What's the child-free movement?

In this episode, Molly and Cristen take a closer look at the child-free movement.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step Mom Never Told You?
From House top Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen Kristen. Today
we're gonna finally tackle one of our most requested topics,

(00:23):
the decision not to have children a k A child
free by choice right. And this should be distinguished from
being child less, because if you're child free, as people
of this movement often explain, it's it's a choice. It's
an active, empowering lifestyle choice that they make to not procreate,

(00:46):
whereas someone who's childless, they say, may want to have
children and for reasons of infertility not be able to.
And according to some pure research, about one in five
American women ends her child in years without having a child,
compared to one in ten women who did the same
thing in the nineteen seventies. Now they can't separate out

(01:08):
all the women in that statistic who are child freed
by choice versus those who may want to have a
child and couldn't. But because those numbers are going up,
they think that more and more women and men who
are who are with them or women who are with
them are electing to not have children. And in terms
of demographics, who's making this child for each choice? Pew
found that the most educated women are the ones who

(01:31):
are more likely to not have a child, and also
white women are the most likely racial or ethnic group
do you never have a child as well? But that
gap is closing, especially in the last few years, where
they're finding more and more racist and ethnicities are choosing
not to have children. And this is not just an
American phenomenon. It's happening in many countries all over the world.
And again, to pull from Pew, more and more couples

(01:52):
are saying they don't need to have children to make
a successful marriage. You know, if you think about this
checklist of things you do in your lifetime, let's say
it's go to college, get married, have children. More and
more people are too doing the first two and just saying, hey,
we're not going to check that last box. There are
a lot of advances in worth control options, and we
don't want to bring children into the world. Now, let's

(02:14):
go into some of the reasons that people might elect
to do this. By far, the biggest reason that's given
across the whole host of studies and surveys is that
people you know, like their lifestyles without children. They like
their job and want to have more energies to donate
to that, they like traveling, they like time alone with
their partner, and uh. And that's sort of the main

(02:35):
reason for men specifically. There are four major reasons that
they generally don't want to have children as well, such
as freedom change jobs without financial obligations to children, time
and space for personal development. Much like you're saying, Molly, Uh,
they never have felt a need to have children, which
is kind of different from women. You don't hear that
as much from women, simply because there's more of a

(02:57):
societal expectation for us to want to have that maternal
instinct and want to have children. Um. And then finally
they're just happy and don't really want the responsibility of
raising a child. But in today's society is progressive as
we might be, this idea of just not wanting to

(03:17):
have that responsibility, not really wanting to pass along your
genes to another being, it's pretty controversial. It's pretty controversial
because you know, some will say that desire to pass
on your genes it's an evolutionary imperative. We've got to
make more people. But you know what, we're reading one
interesting study called child Free by Choice or review in

(03:40):
the Journal of Cultural Geography, and it talked about that
evolutionary desire, you know, because a lot of times on
this podcast we talked about how all these behaviors are
subconsciously driven by, you know, the desire to pass along
genes and to find the best genes and pass them on.
And according to these researchers, one, you know, one part

(04:00):
of this drive is the fact that you want to
leave something of yourself behind, something that will last. That's
this monument to I guess not a monument to you,
but you know, you're you're you're leaving your mark. And
a lot of people have done that through having children
who has on the family name, who go on to do,
you know, wonderful things. But they're saying that that drive

(04:21):
can also be marked by the desire to say, write
a book and that's what you leave behind, or um
or a podcast or record of podcasts, and that's what
you leave behind. And they're saying that in some ways,
if if you focus all your desire on writing that
book or making these podcasts, it's sort of a purer
form of the evolutionary drive and having a child, because
the child can go off and make its own decisions

(04:42):
and dilute your legacy. Whereas if you've spent all your
time that would have been directed towards raising a child,
towards podcasting or writing or singing songs or whatever, that's
a purer form of your legacy. But that same study
that you're talking about also points out that if you
do make that choice to say, have you know, have

(05:04):
a have a book or a podcast, be your baby
in quotes, other people are not necessarily going to understand
where you're coming from. For instance, um in surveys that
they've done, uh pulling people on how they perceive couples
who choose to be childless, they find that a lot

(05:24):
of times child free couples are seen as less sensitive,
less loving, and not as well adjusted, right, simply based
on their desire to not have children. Right. And you know,
there are so many articles we read, just a handful
of them, but they're there's so many of them where
it's these people who are judging the people who don't
have children to be selfish and the people who choose

