Transcript | Ep. 144: Childfree by Choice

Sam: I made the choices that would, like, bring joy to my life without one of those choices being that I have kids. Like, I am not a broken person just because I make that choice. I am fully whole, and that is not something I need to be fulfilled.

[theme music]

Caroline: Hey y'all, and welcome to Unladylike. I'm Caroline, and I don’t want kids. Never have. Never will.

Cristen: I'm Cristen, and I currently don't want kids, either.

Caroline: Ok, you said “currently”...

Cristen: Yeah, you know, OK. My partner and I do not want kids for the foreseeable future. But saying “never” feels too definitive, and who knows, Caroline. We could change our minds. Which is something I’m sure you have been told before.

Caroline: Oh yeah, including by like nosy coworkers which is MASSIVELY inappropriate.

Cristen: You talking about me?

Caroline: Yeah, you’re always so pushy about it! But like seriously there have been so many times that people have insisted I would change my mind when I got older and just like "met the right person.” And there’s always this subtext that not wanting kids means something must be wrong with you, right? Like, you’re too selfish or immature or clearly you just hate children like some wicked witch of the West…

Cristen: Well there’s that subtext and then the outright questioning, too. You don't want kids? Why not?! As if you need to justify your own reproductive choice to everybody else.

Caroline: And the thing is, American birth rates have actually been dropping for decades. But choosing to not have kids is still wildly taboo. One childfree listener named Kinga described it as, “the ultimate unladylike thing one can do.” Which is probably why being childfree is one of our most requested topics.

Cristen: But we can’t fit the entire conversation into a single episode because being childfree isn’t always a choice. Or at least, for some folks without kids - it wasn’t their FIRST choice. We've also heard from a lot of unladies who want to have their own biological kids but can't. So on the next episode, we'll be talking to Unladylike listeners about navigating infertility. Today though, we're digging into living childfree by choice.

[stinger]

Sam: As a kid, I remembered always growing up with this teaching that if you were born with a feminine body, you were probably going to have kids. Assigned female at birth means mom in the future.

Cristen: Meet Unladylike listener Sam Bullard. They’re a 27-year-old artist, volunteer at a local feminist health center, AND a co-program director at the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine.

Caroline: Sam, you're busy.

Sam: I'm very busy all the time.

Caroline: Sam grew up in a strict, conservative Baptist home where they were taught it was women’s duty to submit to their husbands and raise godly children. And the motherhood mandate didn’t just come from the church — Sam felt it everywhere.

Sam: One specific incident that really stuck out in my mind was when I went to the OBGYN for the first time at like 20, 21, and all I was there for was birth control to help with my period cramps because I had very severe period cramps growing up. And this man is like, “oh, you know, I was actually supposed to help your mother give birth to you, isn't that so cool? Like, I was originally going to be your doctor until you were born way too early” — apparently I was two months early, which is rushing it in baby months. But then he started talking about how cool it would be if he could deliver my kids too. Just already blatantly assuming that I was going to have kids. And it just freaked me out.

Cristen: Well, tell us about when you first realized that you didn't have to have kids?

Sam: I joined a group called The Feminist Collective or Fem-C at the University of Maine towards my last year of college, and I'd already kind of had some of these discussions because I was picking apart my ideas of religion and philosophy with my partner. But being immersed into that sort of feminist lens more frequently really opened my mind up to all the possibilities of my life. I like realized I had as many options, if not more than like what I had originally thought, and I could just take control of my life. I could become an artist if I wanted to be, I could become an activist. I could literally do anything I want, and I didn't have to have anything hold me back. And I started thinking about how I'd always structured my life around this idea of having to build a family. And then the idea sparked in me when I started talking with my friends in that group that maybe I didn't need to have a family just yet or ever. Like it's quite possible I could just live my life for the passions that I have.

Cristen: Sam wasn't sure what their partner, Julie, would think about this childfree revelation. What if Julie did want kids?

Sam: And then, to my surprise, she responded to me, “Actually, I really don't think I want kids either. Like, we're kind of living in a fucked up world with climate change and shit, like, do we really want to bring another kid in that?” And like “You right. We'll just adopt if we want.” But yeah, we just realized it's not a super big priority to our relationship, either. And it just opened up the possibilities of pursuing my dreams. And it was just so amazing when I came to that revelation.

Caroline: Yeah, what did it feel like for you when you had that dawning realization?

