When ‘just one’ sparks scrutiny

Delhi-based Sukriti Mathur, 28, still remembers the exact manner in which the question was asked. It was something that usually passes for small talk. “Some guests had come over, and one of the women — meeting us for the first time — asked my mother how many children she has after she saw me,” she says. Her mother smiled, and said, “Just one.”

Sukriti pauses. “There was shift and you could feel it. And then it came: Only one?”

For Sukriti, the discomfort was not new. It had followed her in fragments — in school admissions, during casual conversations, in the offhand sympathy of strangers.

“People don’t say it outright,” she says. “But you grow up sensing that you are a lesser version of a family.” Even though we have moved past narratives of the “the ideal mother” and have accepted women focussed on careers, our culturally rooted norms still struggle with the woman who refuses to be consumed by motherhood.  

Sociologist Gulshan Sihag from Gujarat University, explains, “In the Indian sociological imagination, the family is not merely a private unit; it is a reproductive contract with the community and the groups to which she belonged.”

Sihag adds, “Historically, plurality was a hedge against high infant mortality and a strategy for agrarian labour. There remains a kind of structural anxiety with one child. And if that child is a girl, the patriarchal lineage is seen as reaching a “dead end.”

Consequently, the single child family is seen as incomplete not because of lack of love, but because it fails to satisfy the social expectation of multigenerational safety net and the socially constructed norms of society.”

Not always about choice

The decision to have one child — or more — is framed as preference, temperament, even selfishness. But there are other lived realities, that of pregnancy, recovery, and risk.

Dr Teji Dawane, Senior Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at a Bengaluru hospital describes postpartum recovery as a “sea change”— uneven, and often prolonged. Particularly after Caesarean sections, healing is neither swift nor linear; there are lactation challenges, sleep deprivation, and emotional recalibration.

For many women, recovery stretches months; some need a year or more to feel remotely normal. Yet this timeline rarely enters family expectations. As nuclear households expand and women return to work early, the postpartum period becomes an impossible overlap of care, labour, and healing.

Dr Dawane adds, “Gestational diabetes, hypertension, and thyroid disorders are increasingly common, prolonging recovery and intensifying risk in subsequent pregnancies.” For those whose first experience was medically difficult, another pregnancy can feel less like choice and more like calculation.

In cases involving assisted fertility, the strain deepens. Treatments such as IVF introduce hormonal demands and higher chances of preterm birth, multiple pregnancies, and complications for both mother and child. In some instances, doctors explicitly advise against another pregnancy.

Such guidance often clashes with social expectations that privilege larger families or the idea of a sibling. Women are left negotiating between medical advice, personal limits, and cultural pressure, weighing desire against the memory of what the body has already endured.

Gendered asymmetry

For Mumbai-based Anita Narang, 52, the decision to have one child was shaped by financial strain. But its emotional aftermath has been unevenly distributed.

“After the birth of our daughter, we were struggling financially,” she says. “We decided not to have another child. I started working soon after my pregnancy to support the household.”

Years later, she still feels the weight of that choice. “I admit that I feel lesser, incomplete,” she says. “At family functions, when people say ‘just one,’ my smile shrinks. It feels like I’ve committed some kind of crime.” Her husband, she observes, has never had to answer such questions.

Sihag frames this disparity as deeply gendered. “When a man advocates for a single child, it is read as economic rationalism,” she says — evidence of foresight and responsibility, a desire to consolidate resources and provide a better quality of life.

“But when a woman makes the same decision, it is often framed as selfishness,” Sihag adds. She is seen as protecting her body or her career at the expense of her child’s needs, she notes. The asymmetry is stark. “Men are allowed to be strategic,” she says, adding, “Women are only allowed to be sacrificial.”  

Cultural myths that persist

Layered onto this is a persistent cultural myth: that a single child is, by definition, socially deprived. Kavita Yadav, psychologist, psychotherapist, and parenting coach, challenges this assumption.

Social development, she argues, is not determined by the presence of siblings alone, but by the emotional availability of caregivers, exposure to peers, and the broader home environment. An only child raised in an attuned, responsive household can be just as socially capable — sometimes more so — than a child with siblings.

Yet, in India, the mother of one is often scrutinised for retaining a sense of self beyond motherhood. The critique can be subtle but sharp: that she has withheld something essential from her child.

In reality, Yadav notes, maternal well-being is closely tied to more responsive and emotionally available parenting. The issue is not the absence of siblings, but as the balance between support and autonomy, attention and independence.

In many cases, the decision to have one child is less an ideological stance and more a negotiation with constraints — financial limits, lack of care infrastructure, time, health, and the desire to “do justice” to parenting. What persists, however, is a cultural discomfort with that choice, particularly when it is made by women.

Dropping fertility rate

India is gradually becoming a smaller-family nation. The country’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has declined to about 1.9 children per woman between 2023 and 2025, falling below the replacement level of 2.1, according to recent estimates by the United Nations Population Fund and data analyses from Data for India.

This marks a steep drop from nearly 2.9 in 2005 to around 2.0 by 2020, reflecting a long-term structural shift in how Indian families are being imagined and built.

Within this transition, only-child families remain a minority but are steadily rising, especially in urban India. A peer-reviewed study published in 2016 in the National Center for Biotechnology Information estimated that only about five per cent of Indian households had a single child, but the proportion rose to roughly 13 per cent in metropolitan areas, particularly among educated and higher-income groups.

Recent research suggests that the stigma surrounding only-child families persists even as evidence increasingly challenges it. A 2024 report by the American Psychological Association finds that stereotypes of only children as selfish or maladjusted remain culturally entrenched despite decades of data showing otherwise.

Another 2024 study published in World Journal of Clinical Cases finds that parenting stress is closely tied to family structure — but not in the way popular perception assumes.

In fact, while multi-child households reported higher overall stress levels, the study underscores that in single-child families, parenting remains highly intensive and psychologically concentrated, with parental attitudes, expectations, and involvement playing a disproportionately large role in shaping the child’s emotional world.