Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

by Meghan Daum

Anna Karenina: People who want children are all alike. People who don’t want children don’t want them in their own ways.

Still, in thinking about this subject steadily over the last several years, I’ve come to suspect that the majority of people who have kids are driven by any of just a handful of reasons, most of them connected to old-fashioned biological imperative.

I realized that what I wanted most of all was to find some different ways of talking about the choice not to have kids. I wanted to lift the discussion out of the familiar rhetoric, which so often pits parents against nonparents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income.

There are notably more women than men here—a thirteen to three ratio, to be exact. That ratio felt to me more or less proportionate to the degree to which men devote serious thought to parenthood (at least before it happens) compared to women, who are goaded into thinking about it practically from birth.

It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption—and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

We were terrible babysitters, impatient, insincere. The kids knew it.

“The world,” he said to me darkly one of those evenings, “has enough people. You and I do not need to add to them.” And I was happy to sign this latest treaty of mutual support and defense.

Scientists say that our pupils flare when they register something of interest; for women, babies top the list. (Porn follows.)

All the available cultural artifacts seemed to be telling us holdouts that if you were a woman, your business was having a baby, and if you didn’t, there was something wrong—with your body, meaning you couldn’t conceive, or your mind, meaning you couldn’t conceive of it.

Another woman held both my hands, her eyes drilling into mine, and said that for her, having children was like flicking on the light in a dark room. But the older I get, I thought mutinously to myself, the more I like a bit of dim lighting. At forty, it’s easier on the complexion.

Here’s where I tell you that I love children, and where you look at me skeptically. But I do. I love them for their wild experiments with language; for their inability to feign interest in things that do not truly grip them; for their seriousness and total immersion in play.

This was the telescoping nature of human endeavor. All the flailing around, the mad activity—going to parties, falling in love, buying houses, striving at work—could be smashed like a soda can into this flat fact: we have children so they can have children so they can have children. I had a blast of vertigo, as when you look into a puddle and see the stars falling away behind your head.

Beyond the personal discomfort, her larger point was that women aren’t going to achieve social equality until some technological alternative is invented to save us from being the only sex expected to go through it. If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised.

I don't agree with this point of view. If men need to pregnant, then the men will become disadvantaged and become the discriminated party in sexism like current situation of women. So one of the keys to solving gender inequality is indeed a machine that can replace women in giving birth, but it does not mean that if men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, the machine can be invented earlier.

It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything.

But then childhood as such really didn’t exist, or at least it wasn’t a recognizable concept, as historian Philippe Ariès documented; this, too, is a social invention. Children were viewed as small adults; apprenticed out to work at age five. It was only as families began getting smaller—birthrates declined steeply in the nineteenth century—that the emotional value of each child increased. Which is where we find the origin point for most of our current ideas about maternal fulfillment.

All I’m saying is that what we’re calling biological instinct is a historical artifact—a culturally specific development, not a fact of nature.

I do agree with it. A lot of things are artificially fabricated for brainwashing.

Maintaining the species is something the United States, too, would appear to have a stake in. But until there’s a better social deal for women—not just fathers doing more child care but vastly more social resources directed at the situation, including teams of well-paid professionals on standby (not low-wage-earning women with their own children at home)—birthrates will certainly continue to plummet.

It’s also my little “fuck you” to a society that sentimentalizes children except when it comes to allocating enough resources to raising them, and that would include elevating the 22 percent of children currently living in poverty to a decent standard of living.

I picture my life without children as a hole dug in sand and then filled with water. Into every void rushes something. Nature abhors a vacuum.

I don’t know how the conversation gets around to the differences between how men and women age, but U talks with determined frustration about the fact that men have more years than women do. By that she doesn’t mean longer lives—statistics tell us that that isn’t true, of course—but a longer time to be fertile, desirable.

Numerous factors have contributed to the Incredible Shrinking Family: the introduction of reliable contraception, the wholesale entry of women into the workforce, delayed parenthood and thus higher infertility, the fact that children no longer till your fields but expect your help in putting a down payment on a massive mortgage. Yet I believe all of these contributing elements may be subsidiary to a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for.

During the Industrial Revolution, Western fertility rates plunged in a similar fashion. This so-called “demographic transition” is usually attributed to the conversion from a rural agrarian economy to an urban industrialized one, and thus to children’s shift from financial asset to financial burden.

We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savoring what every day offers—in contrast to dour killjoys who are bitter and begrudging in the ceaseless fulfillment of obligation.

Here we were, just emerged from the tedious constraints of a seemingly endless education, financially independent for the first time, tasting our liberties at last, and the first thing they decided to do was to enter the prison of child rearing, with all its boring routines and dreadful responsibilities.

As for perpetuating her ethnicity, her parents both taught Irish, and she has “a mother tongue that is under threat.” But, she says, “In the wide scheme of things, I am conscious that languages disappear every year.” We are of a generation grown accustomed to loss—of habitat, wilderness, biodiversity, fish. Why not Irish, too?

The dominant emotion toward children, from mothers and fathers both, seemed to be anger.

Parents may find it difficult to communicate with their children in manu situations and the only thing they can do is expressing their emotions in an ineffective, negatively impacting way. For this situation, I think parents are supposed to try to learn the children's language.

This might have been the first time I understood that if you cared passionately about something and you managed to express it by putting down certain words in a certain order, you could touch people; you could win their praise.

“There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”

I had a college professor who, with Plath’s story very much in mind, used to warn her female creative writing students: “You girls all want to set up your domestic lives before your careers, and that’s a mistake.”

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out, as neatly put by the narrator of this one-sentence story by Lydia Davis called “A Double Negative”: At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

Any person who marries but rejects procreation is seen as unnatural. But a woman who confesses never to have felt the desire for a baby is considered a freak. Women have always been raised to believe they would not be complete and could not be thought to have succeeded in life without the experience of motherhood.

When Michelle Obama (to name just one prominent, accomplished woman) announces, “I’m a mother first,” she is of course saying what most people want to hear. (It is inconceivable that any woman running for public office today could get away with explaining that although she loves her children dearly, for her, being a leader comes first. President Obama has often been heard to say, meaningfully, “I am a father.” No one leans in expecting to hear first.)

Society has some strange stereotyoes about men and women: the men should put their careers first and women should put their motherhood first.

But if being a mom really were something held in high esteem—if it were even regarded with the same respect as other work that people do—women everywhere would probably be a lot happier and more fulfilled than we know them to be.

In fact, I think the high social status of mother is just a propaganda and thus motivates more people to have children. After all, the fertility rate is a very important indicator for a country.

namely, a set of insidious though by no means unprecedented expectations for the maintenance of outward appearances. (The term MILF, which, for the uninitiated, is an acronym for the phrase “Mother I’d Like to Fuck,” only gained widespread popularity some fifteen years ago.)

New prospective that I've never thought.