ABSTRACT
From the parents’ point of view, the five-year-old moving on to full-time school attendance can be felt as a liberating end of a phase, but others can experience this as a loss. Some parents feel now free to devote more time to the pursuit of their interests, but we do find others who feel they have lost their child and, so rarely, we can find women who start feeling broody at this point. Children growing up as an only child are likely to ask the parents at some point why this is so. At what age will the question arise? This probably depends not only on the various environments where other children are met, but also on the personality of the individual child. In most families, by the time the child reaches the age of five, there is one (or more) sibling to accommodate. The five-year-old’s reaction to the birth of a sibling is a fascinating subject.
