I was trying to think of why I wanted to feature this topic. After all, I have two children whom I love very much. I am not childless by choice.
I remember a while ago my friend said about motherhood, “It’s fun, but be prepared to do something for other people from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.” She was right in both respects, except she forgot about the part where you also have to wake up three to four times a night as well, that the “doing for other people” doesn’t even stop when you go to sleep. That’s just me ranting though.
In the first foggy year of motherhood, I remember thinking a lot about how I understood, finally, why people choose not to have kids. I had so many identity crises that year, I still do, and motherhood was so much harder than I ever imagined, in every way possible. I missed, still miss, my old life often. I miss living for myself, and struggle to find purpose in the Groundhog’s Day aspect of parenthood. And of course I have to qualify that by saying I can’t imagine life without my kids either.
I realized I want to talk about being childless by choice, the decision many women (and men) make, because the way we see women is so tied into procreation. It is essential that we see women as complete, full beings unto themselves, without procreation, in order to protect women’s fundamental human rights.
It’s really none of our business, but I truly appreciate everyone who gave me these honest, thoughtful responses. The range of sentiments here, from logical and direct, to conflicted and emotional, is proof in itself that there is no one way to see the having of children, which is to say, there is no one way that a person should live or be.
Thank you to everyone who opened up about this often delicate and private topic.
Courtney Wooten Adams, PhD, is a Professor of English and is working on a book about women who choose not to have children
My road to deciding not to become a mother wasn’t a straightforward one. I had grown up the oldest of six children, and it was just assumed that growing up meant one day having children of your own. Even after my husband and I married when I was 22, we thought we would “one day” have children even if that day seemed rather far off. What seemed much more immediate was the work I knew I wanted to do by going to school for my M.A. and then my Ph.D and pursuing a teaching career in writing studies. Even before we married, I told my husband that he shouldn’t marry me if he didn’t want to follow me to a job, so my goals were very career-oriented. Still, I thought that children would be part of the plan eventually.
After I had finished coursework during my Ph.D program and was heading into the dissertation stage, my husband and I decided that perhaps this would be a good time to have children. I had spoken with a couple close women mentors and some friends and thought that this might be a time in my career when I could juggle children and the work I needed to do. So, I stopped taking birth control. However, we didn’t really do anything to encourage pregnancy; we simply thought that we would wait and see what happened. About two months after we made this decision, we went to stay with a friend at his parents’ home in the mountains. On our first night, I stayed up late into the night talking with him about whether or not I thought I would be a “good” mother, what motherhood might mean, etc. and he very patiently listened and supported me. After that night, though, I realized that I had doubts about being a mother and that, actually, motherhood didn’t have to be for everyone. Perhaps that seems like a silly thing to realize, but the expectations of motherhood had been so ingrained in my life by the example of the people around me and by sociocultural norms that being a woman means being a mother that I had never even considered not being a mother.
At that point, I went back on birth control and haven’t looked back since. My night thinking about motherhood was an emotional one, but my decision since then has remained unwavering and has been largely an unemotional one. In part, I think, this is because I have support from those around me; frankly, if someone doesn’t support this decision, then I’m not sure we could be very close. I try to be as supportive as possible for my friends, whether they are parents or not, and I expect the same in return. I have also become professionally invested in who women who choose not to have children are and how they communicate their identities to others.
This decision hasn’t been without its costs. And those costs have been largely familial and social. I am fairly blunt with people about not wanting children, and since whether or not someone has children is a typical question to ask someone in their thirties, especially someone who is married, I have experienced a range of reactions to my decision. Complete strangers whom I have just met have thought it was their right and even responsibility to tell me that I would “change my mind one day” and that women should have children. My parents struggled for some time with my decision, at first saying I would change my mind then gradually realizing that I would not and wondering what had precipitated this decision. Last Christmas, my father had a moment that, for him, seemed to explain what had happened, although I have a much different view of it. We were watching an old home video from when I was around ten years old, and I was carrying around one of my younger siblings who was a baby at the time while my parents were in the background talking with relatives. My dad said, “There’s why Courtney doesn’t want kids – she’s taken care of them already.” While I do feel that I have experienced some parts of parenthood due to my role as the oldest of six children, I certainly don’t view that as the primary reasons – or perhaps a main reason – that I chose not to have children. However, my family pinpoints some of those earlier times as ways to make my decision make sense to them.
