an only child. When I was 3, I swallowed a penny thinking that would give me a baby brother or sister. I dreamed about having a personal playmate throughout my life. As I’ve gotten older, however, I realized being an only child is great.

Fourteen million children are only children – making up 20% of all minors in America.

After my mom had me, she was content with being a single mother of a daughter. And I am content too. I had friends, and when they weren’t around I had imaginary friends. According to a study done by psychologist Eileen Moore, oldest children, children who are only children and children who don’t watch TV as often are prone to have imaginary friends. It wasn’t until recently, I realized that those imaginary friends helped me become a novel writer. With as much alone time I had as a child I developed personalities, appearances, and end goals for these imaginary friends. Which is a lot more than most kids who had imaginary friends at the same age as me did. Most of their imaginary friends were animals or made up creatures while mine were actually normal human beings in my eyes. Writing my characters on a website called Charahub now is a lot more easy now because I’ve essentially done this all before as a child.

The most common thing people directly ask after you tell them you’re an only child is: “Oh? So that means you get spoiled a lot, right?”

No, it honestly doesn’t mean that at all. Sure, my mom bought things that we probably couldn’t have afforded if she had another kid; but it wasn’t every single day. I have had friends with siblings, who owned far more possessions than my mom and I. A lot of those kids were real brats in school. I guess they never learned how to share or take turns with their things. Luckily my mom instilled those ideas when I was a toddler so I never had those problems growing up even though I was an only child.

There are a lot of good things about being an only child too. You have plenty of alone time to occupy yourself with books, writing, drawing, walking outside, or playing made up games you made when you were bored.

Being alone now is like a holiday for me. Everyday I’m forced into social situations and to interact with actual people daily thanks to school. I crave that alone time now.

Another thing is I find fighting pretty pointless. Without a sibling, I didn’t have to deal with unnecessary fighting, drama and bullying.

Unfortunately, the side effect is that only children can get overly sensitive. Meaning if someone didn’t like your shirt, well, that’s it. The world is officially ending.

Another downside is that you tend to annoy your friends a lot. We all didn’t have older siblings growing up so we basically had to learn to figure out social cues by ourselves.

And lastly, a really bad thing about being an only child is every time you’ve failed you felt like you failed your parents. I mean, you are their only hope at bringing a successful, worthwhile human being into this world. So it is a lot of pressure to live up to your full potential to make your parents be proud of you.

Even though there are negatives about being an only child, there is a lot of good things as well. I probably would have grown up to be a different person if I had an older sibling before me or had to deal with a younger sibling that came after me. To be honest. I’m pretty satisfied with the fact I’ve never had siblings and I probably will never have any. Some people think it be too lonely or quiet without a sibling. For me, however, I wouldn’t have it any other way.