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

by Meghan Daum

Now the decision is made. But the decision is not past. No matter how it came about—was it my procrastination; disinclination; anxiety; self-absorption?—we live with its consequences every day. Nathan is younger than I am, and it’s a little odd to be dealing at his age with the question of whether he will have his own children or not.

lowering the maternal death rate, inventing decent birth control methods—that’s offered women some modicum of self-determination. If it comes down to a choice, my vote’s with technology and modernity, which have liberated women far more than getting the vote or any other feminist initiative (important as these have been), precisely by rescuing us from nature’s clutches.

In retrospect, not having children feels to me like having dodged a bullet. I think the lifestyle would have felt too constraining, too routine, though I do sometimes encounter women who seem to manage it with panache.

curiously little heed is paid to why the West is aging. Our gathering senescence is routinely referenced like an inexorable force of nature, a process beyond our control, like the shifting of tectonic plates or the ravages of a hurricane. To the contrary, age structure is profoundly within human control. Remarkably resistant to governmental manipulation, it is the sum total of millions of single, deeply private decisions by people like me and a startlingly large proportion of my friends and acquaintances. We haven’t had kids.

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.

Financial independence is very important to me, as is retaining my own independence in any relationship. Something would have to give in order for me to properly care for a child, and, unfortunately, it’s most often the mother who has to forgo some aspect of her life.”

“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.”

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?

And for us, the lucky daughters, reliable birth control, legal abortion, and changes in attitudes toward a woman’s rights and her place in society brought about possibilities the likes of which women before us could only dream.

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

If you were a girl who loved above all to read and write and who could not imagine an adulthood in which these activities did not hold a central place, you probably knew even before puberty that you were headed for conflict. For is it not a truth universally acknowledged that, for a woman, the central place is reserved for her kids?

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.

do plan to have kids one day, but I certainly hope they won’t be the most important thing in my life!”

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.)

Our own culture likes to sentimentalize motherhood with a certain kind of mushy tribute, as in those Procter & Gamble “Thank you, Mom” commercials aired during the Olympics. 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.

And not too much time passes in the course of my days without my remembering that I have missed one of life’s most significant experiences. But let me say this: the idea of having it all has always been foreign to me. I grew up believing that if you worked incredibly hard and were incredibly lucky, you might get to have one dream in life come true. Going for everything was a dangerous, distracting fantasy. I believe I have been incredibly lucky.

And so when I tell people—usually female friends—that, at age forty-one, I “don’t know” if I want children or still feel that I’m “not ready,” what I’m really saying is that I don’t believe I can do the things I want to do in life and also be a parent to kids, nor am I willing to find out. Fueling this tension is a deep and paralyzing fear, a fear that, again, is not so much about children but about my own latent caretaking instincts. I suspect I would be a good mother—a fantastic mother, even—thanks to the gifts bestowed upon me by my own parents: the ability to give and express love, the indulgence of curiosity, and the prioritizing of imagination, education, and personal integrity over societally approved successes like financial or social achievement.

Some might call my trepidation at the idea of motherhood “selfishness”—I would call it “agency”—but those people are probably either (1) dudes or (2) self-satisfied professional parents, and I’m not sure I care enough about their opinions that I wouldn’t just agree with them and shrug my shoulders in shared chagrin. (Those who inquire after my plans for parenthood often interpret my childlessness as a function of my dislike for kids, when, again, nothing could be further from the truth: the barrenness of my womb has nothing to do with a distaste for kids, who, along with animals, I like and identify with more than I do with most adults.) But the fact is, it is never far from my mind that the means of reproduction—and its costs—are beasts of burden borne, historically, by the fairer sex.

“I was forty years old; I had a life,” Ms. McCray told New York magazine. “But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it … I’ve been working since I was fourteen, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.” (The editors of The New York Post interpreted these comments to mean that Ms. McCray was a “bad mom” and said as much, in huge type, on the cover of their paper’s May 19 edition.) * * *

My childhood was so inconsistent that I never expected normalcy, and it’s enough for me to be able to have time and space to be good to myself and the people around me. Children are nice, but I decided to save myself instead.

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.”

The problem is that there is nobody alive who is not lacking anything—no mother, no nonmother, no man. The perfect life does not and never will exist, and to assert otherwise perpetuates a pernicious fantasy: that it’s possible to live without regrets. 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.