(05:47):
not to have children counter that, you know, having children
in itself as selfish and that they've probably spent more
time thinking about why they didn't want to have children
than people who do, and some people who do have children. Um,
and you know, it kind of gets into this murky
territory of you know, is it is it selfish to
want a baby or is it selfish to say I'm

(06:08):
not a good parent for this baby, I'm not gonna
bring one into the world. And the arguments between both
sides can get pretty ugly, as we found in a
New York Times article by Lisa Belkan And this was
written in two thousands, so it's a little bit dated,
but just to give you a little idea of how
serious some child free groups are. Um, they sometimes refer

(06:32):
to and these are again, these are very certain groups.
I'm not saying that everyone who wants to be child
free it feels this way, but um, they refer to
couples in which one parents stays home as sitcoms, as
in single income to children, oppressive mortgage. And those who

(06:53):
don't have children are thinkers as in two healthy incomes,
no kids, and only retirement, which does sound pretty good.
But I mean it's it's some sometimes you get into
these groups that have acronyms like that they call kids
like spoiled lizards, brogs. They're saying, they're just squirting out
little kids, and it's. Um. I think that, you know,

(07:16):
the writer picked an extreme of these people who don't
want to have children to kind of represent this side,
and uh, and they don't come off looking great. And
I'm just gonna say that, Well, I do like I
like the fact too that in this New York Times article,
the main person they used to illustrate sort of the
um the classic child free person is this guy driving

(07:38):
around in his Miata shopping for real estate. And the
whole reason he needs real estates because in his current house,
he's got families on all sides of him and it's
driving him insane. He cannot stand the sound of children
playing football. You cannot stand the sound of children crying
in the middle of the night. He doesn't, you know.
He's trying to like lay in his hammock and the

(07:59):
kids coming over and trying to bug him. It's like
Mr Wilson from Dennis the Menace, and and he just
has decided that if I've made this choice to be
child free, then I don't want to have to see
anyone else's children. And uh, you know there are people
who feel that way. Not everyone who's decided not to
have to learn feels that way. I think people who
have children don't want to deal with other people's kids sometimes.

(08:20):
But you know, adults can be annoying too, sure, and
and we are making we're making them. This guy sound
really petty and true in this New York Times article.
A lot of the things he points out do seem
um kind of petty, but there are But at the
same time, you know, you can call the police on
a guy playing drums the mill of the night, but
you can't call a police on a child crying. He's

(08:42):
just saying that that's an inconsistency in terms of disturbance, right.
And and there are a lot of very important issues
that come up, especially in the workplace, because there are
a lot of added benefits UM for say, dependent care. UM.
Perhaps you have on site daycare that allows you to
save a lot of money. You might have UM some

(09:04):
kind of bonus for adoption. Sometimes you get tuition assistance.
All of these different things that are built into employment
packages that people who are child free say are unfair, right.
You know, insurance for a family of four can be
cheaper per person than insurance for a single person. When

(09:24):
you're filing your taxes, there are all these deductions for dependence.
And so the people who are some of these people
who are child for you're saying that, yes, it's disturbing
to go out to dinner and have to listen to
a baby cry, but it's actually the way that our
society has instituted a family life as the ideal that
can be unfair the people who have decided not to

(09:45):
be child free, that what a workplace should do is
offer a menu of options, and you have, let's say
X number of dollars to spend on this menu. If
you decide to spend all your dollars on childcare options,
that's good. Whereas a single person might be able to
elect have greater vacation because you know, they can go
to Paris on a whim because they have no children

(10:06):
holding them back. And that's another big thing. Time off.
A lot of child free people say they're picking up
the slack for people who have to leave at six
to get a kid from daycare. Holidays, holiday weekends that
some bosses will just assume that the people who don't
have families a k a. Don't have children have more

(10:27):
time to devote to their work, Whereas these people may
have just as fulfilling lives, it's just they lack that
picture on their desk that has two kids. Now. I'm
sure though, if you ask almost any working parent, they
would laugh at the idea that they somehow have it
easier in the workplace just because of these benefits. And
they'd probably laugh at the idea too that kids provide