Interestingly, my husband has faced similar questions, although not with the same frequency or intensity that I have. Perhaps this is because of the idea that men can hypothetically have children at any age (despite research that shows that the ability of men to procreate later in life isn’t guaranteed and does decrease over time). In his workplace, though, his coworkers were surprised when he said that we weren’t going to have children and asked him questions about why we would make that decision. Thankfully, his journey to not becoming a parent paralleled mine – we both decided around the same time that we did not want to become parents. I did put pressure on him, though, because once I decided I didn’t want children, I was firm in my decision. Thankfully, he and I want similar things out of life and have enjoyed building a family without children.
At this point, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of being a woman without children is feeling that others constantly judge this decision. When I first meet someone and tell them that I don’t want children, it is hard to feel that they aren’t judging me on the basis of this decision. What kind of woman doesn’t want children, anyway? And that’s the cultural narrative that I think we need to change: what does it mean to be a woman without children? Even labeling this group cannot be done without referencing their lack; we aren’t simply “women,” we are “women without children” or “childless-by-choice women.” What would it mean if “woman” simply meant that person, in her own skin, regardless of whether or not she had children? And what would it mean if “woman” didn’t seem to imply a dangerous person who will disrupt society? Or, what would it mean if women simply accepted that we will and must disrupt society, regardless of whether or not we are mothers? In the end, I think women generally want to contribute to society and make it a better place for everyone to live in, whether that’s my children or someone else’s. And that’s the work I want society to focus on, not whether or not I have children of my own.
What would it mean if “woman” simply meant that person, in her own skin, regardless of whether or not she had children? And what would it mean if “woman” didn’t seem to imply a dangerous person who will disrupt society? Or, what would it mean if women simply accepted that we will and must disrupt society, regardless of whether or not we are mothers?
Jay, PhD. Professor of English
2014–3 years ago, I had FINALLY gotten a tenure-track job after years of trying. My life to that point had always been temporary, in transition. I was in college, then an MA program going to a different PhD program, then I was in graduate school, then I was in my first job but it wasn’t on the tenure track, so it was temporary…I was always going to go somewhere else, move, uproot my life. So I told myself I was waiting to have children until my life settled down, until I had a sense of where I’d be living long term. In 2014, at the age of 36, I got a tenure track position, and it was time to pull the trigger. I had to decide whether to have kids or not because this pretend “when I am settled” notion was no longer something I could use to put off the decision.
I definitely am not one of those “I never wanted kids and I knew that all along” people. I always assumed I’d have kids. I had names picked out, theories of how to feed them, ideas about where to live that would be conducive to a more “free range” style of parenting, etc. I worked in a daycare for much of college, and I was a nanny to my nephew when I was in my MA program. I love kids. They fascinate me. At parties, I’m the one in the corner playing with the kids. It was always in the future, but it was a future I was sure of. Then, when the time came to make that future the present, I felt panicked and awful. I had extreme anxiety over it. Once, my cycle was late, and I went into a total depression and panic. I was certain I would have an abortion if it turned out I was pregnant. That reaction caught me completely off guard. I assumed I’d always have the attitude of “Oops! Well, the decision is made for us!” if I accidentally got pregnant. Instead, when I thought I was accidentally pregnant, I was as miserable as I’d ever been in my life. My husband and I would talk about it, my mom and I would talk about it, I’d talk to myself about it… I was getting into my upper 30s, and I knew I couldn’t just continue to waffle back and forth forever, so I made myself make a final decision—for my own sanity.
It was very hard. I felt as though something had been lost or died. It was a vision of my own future that I had to mourn. I had always just assumed I would have kids eventually. But it was always a future me—like the feeling you have of what you’ll be like when you’re an old lady. It was never close or real. But once I’d decided not to have kids, it suddenly felt absolutely close and real. I had to say goodbye to the image I’d fostered of kids at Christmas or telling my parents I was pregnant or picking out a first day of school outfit—stuff like that—and of just thinking of myself as someone who would be a parent. What does married adulthood without children look like? I pictured people in NYC going to brunch and then the theater. I had no clue what that looked like for a couple of Gen X people in in the burbs of Birmingham, Alabama. What will my life be? It seemed like a total blank. That was depressing.
My close family and friends didn’t seem particularly surprised or bothered. My mom was relieved I’d finally settled the issue for myself. She could tell the decision was eating me up. I still get weird and rude comments from strangers, but most people in my life are open and liberal. They realize there are other ways to form a life. The most unkind comments have definitely come from mothers of young children. To my knowledge, my husband has never been asked about it at all.
I kept thinking about it a lot at first. Over the past year or so, it’s become less and less frequent. But it’s still something I deal with emotionally. It’s lonely on holidays. I feel weird and awkward in social settings when everyone is discussing their kids. It’s certainly something that comes up fairly regularly.