Sam: It felt like I could finally take advantage of my life in the way that a man could, you know? Like I didn't have to be held back by all the roles that people had imposed on me all of my life, I could be whatever I wanted to be. And it just really allowed me to take control of my life and stop being scared of certain things or frightened of pursuing the things that I loved, just because I felt like I needed to build a stable life for other people. Like, if all that matters is providing stability for myself, I can handle my own mistakes if I mess up. Honestly, it doesn't even feel like I'm losing a family by not choosing to have, like biological kids. To me, it feels like I'm choosing an alternative family. I'm choosing to make my community and my people and my friends, my family.

Caroline: Well Sam, you told us in your email that you get you know just like all sorts of backhanded comments about when you’re gonna have kids. Do you think that’s more an age thing, or more about gender?

Sam: I definitely think it was the fact that people perceived me as a woman and only recently have I really come to terms with the fact that I'm not a woman. I identify as agender, which basically just means like, I feel like no gender fits me, like I just want to be perceived as a void. I don't want anyone to perceive a gender when they look at me. I just want to be Sam. And that becomes really difficult when people transpose their ideas of womanhood on me because I don't want to physically change my body to look something other than. And so a lot of people expect that from me because they perceive me as a woman, and naturally, it's just the assumed social duty that a woman creates babies. It's also a complicated relationship with my body personally, because I'm disabled in a couple ways that's often invisible to people. So a lot of people wouldn't even realize the struggle that it would put my body through to be pregnant. But I have IBS and interstitial cystitis. It's a really painful bladder condition that basically makes you feel like you have a UTI all the time, and it can also make you pee up to 40 times a day. And so just the idea of a baby sitting on my bladder constantly also really freaks me out, because that sounds like a hell of a time for my body.

Caroline: Have you ever felt like you had to justify not wanting kids?

Sam: Oh yeah, all the time. It just doesn't feel like an option that most people accept..The nice thing is I do have like a really great found family that a lot of them too also want to be child free. So when we bring up these ideas, it's almost like a light hearted joke, like we just kind of know that about each other and we're pretty chill about it. But outside of that circle of friends that I have, it can be very uncomfortable to bring it up. And any time that I do bring it up, people will like really question me, like why I don't want kids. Like, why wouldn't you? And just ask me weird bullshit like, Well, who's going to take care of you when you get old, you know? You really want to be stuck in a nursing home alone? And it's like, well, I do have my partner and I do have my friends, like we can take care of each other. And then they'll be like, Oh, but don't you want to know what it feels like to create a life in your body? Don't you want you know someone that looks like you? And I'm like, I don't need to create a mini me. I'm already fucked up enough. I don't need to pass on those bad genes. So, yeah, like, it's just super frustrating.

Cristen: So when when you encounter folks who come back at you with disbelief and kind of peppering you with all of these questions, how how do you tend to respond?

Sam: At this point, I just try to be assertive about it, and to the point, I don't try to make it a long conversation unless they want it to be. But it's usually just, you know, this isn't what I want for my body. I don't like the way that it would wreck it, and I also don't like the way that it would change the life path that I have for myself. Like, I have an idea of where I want to go and I want to stick to that.

Cristen: And what kind of response does that tend to get?

Sam: Well, most people act a little bit awkward and then they try to change the subject. Some people get genuinely mad at me or glare at me and act like I've said, this unspeakable sin in front of them. But then there are some people that are, you know, they're chill with it and other people that even will be like, oh, you know what? I want that too. That's really cool. It's kind of a mixed bag. But generally, it leans towards the awkward, ambivalent side to mild disgust.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break. We’ll return to Sam later in the episode, but first we've gotta get to the bottom of that childfree stigma that Sam just hit on..and why it’s so hard for people to accept that ‘No, I do not want kids!!”

Cristen: That’s after the break.

[stinger]

Cristen: We're back, and C, we've got some major mythbusting to do because childfree unladies are perpetually misunderstood and stigmatized.

Caroline: Yeah, let's first get a sense of how little our cultural attitudes toward being childfree by choice have budged. In 1936, a study of childfree married folks concluded they were motivated not to have children because of "an infantile, self-indulgent, frequently neurotic attitude toward life.”

Cristen: Well, OK, I guess - I guess that’s me, then!

Caroline: Ouch.

Cristen: And I think it’s worth mentioning the source of that early childfree stigmatizing. It was eugenicists of the day who were making the big stink. They believed that childfree white couples were essentially contributing to the death of the white race.

Caroline: And in 2003, another study noted that “there is a general assumption, generally unquestioned … that women without children want them but have ‘a problem’” — as in, physically or mentally, something must be wrong with you.

