(Link): Not All Women Want To Be Mothers: The Stigma That Surrounds Choosing Not To Have Children
Excerpts:
by Dr. Peggy Drexler
….The reasons women are giving are varied. Having babies is expensive for one thing: a (Link): 2017 USDA report found that American parents spend, on average, more than $230,000 on child costs from birth to age 17, not including college.
…The increase in working women — and female breadwinners — around the world has also left many reluctant to leave jobs that aren’t always guaranteed to be there when they return.
…Even as more women are choosing not to have children — and the idea that there’s many different ways to create a “family” has become more normalised — there still exists a stigma surrounding women who don’t bow down to, or perhaps even feel, a maternal urge.
Women who opt out feel somehow “threatening”, as Andersen puts it. They defy our expectations of what women do or “should” want.
“Many people think that women who don’t want kids don’t like kids, which is almost never the case,” says psychologist Dr Sarah Gundle, co-clinical director at Manhattan behavioural health studio Octave.
“Liking kids or not is rarely the reason I see among patients who’ve decided to remain childless. Women now have more choices, and for many, it’s a choice like any other choice. But the idea of women [having children] is still so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that women who choose not to are often seen as a little suspect.”
Or worse than a little.
A 2017 study published in the journal (Link): Sex Roles found that many people consider the decision to forgo parenthood as not only abnormal, but also morally wrong.
“Voluntarily child-free people elicited moral outrage — anger, disgust, disappointment — relative to people with children,” says study author Dr Leslie Ashburn-Nardo.
“They were also seen as less psychologically fulfilled.”
In other words, she says, most of us expect voluntarily child-free people to live “incomplete” and “unhappy” lives.
In a piece on Chinese online magazine (Link): Sixth Tone, Fan Yiying writes of the open Chinese disdain for couples who choose not to have kids…
The irony, as Dr Gundle points out, is that having children does not actually make people happier.
A 2016 study published in the (Link): American Journal of Sociology looked at families in 22 countries and found that having children makes people significantly less happy compared to people who don’t have kids, a phenomenon researchers dubbed the “parenting happiness gap”.
Nevertheless, says Dr Ashburn-Nardo, “As a society, we tend to assume [having children is] more than just what most people do, it’s what they should do. It could potentially be effective for a voluntarily child-free woman to deflect bias by providing a reason,” she continues, “but this alone isn’t very fair – we don’t tend to ask parents why they chose to have kids, so why would we want to question non-parents’ motives?”
It could be, perhaps, because some parents question their own motives. Dr Gundle says that she sees many patients who have mixed emotions about children after they’ve already had them, often a reaction to the pressure on women, and mothers in particular, to be perfect, to take on too much and to always prioritise their kids….
Related Posts:
(Link): Study (2014): Couples Without Children Have Happier Marriages
(Link): Childless and happy: The new tribe of women?
(Link): Times You’re Glad You Were Never a Parent (1)
(Link): Why the World Needs Childfree Women by Claudia Spahr
(Link): Stop putting pressure on women to have kids before they’re 30 by A Chandler
(Link): Why we’re child-free and happy (article)
(Link): Many Parents Will Say Kids Make Them Happier. They’re Probably Lying. by A. Swanson
(Link): A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates
(Link): Is The Church Failing Childless Women? by Diane Paddison
(Link): Why is the childfree singleton a curiosity? by V Blackburn
(Link): ‘It’s a break from the kids’: Why parents cheat more than childless couples
(Link): Idiot Author Thinks Childless and Childfree Should Pay Higher Taxes to Subsidize Parents
(Link): Childfree By Choice: How Women are Redefining Tomorrow’s Family
(Link): ‘It’s a break from the kids’: Why parents cheat more than childless couples
(Link): Study: Couples Without Children Have Happier Marriages / Study: Having Kids Ruins Your Life
(Link): On Being Circumstantially Childless by A. Pearson
(Link): A Teen Tried To Kill Three Women “In Revenge” Because He Was A Virgin
(Link): I’m 45, Single And Childless. No, There’s Nothing ‘Wrong’ With Me. by M Notkin
(Link): Why do we still have to justify the choice to be child-free? by H. Freeman
(Link): Hey, Pope Francis: Some people would rather raise pets than children by C. Hall
(Link): More Criticisms of the Pope’s Anti Childless Anti Childfree Comments
