Is Having Children Worth it?
I’ll preface this blog by admitting that I am a 40 year old child free woman, currently, and I imagined growing up that by now I would have a child and yet, I did not make the necessary moves to create a life where I could feasibly include a child. I enjoy travel and adventure, I derive a lot of life satisfaction from my career where I take care of many women who are mothers themselves, I am self employed and have an unstable income. I am also with a man who could take or leave parenthood and lets face it, I am running out of time and here I am thinking about business showers instead of baby showers.
I have to wonder how much of the idea that I would always have a child was culturally imposed. I am not one to forgo the things I want in life. I have a courageous streak and when I want something you will see me go after it with my whole heart and the truth is I sit here pondering the question of children with a half-heart. I know many women feel similar and then after having children it changes them fundamentally and they are wonderful mothers, I also know if an accident happened I would keep the child but there is no planned parenthood here. No, I did not and have not created the right environment for a child to be born in to. Whilst my sister was nursing in a stable job and had her first house by 25 to invite her first child in at 27 I was busy founding a ghost tour and then living in Berlin coming home from a night out at 9am. I was then a yoga teacher living in London, sharing accommodations earning a modest wage learning how to handstand, meanwhile my sister was thinking about buying a new home and looking at the best schools in the area. Actions speak louder than words.
I do believe though I am faced with the same question that many women are faced with today.
If I don’t have children will I regret it and will I be less happy?
I have been meditating on this question for some time - since I met a man I would really trust to father my child - and there has been much soul searching, and along with the soul searching I have also read the research (you know I wouldn’t let you down on that) and the findings are quite illuminating.
Parents will be quick to proclaim the gifts and blessings their children provide, but a more detached appraisal calls into question this conventional wisdom.
Over the past decades social scientists have found that there is an almost ZERO association between having children and happiness, in fact both men and women report less personal happiness and less happy marriages when there are minor children around the house. For women having kids is associated with a 3/4 percent decline in happiness, which is marginally significant.
68% of childless women without kids at home are happy in their marriages compared to 54% of mothers with kids at home.
Child free adults can be reassured by the results of this research; they don’t seem doomed to unhappiness by their decision not to have children.
Perhaps children provide benefits not readily observable with the blunt psychometric instruments offered by the General Social Survey. Is life really about happiness? Or is it about meaning, purpose and satisfaction? I know I enjoy a challenge simply because it is hard and we know that hard challenges generally result in great rewards. There is then, a bigger question here:
What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness?
What then? Are we child free people risking a life devoid of meaning? I personally believe this is entirely individual, not everyone’s legacy is about procreation and having children is not the only way to live a meaningful life. There are many badass women I can think of who remained and remain childless and led and lead meaningful lives with lasting legacies; Jane Austen, Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Helen Mirren, Katharine Hepburn, one of my best friends.
Thankfully I am from a fairly open minded family who tend not to impose culturally expected standards on to me, either that or they know better! I’ve been referred to as selfish before indirectly when discussing this issue with family members,
‘you have to be less selfish if you want to have children’ and well that is a whole other blog, but to that point (and we can argue the toss if you like) I take the contrary position,
having children is by its nature a selfish act.
And there is nothing wrong with this. It is (more than) okay to act in one’s own self interest sometimes but let’s not just simply assume that the decision not to have children is because the person is inherently selfish whilst parentdom is akin to martyrdom. In fact child free people are more likely to be philanthropic. According to the British group Legacy Foresight, childless people make 55 per cent of all legacies to charities. The Canadian charity newsletter Hilborn cites research that finds those without children are five times more likely to give a bequest than other seniors, and when parents make bequests, they’re typically less than donations made by non parents.
Those with children are typically more inward-looking. From the moment a newborn baby arrives, every impulse seems to galvanize toward helping that baby thrive and rightly so. Resources become the child’s resources and when doing estate planning, although parents might leave money to charity, most parents and grandparents put family first.
I wonder about those women who have mothers who badger them to have children, who are told that they will be unhappy and grow old alone and unfulfilled. It’s for you as well as me that I chose to sit down and write. I loved this quote from an article in The Guardian:
“The increased visibility and acceptance of women who choose not to have children is just one part of a social evolution away from the limited “traditional family” model, and into a world where human beings with a diversity of needs can create family arrangements that work for them. That’s not just good for the child free; it’s great for feminism. “
-Jill Filpovic The Guardian.
Jill says this subject is often met with an intense hostility and deep concern. I have personally observed those who hold the opinion that the child free will be left to rot in nursing homes and become a societal burden without any children to look after them. Not true since child free people tend to accumulate more money and can support themselves in their old age and this brings me on to my last point; we no longer live in an environment supportive of rearing children. The US and UK are hostile environments, childcare is an expense many cannot afford, mothers face the reality of working full time and looking after their child, buying a house is no longer possible for many people with sky rocketing house prices, for a-lot of couples the decision is a financially imposed one. Deciding not to have a child in this current climate is activism for many, these people are called ‘birth strikers’ and though I wouldn’t necessarily identify wholly in that category there is an element of that there.
The wonderful take away is that the decision not to have children won’t definitely result in you becoming a sad and lonely old spinster, in fact you’ll likely be happier and if you can find a meaningful existence outside of procreation there aren’t downsides anymore significant than those we associate with having children. With every choice we take, there is another choice we did not make and as humans it is only natural to ask the question:
What if?
What if I have children and I never travel the world or realise my professional potential?
What if I don’t have kids and I regret never experiencing motherhood?
There are many doors we choose not to open in our lives and it is okay to grieve a choice not made even if you are glad you made it.
Ultimately the notion that we can now choose to procreate or not could be a wonderful thing for society since it means that we can choose to have kids based on our own personal value system and not because we feel we have to, we can have them because we really do want them and this may result in less unloved children in the world, and god knows we need more of that.
For now I am still on the fence about having kids and you know, if I decide once and for all to procreate before my eggs run out I have thought long and hard about it.
Have a view on this? Share it in the comments.
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