Cristen: That pathologizing tends to show up in a few different ways. One, you may be judged as deficient, and that by not having children, you’re missing out and setting yourself up for loneliness and regret. Or you’re judged as psychologically damaged or deviant since not wanting kids is obviously “abnormal” and must be the result of some emotional trauma. And/or you’re judged as totally self absorbed and too materialistic to care about contributing to healthy families and societies, which is another way of calling you infantile, self-indulgent, and frequently neurotic.

Caroline: Big Yiykes. Ok. No wonder so many childfree unladies feel compelled to justify our non-reproducing choice! It’s like we have to preemptively prove that we’re not monsters.

Cristen: And how do childfree folks try to prove it? Usually by citing altruism, money and happiness. In other words, the argument is that the childfree lifestyle is better, cheaper and ultimately more fulfilling than parenthood. And let’s just say, Caroline, pitting people’s major life choices against each other like.. That is a dicey debate.

Caroline: Yeah for sure. OK. So let’s start with the altruism argument. It IS true that childfree folks tend to spend more time volunteering and donate more money to causes. But I think one of the biggest altruism arguments we hear these days is that being childfree is better for the environment. Can I get a fact-check, Cristen?

Cristen: Yes you can. It is statistically true that not having kids results in fewer carbon emissions. But being childfree, y’all, it doesn’t make you Captain Planet. According to environmental experts, the climate crisis is so fucking dire that taking more immediate steps to reduce your carbon footprint makes a bigger difference than going kid-free.

Caroline: Next up is money. It is an indisputable fact that having children is expensive – over the course of 18 years it’ll run you an estimated quarter million dollars to raise a kid. Childcare alone costs an arm and a leg!

Cristen: And that’s not to say, though, that being childfree will automatically make you rich. Depending on your income situation and general life circumstances, you might just have some extra disposable income.

Caroline: Which brings us to the happiness argument. Because it is very much linked to the money tradeoffs. What the research suggests is that having children does make new parents happy in the abstract. And no surprise, right? It’s the miracle of life! But, the expense and stress of raising those children tends to chips away at that happiness. Also no surprise. So statistically speaking, childfree folks are actually a bit happier than parents in the long run.

Cristen: At the same time, all of the research on who’s happier feels like a red herring – to me, at least. For one thing, happiness is a temporary emotional state, so it’s kind of a flimsy goal post. And all of the hair splitting is really part of a bigger problem. It’s still pitting parents against childfree folks as if it’s some kind of competition to live BEST life ever and ultimately it fuels that kind of questioning Sam mentioned of who’ll take care of you when you’re old??

Caroline: Well C, who will??

Cristen: Great question! So I learned Older folks without kids are referred to as "elder orphans," which sounds depressing as hell. We’re just a pack of wrinkly Annies running around the streets.. Or should I say just hobbling through the streets. But the major risk factor isn't so much not having kids; it's social isolation and loneliness. And having children to take care of you when you're older… that is not a tidy solution. For one thing, unpaid elder caregiving disproportionately falls on the daughters. Plus, there's no guarantee that your kids will be geographically close enough and/or financially able to keep you cozy in your twilight years. So rather than pestering childfree folks, our collective energies would be better spent questioning the absence of social support for our ballooning population of old folks -- childfree and not -- as people live longer. Steppin off my soap box.

Caroline: Hell yeah. And get a load of this, y’all. Research has shown us that in the US, the growing number of single, childfree women over 65 tend to be happier and wealthier than their mom friends. And for all the shit that women get about choosing their childfree choice, the folks who tend to fare the worst as they get older are single, childfree MEN.

[FACT BOMB sound effect]

Cristen: Fact bomb! A 2010 study found that the ONLY people who experienced all of the stereotypical lonely spinster feels of depression … were unmarried, childfree men. So TLDR, the women and nonbinary kids without kids - they’re gonna be all right!

Caroline: And that’s something listener Sam, with their chosen family, already knows.

Sam: So to me, family is a group of people that support you through it all and help you navigate all the craziness of this world. And they don't necessarily have to be like your blood family. Like I do have family, obviously, that I love very deeply that I'm related to. But oftentimes, the people that I care about, the ones the most are the ones that choose to be in my life as much as I choose to be in theirs. It's not like we are obligated to one another, it's that we appreciate the time and the things that we give to each other in our lives, and we want to be with one another.

Cristen: We’re going to take a quick break.

Caroline: When we come back, we’ll meet listener Jaclyn, who, like me, has never wanted kids and wishes people on all sides of the discussion would just chill out!!

Cristen: Plus, we’ll get some advice from her about one of my big concerns — how to navigate friendships across parent and childfree lines!