I often feel odd, weird, outside the space of “normal.” I don’t fit a lot of the time. I notice FB has trouble advertising to me. I’m too old to be a millennial, I’m too young to be a baby boomer, I married, but no kids… It’s a really unusual space, and I don’t quite feel I fit into any clear group. I often have to remind myself that it’s a constructed narrative. Of course people want children. That’s completely understandable. But the narrative that all people must have children is a fiction, and I have to remind myself of that a good deal. I think more and more things like what you’re doing here are vital. Just now, I realized that someone else had faced exactly the same depression I did. I always assumed that was just me and that it had something to do with me making the WRONG decision. If you really don’t want kids, you wouldn’t be depressed about deciding not to have them, right? But now I see that it’s far more complicated than that. Opening the dialogue without judgment of women would help to counter the dominant narrative that most women want children but the few outliers are just hipsters in NYC going to brunch and the theater.
I’d say the thing that not having kids affords me most is the luxury to have a relatively stress-free day-to-day life. One of the main reasons I finally decided not to have kids was that I had a strong feeling I would hate the day in-day out stressors. I also don’t have to have the big major stuff either. I stress over work and aging parents and the other things all people worry about, but generally, the stakes just aren’t as high for me. A goof up or a thoughtless moment or a major life change just doesn’t carry the same weight without kids. I’ve consciously tried to make my life as easy as possible, in fact. I live in an apartment complex, so I don’t have to worry about mowing yards or maintenance or mortgages or cleaning gutters… I have 1 dog. I have a fairly relaxed schedule… all in all, my life is just less stressful. It suits my personality. I feel like I’m being true to who I am living this way.
Founder of Give a Shit About Nature, a site that shares environmental news (also, very cool clothing)
I don’t think I ever took seriously the idea of having children. In my mid 20s, as I became more serious about understanding my ecological footprint and what I could do to reduce it, it became clear that using my genetic material to create more humans was one of the worst things I could do. I often hear the argument that environmentalists absolutely must have kids and raise more environmentalists, but I myself wasn’t raised by eco warriors. Yet here I am. I don’t believe that, on issues of sustainability and consciousness, knowledge flows exclusively from the old to the young, but more often from the young to the old.
I would say it was a mix of emotional and logical. It becomes less about logic and more about feeling when I think about the state of the world for kids in general. In the United States alone, there are roughly 135,000 children in foster care ready to be adopted (according to childwelfare.gov) at any given time. Adoption can be a difficult, rigorous process, but still, it’s hard to justify creating a new person when so many children already born lack stable, permanent homes and familial support structures.
My eldest three siblings have given my parents a total of 7 grandchildren. I have another brother who has not had kids and is opting for a vasectomy in the near future. So there are plenty of babies in the family and I’m not alone in being childless. I think my mother secretly loathes the idea that my brother and I won’t have kids but she keeps it to herself.
I’m mostly done thinking about it, at least for now. I may consider adoption when I’m older. My dad was 46 when I was born. I’ve decided to make a decision about it sometime at or before that age. I have 17 years to figure it out.
The cultural narrative [about finding purpose through having children] hasn’t impacted me much. But I am a man. I’ve come to understand from talking to female friends of mine that the expectations put on them are much higher. One of my friends, who had her daughter about 6 years ago, told me that she was pressured by members of her family to have more children, even though she didn’t want to. In my experience, this impacts women more than men. As far as changing it, I’m not sure. I’ve never studied sociology so I’m not sure I’m qualified to weigh in on that.
Kids are expensive and take up a lot of time. But the young parents I know wouldn’t trade in their kids for extra cash and sleeping until noon. (editor’s note: I mean…)
Amy P. Knight, lawyer, and author of the book, Lost, Almost
I never felt the desire to have kids — and when I was younger I always thought it was probably a “not yet” situation — I’d heard enough stories of people feeling that way and then an urge overtaking them around age 30. Never one to ignore the views of elders, I figured that feeling would come to me, most likely, but as I approached and passed 30, it never did. I never made a serious conscious “Nope! Not doing it!” choice. I just realized, as time passed, that that desire wasn’t coming for me. Which, honestly, was a relief — because through my 20s and into my early 30s, I have had a lot of things I’ve wanted to accomplish, which I did not particularly want hijacked by my uterus telling my brain what to do.
It was more of a relief. I’m not having kids because I really honestly don’t want them. I want other things. I want to be the best lawyer I can possibly be. I want to keep writing and publishing novels. I want to continue to serve the nonprofit whose board I’m chairing right now and do other similar things. I want to read. I want to have adult relationships with other adults. Not feeling a disruptive urge to complicate all that with tiny humans in my life lets me continue the commitments that are important to me without the kind of conflicted feelings I’ve heard from so many talented, creative friends who have all these same urges and also want to be mothers.
