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

by Meghan Daum

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

As Jeanne Safer so poignantly describes in her essay, she didn’t really want to have a baby; she wanted to want to have a baby.

I think this is a line that resonates with me a lot. It's natural to want to want to have a child because that's everyone's expectation from you and it can be hard to reconcile our innermost reluctance with everyone's expectations.

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. I wanted to show that there are just as many ways of being a nonparent as there are of being a parent. You can do it lazily and self-servingly or you can do it generously and imaginatively. You can be cool about it or you can be a jerk about it.

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

But a dwindling number of my babyless friends admitted, very quietly indeed, that they weren’t so sure they wanted one, not just now but ever—like a group of medieval heretics muttering agnosticism at a time when that could get you a date with a stake and some matches.

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.

Is there any other situation in life where people feel so free to tell you what to do, short of checking you in to rehab? “I’d get on with it, if you’re going to do it,” said the gynecologist, blunt as a speculum. “And sooner rather than later.” I didn’t recall having asked her opinion.

You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing, if only so that we can help you work through your feelings about not having it!”

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.

It only confirmed Firestone’s view that childbearing was barbaric, and pregnancy should be abolished. 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.

Firestone was clearly no fan of Nature, an animus I find myself reliving whenever I hear people, especially women, espousing such supposedly “natural” facts as maternal instinct and mother-child bonds. It’s not that I think these things don’t exist; they certainly do. They exist as social conventions of womanhood at this moment in history, not as eternal conditions, because what’s social is also malleable.

If it were up to nature, women would devote themselves to propagating the species, compliantly serving as life’s passive instruments, and pipe down on the social demands.

As family historians tell us, this is also when the romance of the child begins—ironically it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today.

Pregnancies are useful for clarifying one’s life priorities, of course, but they also clarify a lot about the prevailing conditions of motherhood when you’re deciding whether or not to sign on for the long haul.

Not to mention (how to put this politely?) that child raising is not what you’d call a socially valued activity in our time despite the endless sanctimony about how important it is, which those doing the labor of it can’t help being furious about—quietly furious about being dropped down a few dozen rungs in the social-equity ranks.

Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.

Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it’s not a dichotomy; it’s a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one. There would be all sorts of ways to organize society and sexuality that don’t create false choices if we simply got inventive about it—as inventive as we’ve been about equity in sexual pleasure—but there has to be the political will to do it.

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.

but what is the future when you are always feeding it money? Doesn’t it get tiring to give so much away to a world that you’ll never get to touch and see?

I couldn’t help but wonder whether people chose to have families to avoid some stranger’s inscrutable projection. If the desire to have children is just a way to build some noisy tribe of distraction around oneself, then I’d rather be alone.

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.

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy.

The question is whether kids will make us happy.

Studies have repeatedly documented that the self-reported “happiness” index is lower among parents than among the childless. Little wonder that so many women like me have taken a hard look at all those diapers, playgroups, and nasty plastic toys and said no, thanks.

I’d rather pine for children than die saying to myself, ‘I could have been a contender.’ I was a contender.”

I’m arrogant enough to actually think that the world will be a poorer place without my genes in it. But the fact is that I don’t care enough to do anything about it. There wasn’t time to do that and the other things on my list.

I certainly don’t feel I owe the future anything, and that includes my genes and my offspring. I feel absolutely no sense of responsibility for the propagation of the human race. There are far too many human beings in the world as it is. I am happy to leave that task to someone else.

I certainly don’t see my purpose as being to perpetuate the human race. What makes my life worth living for me and also what, I think, redeems my life is my relationships and interaction with others, be they family, friends, lovers, colleagues, total strangers. I think what redeems individuals is their acts of humanity.

I began to understand how a person could love his or her children and at the same time deeply resent them.

Motherhood was like school; it was inescapable. It went along with marriage—and I didn’t know any girl who imagined a future for herself that didn’t include marriage.

As a child, I never felt safe. Every single day of my entire childhood I lived in fear that something bad was going to happen to me. I live like that still. And so the big question: How could a person who lived like that ever make a child feel safe?

I am astonished at those who are unfazed by the prospect of child raising. A male friend of mine, childless but confident, once assured me, “You just give them lots and lots of love.” Perhaps only a man could believe it is as simple as that.

motherhood is one of the most significant as well as one of the most widely shared of all human experiences. In Western culture, it has always been essentially synonymous with womanhood. Yet who can name a major novel by a canonical writer, male or female, that takes motherhood for its main subject?

Plath could not bear the thought that her intelligence and ambition might take away from her womanliness. On the other hand, even as a schoolgirl she had worried about future motherhood holding her back from literary achievement, which, for her, meant not just sitting down to write, but being prolific, winning prizes, publishing a best seller.

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity.

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.

That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants—and should want—both.

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.

Through my mom’s parenting I learned that there was more pain and hurt than there was joy and happiness in the world, and it scared me to death to think of bringing a brand-new person into that heady mix. How could I ever be sure that I would do a better job? What if her failure was genetic, and I was worse?

Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman’s personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone thinks they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone who is curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.

I admire women who look at the rigors of parenting and decide they’re just not cut out for it, or just don’t want to try, and I wish that we had more conversations about childlessness that didn’t force us to approach them from such a defensive place.

Those who hear my story might be tempted to assume that my desire to be childless is rooted in loss—the loss of my mother’s protection and loyalty, the loss of faith in family, the loss of childhood itself. But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate. It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify.

A childless friend recently said to me, “I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”

Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.

Nonmotherhood is forever. Making a conscious choice about something so fundamental, and so intertwined with one’s own past, with society’s expectations, and with notions of femininity and the purpose of life, takes every ounce of will you have; going against the grain always does.

There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.

Real self-acceptance, real liberation, involves acknowledging limitations, not grandiosely denying them. It is true, and should be recognized, that women can be fulfilled with or without children, that you can most definitely have enough without having everything.

Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life “meaning” is the one to which I am most hostile—apart from all the others. The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose! I’m totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose. It would be a lot less fun if it did have a purpose—then we would all be obliged (and foolish not) to pursue that purpose.

Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours. People raise kids because they want to, but they always emphasize how hard it is.

To choose not to have children is to stretch too far outside the inherited rule that procreation is both a biological and a civic requisite for full and proper membership in the human race.