Caroline: Stick around!

[stinger]

Jaclyn: So my name's Jaclyn Chambers Page. I also go by Jackie, and I am a pretty boring librarian that lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario. And I'm child free.

Cristen: Unladylike listener Jaclyn — who is NOT boring! — has always known that she wanted to be childfree.

Jaclyn: Even when I was little like you know people would be playing with their baby dolls and whatever. I'm the one in the corner with the treasure troll. Like cutting his hair so carefully, I never had that urge to like, pick up a baby doll and care for it. That just never appealed to me, ever. It just, that instinct is it's not there for me. It's always been.. like when I think about children, I don't get like a burning desire that I must have one, I must make one, or I must raise one. I just I feel just kind of flat about it like, “Oh yeah, kid.”

Caroline: When Jaclyn and her husband got married, she knew she didn’t want kids but he was a little more on the fence. So, for the first 10 years, they didn’t use birth control. They left it up to fate (and fertility). They figured like if we have a kid - ok great. If not, that’s great too. And a kid never came along.

Jaclyn: it kind of just cemented what I had thought all along, which is kids really are not for me. And the universe said, “Yeah, you're right. They actually aren't for you. So it's fine. Just go on and live your life.”

Cristen: But that didn’t stop other folks in Jaclyn’s life from thinking it’s not fine….

Jaclyn: people seem to understand that there has to be a reason. The reason can't just be because you don't want them. And I don't see why that can't be the reason. That's where my struggle is. I had a conversation with one of my colleagues at work and he just like said to me, like, Why did you get married if you don't want kids? And the question stunned me in the moment. And me being me like, I’m kind of introverted and not the most socially adept, I just blurted out, you know what comes to me, instinctually, which is “For love.” But I kept thinking about that question afterwards and again introvert afterwards, I think is the thing I should have said, which is like, “did you get married to have children?” Because that’s something that I don't understand, like, it's not something that ever occurred to me as a reason to get married. Like, you're not marrying someone's reproductive organs, you’re marrying a person. I don't understand that thought of “I'm just getting married to have children.” What they would say is “to have a family,” which is another thing that kind of irritates me a bit because children don't make a family, right? Like to me, that's not what a family a family is the group of whoever or whatever brings you the most joy and love and support. It doesn’t necessarily have to be children to be a family.

Caroline: What about in your close friend group? Like, how have your relationships with your friends shifted as they have had kids?

Jaclyn: They disappear. It's all just online chatting these days. Occasionally, we used to - like my core group of friends. We would do a thing where we would get together for his birthday, at least. You know, there's five of us at least five times a year, but even that is almost impossible around all different schedules and whatever hockey and soccer, school, jobs, it's just impossible. But I also, I feel like that's fine. This is a temporary part of their lives in terms of the really intensive young child rearing. And eventually, if things just do continue on their natural course, those kids should grow up and go away. So I'm not going to you know give up and walk away just because they have kids. And I know I have. I also have a significant amount of child free friends as well. Actually, if I if I lined everybody up, my friends and family, I'd probably be able to 50 50 split between child free and non child free, which I guess is kind of bizarre. I didn't realize how different that really was from a lot of other people, but I do have a lot of other child free friends too, and I, some of them feel differently. Like they. The minute somebody announces a pregnancy, they drop that person. They don't want to be involved, and that's fine. That's one way to go about it. But that's that's not how I go about it. I choose to go the other way, which is just wait it out.

Caroline: Well, what would your advice be to like fellow child free folks — hi, you're speaking to two of them right now — who maybe feel like they they kind of have lost their friends to parenthood?

Jaclyn: You know what? You haven't lost them, they're just different, and it's OK, like you may miss those connections you used to have, but this also is a time for you to go out and figure out maybe some things that you didn't know about yourself and find some things that you like to do. You know, some new hobbies or or whatever.

Cristen: But Jaclyn has also noticed how folks without kids can also get judgy and competitive with each other.

Jaclyn: Here's the thing. The child free people seem to have this strange obsession with justifying their existence. People tend to go down these two different paths. One is the altruistic path, which is “I'm going to fill all my free time with volunteering... that if I had kids, I wouldn't be able to do it.” So that's OK. That's that's one thing, but I would always ask like, is that making you happy? Is that what you wanted? And if it is, fantastic, you are a great human being. Good for you. Then there's people that go the other route, and they're like, “I'm using all my free time to do all these fabulous things, I’m going on all these fantastic vacations and buying all these fabulous things” and, you know, it's like the childfree people compete with each other, almost, to see who's using their time and resources the best way possible, who's making the most of this child free life. And look at us, we're so we're doing so well because we don't have kids and it's like, you know, people, here's the thing — you can just be average.