(10:48):
some kind of tax shelter for them, even though they do,
you know, they get a little bump, but not not
so much. It's not enormous. So there seems to be
a spectrum for at least from what we've read in
a lot of these articles, between the extreme guy driving
around his Miata who just clearly really hates children, and
then on the other side you have, you know, the

(11:09):
extreme parents who you know, maybe do think that something's
wrong with you if you don't want to have a kid.
But I have a feeling, well that a lot of
us are a little more towards the middle. Well, you know,
I think that even if you are in the middle
and you have kids. Uh, it might be hard to
imagine that someone who's decided not to have kids isn't
going to regret it at some point. You know. I

(11:30):
think that there's part of this stigma is the idea
that you're gonna get to like sixty and just have
all this regret that you did not go through this
rite of passage that everyone else did. And the writer
Lisa Belkum writes about in this New York Times article
about how she didn't think she was going to have
kids even when she's pregnant, didn't love the idea of
having kids, and as soon as she had the baby
in her arms, was like, oh I get this. I

(11:52):
love it. I wouldn't trade it. And they're saying that,
you know, it's almost like you've got to have the
kid to understand why it's going to be so great, which,
you know, I can't think of anything else. We push
on people like, oh, try this broccoli. You're gonna love it. Yeah,
it's gonna be really good. You know, if someone says
I don't want broccoli, we just we let it be right.

(12:13):
But no one can believe that a woman or a
man is not going to change their mind once they
have that little baby in their arms. But a baby
costs a lot more than broccoli. I think the statistic
that I've seen is that raising a child to the
age of eighteen costs around hundred and sixty I think
that's right. Yeah, I mean it's it's not too bad.

(12:33):
It's you know, it's pushing a pretty expensive try it,
you'll like it onto someone, but it's still it's fascinating
to me, Molly though, that the idea of being consciously childless,
child free, thank you, it's such a radical notion. Well,
and you know, let's say that, you know, researchers are

(12:55):
not ignorant to the idea like, oh, you know you're
gonna be sad when you're sixty. Uh. They've they've looked
at these people and said, do these people have higher
levels of regret? Are they more depressed than the people
who had children? And by and large these studies say no,
Like just for example, one two thousand seven study that
looked at six thousand women, and they looked at women

(13:16):
who had had children very early in their lives, uh,
women who had had shot children later on, like in
their late thirties, and then women who hadn't had children
at all, and it was those last two groups that
were the happiest. The women who had had children very
young between the ages of the nineteen and twenty four,
they were the unhappiest. So they're saying that this choice
to either delay child bearing or to uh not go

(13:39):
through childbearing at all uh yields the same amount of happiness.
These people are not maladjusted in any way, but they
do need, according to the researchers, strong relationships in their life.
They do need friends, they do need a spouse, a partner,
someone that they can share their life with in some way.
But let's say that you have a couple, a married couple.

(14:01):
They have each other, They think each other is pretty great.
One question that researchers have looked a lot at is
whether or not the addition of a child will improve
that union, because a lot of people will say, oh,
you know what, you need to have a kid, because
it really just rounds out the marriage. Is the last step.
You get, you get the ring, you get the house,

(14:23):
you get the dog. Now now you need the child,
and then you'll be complete. And there have been mixed
results because at first, a knee jerk response is that, yes,
children do improve marriages because divorce rates go down as
the number of children go up in a family. But

(14:44):
are those parents just staying together even if they don't
love each other because they have children, sticking together for
the kids, right, I don't know, Molly. Well, that's what
they're saying, is that it's possible that that's the reason
why that number goes up. And when they look at
the individual happiness of people, which is more subjective, it's
harder to say by and large, oh, these marriages are happier,

(15:06):
but according to self reported levels of happiness, the childless
couples are just as happy. Yeah. Once it was the
control shore for demographics and for socio economic status and
all of that, it all comes out in the wash. Basically,
a happy couple is a happy couple, whether there's a
child in the picture or not. Let's talk about one
thing I thought was really interesting when we were researching this,

(15:29):
and this is from an essay in salont and it's
about how the lack of interest in having a child
might be a biological thing. And that is because they
looked at these mice who have a gene called the
mess gene, and when, uh, the when the mice have
the gene, they just nurture everything that moves. They just
have that mothering instinct to everything. When the mice don't

(15:51):
have the mess gene, they just could care less. They
you know, they live their own lives. They are nice
to the people who came in contact with them, but
they don't necessarily feel, uh, that nurturing impulse that the
other might seem to. So they're saying it's possible that
humans may have that as well, and that you know,
when someone says, hey, I don't want to have children,

