Conclusion

Do children from different-size families have home environments that vary in ways that may influence their cognitive development and academic achievement? Do extracurricular school activities diverge by sibsize in a manner that may have cognitive and academic implications? Do young people from different-size families have distinctive personality characteristics, such as achievement motivation and self-confidence, which may help to account for the educational deviations that we have seen to exist? And, finally, do parents of small versus large families have disparate childrearing values that may function as unmeasured antecedent variables explaining unequal educational achievement by sibsize? This chapter is devoted to providing some answers to these questions.

Our examination of the home environment makes a distinction between environments as "settings" and as "treatments." Following Spaeth, "settings" refer to the passive aspects of the environment—features that are available to be engaged but do not actively engage the child. "Treatments" are parental behaviors that are directed toward the child and that represent active interventions—encouragement, correction, goal setting and the like. We have regarded this distinction as heuristic and tentative, not ironclad, since many of the environmental features we discuss can be regarded as both passive and active. Using the Health Examination Survey (Cycle II) of young people, we have looked at quantitative data on the amount of time spent by young children (six to eleven year olds) in a variety of informal activities such as reading books, reading newspapers, TV watching, playing alone, and engaging in sports, Little League, and similar activities. We find that children from small families are more likely to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits, and children from small families (particularly only children) spend much more time playing alone. However, data on popularity suggest that children from small families are more popular. Hence, the fact that such children spend a fair amount of time alone is not due to enforced isolation because of unpopularity. It does seem, however, that such children have the opportunity to develop the ability to be alone and to use such time profitably. Nothing from any of the surveys suggests that children from small families, especially only children, are lonely, depressed, or hopeless.

An interesting finding from the High School and Beyond data concerns whether the respondents were read to as children. Children from small families report themselves as having been more likely to have been read to as children than those from large families, in spite of the fact that, in many cases, children from large families presumably had siblings who could have performed this service. These data thus indicate that although siblings might theoretically provide help and instruction, children's chances of actually receiving such attention are enhanced if parents can provide it. The data do not support Zajonc's hypothesis concerning the teaching role of older siblings. In the same study, youngsters from small families were more likely to have experienced selected advantages such as having music or dance lessons or to have traveled outside the United States. In effect, our analysis suggests that children from small families and only children have more intellectually stimulating settings and a broader range of stimuli.

Among teenagers, our analysis by sibsize of the types of extracurricular activities in high school engaged in by seniors is also instructive. A factor analysis allowed us to divide nonsports activities into five types—intellectual (student government, school newspapers, etc.), cultural and artistic (drama, orchestra, etc.), community (youth groups, church groups, "Y," etc), vocational (farm clubs, carpentry, etc.), and hobby. Youngsters from small families are more likely to engage in intellectual and cultural activities (with or without sports) than are those from large families, and those from large families incline more toward community, vocational, and hobby activities. This is true even after we have removed youngsters from farm families (which are both larger than others and also have high rates of participation in community and vocational kinds of activities).

Turning to parental treatments, do parents of small versus large families conform to the speculation that small families are hard-driving and competitive, emphasizing external standards of excellence, whereas large families emphasize obedience, conformity and assimilation? Although there does seem to be some bivariate association between parental values for offspring and the number of children parents have, this association disappears when education, age, and religion are held constant. These results provide further backing to our contention that many of the personality characteris-

tics that have been associated with small versus large families are actually characteristics related to education and class rather than family size.

Turning to respondents' personality characteristics, we have been concerned with those aspects of personality that seem important for academic and intellectual advancement, and about which we have information. We have concentrated on over- and underperformance in school and on confidence in one's own intellectual ability.

With regard to over- and underperformance (defined as receiving school grades above or below what would be expected given the student's ability), differences by sibsize are not large, but children from sibsizes two to four are more likely to overperform than those from sibsizes five or more. Large families show a fairly consistent pattern of underperformance as well.

Information on confidence in one's own intellectual ability is available from Youth in Transition. Not only do youngsters from small families have more confidence in their ability than those from large families, but they have more confidence than would be expected on the basis of their ability scores. By contrast, boys from large families have less confidence than would be expected on the basis of such scores.

It thus appears that with regard to personality characteristics, young people from small families, including only children, seem to have none of the adverse traits often associated with an absence of many siblings. Moreover, children from small families are likely to overperform rather than underperform in school (although the differences on overperformance are not large), and to have a great deal of confidence in their own ability. Children from large families are more likely to underperform, and lack confidence in such objectively verified abilities as they have. We are thus led to believe that the prevalent notions about negative traits of only children and those from small families stem in part from the highly advantaged position that such children have, relative to children from large families—advantaged socioeconomically and in terms of the lack of dilution of such resources as exist. Since many more people have come from large families than from small ones, such people have "carried the day" in labeling those from small families as overindulged or spoiled by advantages.

Finally, this chapter has provided additional information relating to the causal interpretation advanced in this volume—that there are independent effects of sibsize on child achievement. As discussed in detail in our introduction, the alternative explanation of sibsize effects is that both sibsize and differential environment are the result of unmeasured antecedent parental characteristics that affect both the number of children parents have and the environments they provide. In effect, it is argued that sibsize effects are spurious. The results in this chapter supplement the data presented in our introduction concerning whether parents of small versus large families have disparate personality traits. Here we examine whether such parents have different childrearing values—differences that are not captured by socioeconomic controls. Our analysis indicates either no difference, or small differences in childrearing values by sibsize after controls for parental socioeconommic status are introduced. It thus seems that parental personality traits and childrearing values, at least as analyzed so far, are not among the unmeasured variables that might invalidate our interpretation of the sibsize/achievement relationship.