Cristen: Yeah, I, Caroline, and I have talked about this in putting together this episode of noticing sort of that aspirational child free almost trend of like, “let's turn this into a lifestyle, ladies, you don't have to be the sad woman without kids, you can be the rich auntie who flies from here to there.” And it's like, OK, that still isn't really it doesn't seem like making it an aspirational lifestyle is necessarily getting at the root of the fact that we still feel like we need a reason to not want kids.

Jaclyn: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's exactly it. You nailed it. Like it’s a reason - the reason I the reason I don't want kids is I want to travel the world or I want to devote myself to my career as a pro bono human rights lawyer or. OK, no, you can just be ordinary. It's fine. You just don't want kids. Just going through life. It's totally fine.

Caroline: And I think too, what's inherent and sometimes actually spoken, in some of these, like pick your fighter, child-free style, is like, oh, well, I'm I'm better than fill in the blank. So like, I'm this rich jet setting auntie, so I'm clearly better than these pitiful parents, or I'm clearly better than this fellow child free person who isn't doing all of these fabulous things. And it's it feels kind of like you said, like a lot of a lot of competition when it doesn't have to be like that.

Jaclyn: Yeah, it's funny, I don't know if it's an insecurity issue. Maybe from from what we've learned from society and how much value you put on people with children that we feel insecure. When I say we, it's like the royal we, it's not me, but but it's just. Is that why people just have this insecurity about about their child free status, so they want to compete or justify what their choices have been, by doing all these things just to make, you know, some kind of social point that I have value? I guess in the end, that's what everybody wants to say is like, I have value. Even though I don't have kids, I still have value.

Cristen: And I think it's also kind of a way to get ahead of any kind of backlash of like “Oh, you don't want kids, well, what must be wrong with you?” And I wonder, too, if especially when it comes to that instinct to justify not wanting kids or not having kids, how gendered do you think that is? Because I don't, at least in my own life, I don't know, I don't see a lot of guys out here being like, “I don't have kids because it's better for the planet.”

Jaclyn: Yeah. Yeah. As like a cisgender woman, I definitely see a difference in how someone reacts to a child free woman and a child free man like a child free woman is like the spinster, right, the, the pathetic cat woman spinster, and the guy is the swinging bachelor not tied down kind of thing. So yeah, and within couples I can't think of a time where someone has said to my husband, when are you having kids or why don't you have kids? It's always to me. So that is, it’s interesting isn’t it.

Cristen: Well, what does being child free mean to you?

Jaclyn: To me, it means that I'm happy that I've done the right thing with my particular life. That's it. You know, it's just. It's it just is. I don't know what else to say about it other than it's how I chose to live my life and I'm really happy with my life and I wouldn't change a damn thing.

Caroline: Well, is there anything about being child free, child free Reddit boards like truly anything that we haven't asked you about your own experience that you think unladylike listeners should know?

Jaclyn: Hmm. Um, you know. it's also OK to change your mind. Either one way, like say you've always wanted kids and you’ve like at least you thought you wanted kids and you made that a life goal and things and then you start to realize you don't want them. It's OK to change that way. And it's also OK if you you start out life child free and maybe you've made some stances and you said some things and you know you've made it a part of your identity. Then if you change your mind, that's OK, too. It's OK, people. Do what is right for your life. I don't think it's helpful to any human being to fight each other on on how we choose to live our lives just. It's OK. It's OK.

Cristen: Huge thank you to all of the unladies who shared their childfree by choice stories with us for this episode. Y’all can find us at instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also drop us a line at hello@unladylike.co. And of course, you can support us by joining our Patreon; you’ll get instant access to more than 70 existing bonus episodes, and a new bonus episode every week, including our recent conversation/commiseration over the Mississippi abortion case sitting at the Supreme Court. You can find it all over at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week… It’s part 2 of our childfree two-parter. We are talking to Unladylike listeners about navigating infertility and what happens when you just want to stop trying.

Emily: you see on Facebook, you know, people writing these loving stories about how they've gone through their struggles and fertility, how they overcame it and then maybe got the child in the end. And you see those stories and they're heartbreaking but also heartfelt and, you know, courageous women going through this. And it's like no one's writing up about my story because I feel like there's not much pizzazz to it. It's just the choice to really do nothing and just see what happens. I just didn't know if that was normal.

Cristen: You don’t want to miss this episode! So make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

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