(16:12):
it's not a matter of a well meaning friend or
relative saying, oh, you're going to change your mind when
you see them, just go ahead and have the baby.
It's fine. Well, I think that with all of this,
whether it's biology or not, everything that I've taken out
of all of these articles that we've read is that
there's no there's no right choice with it. You know,

(16:34):
if a couple chooses to be child free, why should
we judge them? But you know, we just all these
articles are about how often they're judge and again, how
some child free couples or people can judge, you know,
like that guy who drove them out and didn't want
to have to ever see a child in his lifetime.
And you're right, it really is a matter of eliminating

(16:55):
that judgment and believing that you know what's best for
any given person. And you know, that's where sometimes these
people who have left to be child free run up
against trouble when they're trying to maintain their child free lifestyle.
And what I'm talking about is people who have decided
to undergo like a tubal ligation or a vasectomy to
prevent ever having children, and what they what they find

(17:16):
is they have trouble getting a doctor to agree to it. Yes,
women under thirty who go to elect to have tubal
allegation are often turned down right by by doctors because
doctors think that they are crazy for wanting to render
themselves infertile basically at such a young age, and believe
that they'll immediately regret the decision. Right they made. One

(17:37):
woman undergo a psychological exam, and you know, she makes
the really good point that you don't have to undergo
a psychological exam before you bring children into the world.
I think we can all agree. I'm not naming names,
but there are some people who do need maybe a
psychological exam before they become parents. But you know, it's like,
as long as they're making this choice that's been approved

(17:58):
by society, you know, and votes, you know, we assume
that's fine. You're crazy, but we all have children, So
here you go. Whereas the people who have said either
I'm not going to be a good mother, I don't
want to bring a kid into this crazy world somehow,
they're the people who are troubled. Well, I think now
would be a good time. I'll to hand things over
to our listeners. I want to know what folks out

(18:21):
there think about this child free lifestyle. If you are
child free by choice or if your child bless me,
do you think it is selfish too not want to
have a child. Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is the email address,

(18:43):
and I have an email here from Kyle and it's
about an old podcast about cord blood banking. Kyle rots,
I feel you did a great job of going over
the pros and concept private versus public cord blood banking.
I'm a clinical pathologist with a specialty in transfusion medicine,
so I'm familiar with cord blood management. One thing that
is little known about the private companies is that many

(19:04):
of them do very little quality control testing to make
sure the blood you're paying force kept viable. When core
blood is donated to a public bank, it is tested
for the viability of the cord blood stem cells and
also check to make sure an adequate number of these
cells are present and the sample to be useful. They
will also check for bacterial contamination to make sure the
sample would be safe for future use. Many private companies

(19:25):
will store whatever they get. They won't tell you if
the sample contains enough viable cells, even be useful in
the future, or if it has been contaminated. Also, the
criteria for safely storing blood over the eighteen or so
years of your child's life are independently controlled at these
private companies. They are not such the same Fedal regulations
that public banking and blood storages, so there's no guarantee
that over the years the company will maintain the sample

(19:48):
at appropriate temperatures or conditions. You can be paying hundreds
of dollars for example, that is completely useless. I have
a caution parents who are considering private core blood banking
to ask many questions about the storage, maintenance, and testing
done on the cord blood. So thank you for those
words of wisdom, Kyle. Okay, we'll have that one here.
From Claire in response to our podcast on cellulite and

(20:09):
clear rights. Ever since I started going through puberty, I
started noticing cellulite on my legs. At one point, I
was very ill with interactsner vosa, and my way of
ridding the cellulite was to slap my legs each night
for a certain amount of time. And I'm not sure
if this ever worked. Now I'm fully recovered, and I
still battle cellulite and look at some women who have none,
longing to have beautiful, dimple free legs. I do think

(20:31):
diet can help, and also exercise. However, I'm not sure
if this reduces the appearance more than actually making you
feel more confident and not noticing the cellulite as much.
In a way, I hope this reassares women that getting
skinny will not rid you of cellulite. I was proof
of that, but a good head and a healthy attitude will.
So thank you, Claire, and again, if you have any

(20:52):
thoughts you'd like to send our way our emails mom
stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can find
us over on Facebook, give us a likely was the comment,
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(21:14):
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