One of the lingering impressions I retain from the pandemic is of a colleague sitting on a Zoom call with a toddler on his lap, trying valiantly to juggle fatherhood and the demands of work, with despair written across his usually unflappable face.
He wasn’t alone. All the parents I know acknowledged the challenges of parenting during the pandemic, and though I took no pleasure in seeing them do so, it opened up the opportunity for more candid conversations among my child-free friends. Many admitted they were relieved. Many of us had been revisiting a decision we'd often been told we’d regret or should be ashamed of — and it didn’t seem like the worst decision in the world.
We're not alone; the evidence is everywhere. Most glaringly, the global fertility rate is dropping. The name is misleading — the fertility rate is not in reference to how fertile people are, but rather whether they choose to capitalise on that fertility. The average number of children a woman gives birth to is falling. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. In recent years, the global fertility rate has nearly halved to 2.4 children in 2017 and is predicted to drop as low as 1.9 by 2100.
The reasons for this are varied and interesting. An essay series in The Guardian titled Childfree explored what motivates people's reticence about children. There are a multitude of reasons people choose to postpone or forgo having children, including financial considerations, the climate crisis, embracing solitude, putting career first and, my favourite, cherishing your freedom. The series wasn’t written in response to the pandemic, but it's particularly apt in this moment as we begin to remerge and assess, what is life to me?
“Until very recently, it was assumed that if you didn’t have children it was a tragedy, because you were unable to,” said Meghan Daum, editor of Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed, an anthology that examines mandatory motherhood. “Or there was something wrong with you psychologically — you were selfish.” Luckily, this is changing, as Kate Bolick wrote in her memoir about single life, Spinster. In it she wrote that “a childless single woman of a certain age is no longer automatically perceived as a barren spinster”.
Which brings us to a word that abounds when discussing voluntary childfreeness: “selfish”. Parenting, no matter how poorly performed, is still viewed as an achievement and a moral imperative. Childlessness, despite over-population, the climate crisis and advances in women’s rights, is still viewed with overblown emotions such as anger and disgust. In 2015 the pre-eminent lifelong celibate, Pope Francis, weighed in: “The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.”
Few women spend their girlhoods aspiring to an unencumbered life
I mean, it's hardly the first time women are discussing options other than marriage and motherhood as the pinnacle of a woman's life. Early feminists addressed these issues in texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which identified “the problem that has no name” — the widespread unhappiness of married women stuck at home raising children. That this exchange is still so supercharged with the expectation that women should want to automatically default to the least controversial role available to them, that of caregiver, is depressing.
In Time magazine, Lauren Sandler mused: “Few women spend their girlhoods aspiring to an unencumbered life. Daydreams often take the form of permanent attachments: monogamous passion yielding beatific motherhood. Yet as we get older, we change along with our economic, professional, social and romantic realities.” And as women spend more of their lives on pursuits other than motherhood, more women find they are perfectly content to forgo that part of their lives.
Meghan Daum wrote that one of her biggest frustrations is that this dynamic “so often pits parents against non-parents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income”. The truth is, choosing to have children is neither inherently good nor selfish, and the same goes for being child-free.
For those without children, the most pressing loneliness is caused not by ageing and dying alone, as people fear, but rather social isolation in your late 30s and early 40s. Going Solo author Eric Klinenberg says: “What people report everywhere is this experience of watching friends just peel off into their small domestic worlds. The real stress point is the loneliness caused by friends disappearing into parenthood.”