My sister is also child-free by choice, so she gets it (although she had to give up on the idea of being Cool Aunt Betsy.) My parents have never pressured me to have children, whether because they really don’t mind or because they are really that insanely supportive, I don’t know. They’ve always referred to my dogs as their grand-puppies. And now that I have a book coming out, my mom has started calling it her “Grand-book.” I really think they are genuinely happy with the things I have chosen to nurture and bring into this world, even if it doesn’t include babies. I also have a lot of child-free close friends. Chicken/egg? Maybe. But some of those friends have been life-long. Nobody seems surprised or concerned.
Colleagues have never said word one. I work in a small office environment. My boss is in his 50s and child-free. For a long time the firm was only child-free lawyers, although we’ve since added two women lawyers with school-aged children. I think my work environment genuinely accepts both choices, and generally considers it none of their business. I’m taking two personal days to devote some attention to the launch of my book. My boss was all for that, and gave me enthusiastic permission to use some personal time for that.
I rarely think about it. I’m too busy thinking about my job, my book, my relationship with my family, my friends, my boyfriend, my dogs, my house, who won the Man Booker, whether we’re all going to be obliterated by nuclear war…
In all honesty, it was probably only that narrative that made me think the urge was ever going to come to me to begin with. Not that that’s a bad thing–if the urge had come upon me, I think I would have been happy to know it was coming. And the odds were in favor of it coming. We’re still rare, we women who don’t end up wanting that.
I think what we do to change it is keep making our own decisions for our own reasons and being reasonably open about them. People ask me sometimes. There’s a lady I take yoga with who seems to have a hard time believing that I’m not into having kids… but at the same time she sees a little jealous of my conviction. She wonders what her life would’ve been if she hadn’t done it.
I’m not the kind of person who’s ever likely to do something because it’s culturally expected of me. So for people like me, I’m not sure the culture of expecting that women are going to want children even needs to be changed. Expecting them to do it even if they don’t want to obviously should go away — but I think in more progressive segments, it already has. Even the most conservative, Catholic friends and relatives in the community I married into never really seemed to imply that I had any kind of duty to raise children. Maybe I never took their heat because I was still young enough to change my mind when I moved away from that community — but I don’t really think so. Maybe they never really thought I was going to be one of them, because I was a lawyer, because my then-husband was always more of the home-maker type, so they’d already given up on us as a traditional couple filling traditional roles. Who’s to say?
At the end of the day — sure, people have asked, assumed, been surprised. But it’s never felt like a threat to my personhood. I recognize that that is serious progress, and that my aunts and great-aunts in previous generations might not have had the freedom to listen for the voice inside that tells them what they do and don’t want. But for me — I use my working hours to fight the death penalty. I use my non-working hours to write fiction, and read fiction, and fight for human rights of people crossing the border, and engage in adult conversation, and have sex, and cook spicy food, and get enough sleep. And nothing anybody has ever said to me has made me question that.
Not feeling a disruptive urge to complicate all that with tiny humans in my life lets me continue the commitments that are important to me without the kind of conflicted feelings I’ve heard from so many talented, creative friends who have all these same urges and also want to be mothers.
Allison Parsons
For me, it was more like I never decided to HAVE kids…if that makes sense. To me, not having kids is the default – choosing to have kids is not the default.
I guess that means I’ve known all along. It wasn’t an emotional decision. To me saying that I “decided to not to have kids” implies that it is given that I wanted to have kids and then at some point I decided not to…and that’s not the case. It’s something that I have understood about myself forever.
Now, there have been moments where I HAVE thought about having kids but they were fleeting and usually based on someone else’s wants or needs (i.e. family members, friends, significant others).
Family: There really hasn’t been any pressure there. I am an only child, only grandchild…I’ve always sort of done my own thing without a lot of push back. My mom has mentioned it a couple of times. Her reasoning was that she didn’t want me to miss out having a relationship with a child like the one we have.
Male friends and colleagues never ask me about it but if it comes up there’s this weird “hi-five, bro” thing that happens.
When I was younger, women would say, “Oh you’re still young, you will change your mind”. Now, people don’t really ask me why, they just ask me if I have kids and I say no and then they ask if we are planning on having kids and I say no. Then, I proceed to qualify the no.
I asked my husband, Jon, to tell me why he thinks we aren’t having kids and he said because we don’t want to have kids. And that was it. He didn’t give a long explanation or anything like I would feel compelled to do. I then asked him if anyone ever asked him about it and he said no. Then I asked if he thought people would question his reasons if they did ask him about having kids and he again said no. There’s definitely some social commentary in there. As a woman, I know that it is socially normative to have kids so when someone asks me about it I feel compelled to speak to that social norm and explain myself. I usually say something about my age or my husband and I are only children (like that means anything, but people do accept that as an explanation) or that we really just like our lives the way they are.
