What If We Talked To Parents The Way We Talk to Women Who Don't Want Kids?

In 2022, "You have time to change your mind" should be banished forever

I wasn't sold on the idea of having kids until I met my husband two weeks after I turned 35. I spent my adulthood prior being undecided on the whole "being a mom" thing, and because of that, I was frequently prodded to discuss my reproductive aspirations with other adults who were put off by my ambiguity on the issue. Even though I'm now on the receiving end of an entirely new variety of annoying platitudes, the way many people spoke to me before I decided to have children has stuck in my craw.

When I would say I didn't want to have children unless I found a long-term partner who I thought would be a suitable co-parent, I'd get confused looks.

Then, after an uncomfortable silence, they would say something like,

"Well, you have time to change your mind."

As though they needed to be assured that there was a chance that I might become a parent someday in order to achieve inner peace for themselves. The idea of a young woman not aspiring first and foremost to be a mommy shook them. They needed to know there was a chance that I was wrong about my own feelings. (And for what it's worth, I didn't "change my mind"; I met somebody who I wanted to coparent with and now we are coparenting.)

Imagine that phrase being aimed at people who wanted kids but didn't have them yet. Picture a nice Sunday brunch with some pals from college, and one woman confides in the group that she was hoping to get pregnant soon. Awkward pause. "Well," you say. "You're not pregnant yet. You have time to change your mind."

I was asked if I was planning on freezing my eggs by people who never asked about my other removable body parts like tonsils or the appendix. I would tell them no, that the egg retrieval process sounded like something I didn't want to do to myself but more power to the people with a stomach for it. Then they'd encourage me to do it, just in case, even though none of them had done it themselves. Imagine sharing this sentiment with a parent, telling them that they should make sure there's a friend or relative willing to take the kid in later, just in case the baby turned out to be an asshole.

Then there's "But who is going to take care of you when you're old?" and "Not having children is selfish" and "But you'd make such a great mom!" -- phrases that imply the person who isn't gung-ho on motherhood is a modern day Ebeneezer Scrooge type depriving the world of her Olympic mommy skills because she gets off on it.

(This line of questioning is especially hurtful to people who want children and can't have them or are struggling with infertility and are trying to deflect the conversation to another topic in order to avoid getting into something painful-- Another reason not to bring this topic up.)

Can we-- the collective "we"-- please leave women who don't have kids the fuck alone? Can we let them bring up the topic of reproduction if they want to talk about it, and otherwise talk about the weather or the latest in the Free Britney saga? Can that be our 2022 resolution?

Throughout history, women got married and had lots of babies because the only socially and financially viable option was marrying a man and having lots of babies. Society was structured so that women were financially dependent for their entire lives. It was tough to fit into polite society as a single woman with no children who was not a nun or a lesbian heiress; the alternative to wife and mother was living alone and, if you pissed the wrong married person off, eventually branded with a scarlet letter or burned as a witch. But today, it's not weird for a woman to marry for the first time when she's over 40, or to not ever enter into a lifelong partnership. Women don't need their husbands' permission to open a bank account. Kids aren't the objective of every marriage. Having a child outside of marriage and raising them a partner isn't unacceptable (although it seems pretty hard). Plenty of women want neither marriage nor children, and in most big cities, nobody gets bend out of shape over it.

In addition, giving birth has never been a less attractive individual choice for many American women. The US birth rate is the lowest it's been since the government has kept track. (It's dropping across every demographic except in women over 40.) Younger women know more about the physical and emotional costs of pregnancy and parenthood than their mothers and grandmothers did and have nope'd out in record numbers. At the same time, some people who aren't put off by the cost motherhood extracts from one's body and time don't have kids because circumstances aren't right for them. Kids are expensive, and young women owe most of the outstanding student loan debt, health care costs are absurd, the oceans are rising, we're still experiencing a neverending pandemic, etc. I don't blame any woman who chooses, for these or their own reasons, that having a child is not a sensible decision.

So why are we so rude in such a specific way to women who don't have or want kids?

Anecdotally, I've noticed an overlap between people who act disturbed by women ambivalent about motherhood and the people who complain the loudest about how hard it is to be a parent (or who have the least happy wives). I wonder if these are the same people who started families out of a sense of obligation, and it didn't occur to them that they have a choice. I wonder if at the root of badgering of women who don't have kids is a sense of unfairness and a desire for everybody to be equally as miserable as they are.

Having children can be exactly the right move for some, the wrong move for others. Newly on one side after living a long time on the other, I hope we can all learn to be kinder to those who made different choices than we did.

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