The Choice Between Parenting and Being Childfree

Many years ago, a friend of mine was struggling with infertility. In response to her depression, despair, and disappointment, her mother-in-law took her aside and offered some surprising advice. “Motherhood isn’t all that,” the older woman told her. “You sacrifice yourself for decades, and if you do it right, your children take your efforts on their behalf for granted. It’s an open question whether all the effort and selflessness are worth it in the end.”

We begin our parenthood experience expecting it to be happy and fulfilling, hoping it will bring us a lifetime of joy and connection with our offspring. However, as a therapist, I know that these expectations are often not fulfilled. Parenthood is hard, sometimes wrenchingly so. Kids can get sick, struggle with disabilities, or go worryingly astray. Once they’re grown up, we may not like our adult children. They make poor choices or have very different values. They marry someone inappropriate, develop an addiction, or involve themselves in a cult. They may reject us or estrange themselves from us. There is no guarantee that we’ll have a joyful experience of being grandparents or that our adult children will be there for us as we age and grow ill.

With all this in mind, it’s not surprising that being childfree by choice is becoming an attractive option, especially at a time when raising children feels less affordable than ever, and the stigma of being childless is diminishing. A recent Pew Research Center report found that the number of Americans under 50 who said they were unlikely to ever have children has increased 10 percent since 2018. Now, 47 percent don’t think they will become parents. Many women are increasingly childless by choice, to skip having children to invest in other aspects of their lives, such as career, travel, and relationships. There are childfree-by-choice books and websites, and social media influencer accounts such as Childfree Millennial have tens of thousands of followers.

Source: Pandu Aryantoro / Unsplash

While it’s a positive development that society is more accepting of those who don’t have children, we do young people a disservice when we romanticize childlessness or present forgoing parenthood as a life-optimization choice. That women have increased freedom to chart their own course is a reason for celebration. Having kids is not for everyone, and it’s arguably better for individuals and society if people have children for the right reasons, not simply because doing so is expected of them. However, it is an oversimplification to suggest that electing not to have kids is a simple lifestyle choice, akin to whether to rent or buy. We are, after all, animals. The urge to have children is part of our deep, primal nature. Choosing to forgo this experience has profound implications that may be difficult to fathom. It is hubris to assume that we can consciously assess all aspects of such a decision.

Procreation is why any of us are here. It’s what people—and all other life on our planet—have been doing in one form or another since life began. We all have an unconscious, instinctual urge to be generative. Finding a way to do so is part of growing into psychological wholeness that Jung called individuation. “Individuation,” Jung wrote “... is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one’s destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with.”¹ For many of us, having children will be an important part of fulfilling our innate pattern.

Of course, having children is not the only way to be generative. One can give birth to new ideas, businesses, institutions, or traditions. We can nurture communities, organizations, initiatives, and values. However, nurturing children satisfies an ancient impulse and fulfills our biological destiny. Jung noted that we cut ourselves off from our instincts at our peril.

As my friend’s mother-in-law noted, having children is certainly no guarantee of happiness. And yet it is one way of arranging our lives so that we are in service to something larger than our individual ego desires. In his autobiography written toward the end of his life, Jung noted how essential it is to have a wider orientation. “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”² Living a life of meaning and purpose requires that we be in service to something larger than ourselves. Though there are infinite ways of doing this that don’t involve having children, being a parent decisively decenters and dethrones our little ego.

The poet Khalil Gibran noted that children are “the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” Allowing ourselves to be in service to such a process is a profound experience. The full implications of skipping such an opportunity are difficult to assess and shouldn’t be obscured behind reassuringly bright rhetoric. For as long as humanity has existed, people have been having children, and it has always been something that many people have found deeply meaningful—spending themselves in service to nurturing those who will come after. If parenthood has worked so well for so many before us, it is probably imprudent to cast aside the option based on uplifting images from social media.