Most people don’t really push back. But at some point, almost all of them make some sort of joke about it. Like if we go somewhere and there are a lot of kids someone will say oh I bet this is your nightmare or something indicating that I hate kids. My choice to not have kids has nothing to do with whether or not I like kids. I was babysitting all through junior high and high school, was a nanny in grad school, worked in an elementary school as an afterschool teacher while writing my dissertation, and my research focuses on health disparities in pediatric populations…I have chosen to be around kids (any and all kids) for most of my life and into my foreseeable future. I just do not want to have any of my own.
I think a lot about the people in our lives who have or will have kids and how that might impact our relationships with them. A lot of our friends have started to move out of the city and into the suburbs for the schools and the space because they either have or are going to have kids. The distance alone is difficult but there are other things, too. A lot of our friends who have young kids are making friends with other people with young kids – not surprising given that they see each other at their kids’ activities and in the neighborhood. We will still hang out but it’s more of an event-based friendship (kid’s and/or adult’s birthdays and such).
A few years ago I probably would have thought it was pretty straightforward to change the cultural narrative and expectations about women having children: As more women do not have kids, I think narratives might change. That’s what I would have told you.
Now, I’m not really sure. I have never really thought that I would have kids and yet I still speak to social norms when someone asks me about it. Culture narratives and social norms are powerful and they are not easily changed. Letting younger generations know that having kids isn’t required to be happy in life is probably a good start. In other words, when talking to kids (no matter their age) not making assumptions about girls wanting to grow up to be mommies. So, if a child says that they don’t want to have kids or brings it up somehow let them know that it’s okay to not have kids – the best life is one where you get to choose what’s best for you. Recognition of that privilege is so important, I think.
When I imagine the life that I want, it does not include having kids. So, not having kids affords me the life I want. I would imagine it is the same for people who choose to have kids…when they imagine the life they want, it includes having kids so by having kids they get the life that they want. I struggled with this one because I gotta tell ya, we really don’t think about it – it’s just our version of life. I mean yeah, there are a lot of things that come with being a parent that we don’t have to deal with and there are a lot of things that we won’t experience because we are not parents.
Cricket Medbery
I was 35 and had been with Dan, my husband, for about a year. The subject came up frequently because most of our friends were having multiple children. It was the time in our lives when most people just have kids. The only thing is my “biological clock” didn’t give a shit. I love children but I don’t have the intense desire that I NEEDED to have my own children. I have plenty of children in my life and I cherish each of those relationships with my niece and nephew and with each of my friends’ children. I am happy with the role of Auntie! Though I do have the intense need to have a dog, I feel an emptiness without my dog.
Growing up I had assumed I would have children when I was an adult. At 39, I have never felt like an adult.
I wonder if I’m going to regret the decision and yes, I absolutely mourned the life I didn’t choose. I’ve realized there are many lives I could live but we have to choose one. I love Sylvia Path’s description of this feeling in The Bell Jar.
My dad suggested I keep my mind open to the option of having children because he and my mom have so much joy and happiness having me and my siblings. It was very touching because of the unconditional love both my parents have for my sibling and me. They both had the burning desire to have children, though. He just doesn’t want me to regret not having children. Dan and I have kept the option open if either of us changes our mind. As far as our responses from our friends I’ve gotten, “but you and Dan are so good with kids, you would be such awesome parents.” This is a lovely compliment but not a strong enough reason to make that choice. I had patients say “but who is going to take care of you when you get old?” In my opinion that would be the worst reason to have children! Dan does not get the same questioning but he is also not as open with people he doesn’t know.
I do think about it often, sometimes more often than others but it’s a big decision that I don’t take lightly.
I don’t feel like I am less of a woman because I don’t have children. This is in part from having other friends who have made the same choice we have made and in our bubble it is not unusual or strange. I do think it should change as a cultural expectation to allow freedom of choice without the guilt and alienation that many women experience. I feel like the shift needs to come from change in marketing since so much of our culture is shaped by advertising. For example, when marketing a laundry detergent having a man do the laundry could change how our cultural views. This is a big question and I could go on but for now I will leave it there.
We were able to save enough to buy a house with a quarter acre fenced in yard. We take multiple vacations a years, next year skiing in Colorado and backpacking in Italy. We are able to go out to eat frequently. We have time and energy for each other and our friends.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Further reading:
Conversations to have before having kids
women look back on not having kids