How fortunate we are to live in an era when we can make deeply considered choices about which life suits us, and that now the world looks slightly less askance if we go against the flow.

Having enough—and having the right stuff for us—is all we can get, and all we need.

During the early 1970s, when I first became theoretically interested in sex, there was a considerable body of evidence to suggest that unless you were extremely careful, having sex could lead to unwanted pregnancy. Teen pregnancy was a bad thing, to be avoided through various “precautions” (a word that seemed deliberately chosen for its anti-aphrodisiac qualities). Maybe those early sex-education classes worked on me more powerfully than I realized: I’m fifty-six now and am still convinced that if I fathered a child it would be a belated instance of teen pregnancy.

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.

The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win. I think I was about fourteen when I was obliged to swallow my first substantial helping of regret. I would like to claim that it was also my last, but it turned out to be the opening course of a never-ending feast. If I’ve never forgotten the taste, that is because under- or overcooked regret is the main dish—the very taste—of adulthood.

in Greece (I might as easily say “for in the entire universe”), a woman who doesn’t want children is anomalous, aberrant, and suspect. 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. Conversations about this with elderly Greeks more often than not prove circuitous and fruitless, and so I lifted my own hands slightly to the sky and said, “Right. God’s will.” When I asked the farmer whether he had children, his answer was, surprisingly, no. His reason: I never found a wife.

the only real difference is that, unlike adults, children are not yet bridled. They haven’t yet been forced to conform, to fit in, to behave. They haven’t learned to be ashamed of their emotions, to repress their spontaneity, to hide their flamboyance and truth. They have not yet learned to navigate the world with the constant torpid pretense that they feel far less than they really do. They are inveterate liars and yet they are refreshingly truthful.

All living things on this planet have a simple two-part mission: to (1) survive long enough to (2) self-replicate. It is a complex animal indeed, arguably one too highly evolved for its own good, that consciously declines to fulfill one of its few basic biological imperatives. The only act more perverse and unnatural than purposely not reproducing is suicide. Some philosophers—the really crabby ones, like Schopenhauer—define suicide as the ultimate act of moral choice and free will. And, some ambiguous anecdotes aside, it appears to be the exclusive prerogative of Homo sapiens. I suppose you could argue that choosing not to have children, like suicide, is uniquely human. In fact, if anything can be said to demonstrate the possibility of free will, it is this: human beings willfully thwarting their one predetermined function in life. Admittedly, calling not having children the ultimate act of free will may be a little grandiose. People on both sides of the reproductive divide tend to be self-congratulatory about choices that are, let’s be honest, completely beyond their conscious control, like people who’ve inherited wealth thinking they deserve it. Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they’ve condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood’s ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you’ve had children, that it is life’s ultimate pu...

After all, there’s a sort of role model or template for a man who doesn’t want kids—the Confirmed Bachelor, roguish and irascible in the W. C. Fields tradition. At worst, we’re considered selfish or immature; women who don’t want to have children are regarded as unnatural, traitors to their sex, if not the species. Men who don’t want kids get a dismissive eye roll, but the reaction to women who don’t want them is more like: What’s wrong with you?

Is it possible that I will regret not having had children when I am old and dying alone? People with children love to ask this of us childless types, the way evangelicals like to imagine your tearful deathbed repentance or belated contrition in Hell. Since I already regret every other thing I have ever done or failed to do, I don’t see why this decision should be exempt. Sure: no doubt I will realize, once it’s far too late, as usual, that I have failed to do the one dumb job it was my charge to do during my brief time on the planet, a job countless fungi, flatworms, and imbeciles have successfully carried out for eons.

Being childless is inarguably saner and more responsible in the present world situation than having children, but let’s not pretend we’re actually doing it for sane or responsible reasons. If the childless really feel a need to claim some moral superiority over the child-ridden, it should be simply by virtue of not kidding ourselves. Let’s be honest: we are unnatural—as unnatural as clothing or medicine or agriculture or art, or walking upright. By not having progeny we are depriving ourselves of the illusion of continuity, and have to invest ourselves more deeply in other, more austere illusions: that our lives matter for their own sakes, or that we’ll secure a kind of immortality through art or ideas or acts of decency, by teaching or helping others or changing the world.

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At the risk of sounding grandiose and self-congratulatory again, I’ll venture to suggest that we childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove to ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.