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The topic was undertaken to explore the personality dimensions of adults who experienced childhood as an only child. For decades, popular opinion and research have negatively portrayed this particular birth order, leaving only children unfairly stigmatized. Contemporary empirical data establishes positive advantages to the birth order position and no greater occurrence of negative than children with siblings do. This paper summarizes many academic articles exploring various facets of human existence, some directly related to only children and some more targeted to birth order in general. Topics covered include multidimensional perfectionism, relationship trends, political leadership, Type A tendencies, different types of onlies, cross-cultural data, parental interaction, and real life experiences of only children. In this paper, the data collected serves to generalize expected behaviors, trends, and adult implications of belonging to the birth order of Only Child.
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