Choosing to become a parent is one of the most important and impactful decisions one could make. But how on earth do we make such an important decision without really knowing how it'll turn out? In this episode, we discuss what the pros and cons of a child-free life. We also talk about the decision-making process around having children and whether there is any real evidence that becoming a parent is "worth it."
Resources:
Choosing to become a parent is one of the most important and impactful decisions one could make. But how on earth do we make such an important decision without really knowing how it'll turn out? In this episode, we discuss what the pros and cons of a child-free life. We also talk about the decision-making process around having children and whether there is any real evidence that becoming a parent is "worth it."
Resources:
Hey, little helpers, as Kimmy and I careen through our 30s, and so do many of you, questions about having kids start coming up, and we've done episodes on fertility, we've done episodes on early parenthood and postpartum depression, but one thing we haven't touched upon is what happens if you actually don't have kids at all. I work at the fertility center at Duke right now, and actually so did Kibbe, and so I've gotten used to treating people who are trying to have kids and really, really fear that they never will, and I wanted to see what happens in the worst case scenario the quote worst case scenario. Is it so terrible to never have kids? And then what about, on the other side, people who never wanted kids to begin with. What's it like for them? So we are going to do today's episode on the childless and the child free.
Speaker 1:When diving into this research, I found actually kind of a lot of contradictory information, particularly about the long-term effects of not having kids, and I do want to make a note quickly about this distinction that I'm going to make about childless versus child-free.
Speaker 1:So people who want kids but can't have them have been termed in the research literature as involuntarily childless, versus people who never wanted kids decided not to have kids are called the child-free.
Speaker 1:When I looked into the involuntarily childless research, there were a few things that kind of muddied the research waters. One was that most of the studies I found tended to happen very soon after failed fertility treatments, or they would conflate involuntarily childless with infertile, which meant that some of these women could still be in fertility treatments and then could actually wind up having kids in the end, or they just yeah, they just wouldn't be far out from fertility treatments, when women had kind of accepted that this was what their life was going to look like, and that made kind of a massive difference. Because we know that people struggling with infertility who are in fertility treatments have distress that is at the same level of people diagnosed with HIV or cancer, and so the involuntarily childless research was pretty grim. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it is 10 years out. So I don't know, kibbe, yeah, what were you able to find anything about the involuntarily childless?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm really happy we're doing this because I've been, I've thought about these topics Like what is it like to not have children, you know anecdotally, and I hadn't really thought about looking at the research for this because, um, I spent two years in fertility treatments and I had always been career-oriented. You know that and I, you know, stupidly I guess, I just took it for granted that when I wanted to have kids, I will have them. Right, I just like was so focused and so anxious about can I get a career off the ground that I was just like, yeah, and then at some point I'll have kids. And then you're in it now, where you're in your 30s, the clock even though we have now egg freezing and different options, now it still feels like a clock, like, ok, this is time.
Speaker 1:It still is, because egg freezing doesn't guarantee anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, we have no guarantees, which is kind of a scary thing. And you're at that stage in life where it feels like shit or get off the pot, right. It's like, oh my gosh, like now it's time to really make this decision. And I realized that there was no other decision like this. I'm trying to think if that's accurate, whatever. But it really felt like you decide to have kids at a certain time and if you don't have kids, then you can't actually reverse that, right. It's like, oh, if I decide not to have kids and then I change my mind when I'm 40 or 50, that's going to be a lot harder, right Versus like careers, at this point in our country, you could change it around. You could do something else Go back to school, right. There's actually a lot more flexibility in other kinds of decisions, but like having kids as a 30-year-old woman, it becomes like this you know, make the decision now or you're never going to get it again, kind of choice. So it's like high pressure.
Speaker 1:That's completely how I feel. And also, guys, if you hear background noise, my cat is purring on my lap and will be more annoying if I kick her off, so that's that noise. Yeah, I mean I'm. I'm in a position where a lot of my friends are either a few years older than me or are not in PhDs, both of which mean that they're having babies before me, and it's very mixed reviews.
Speaker 1:It's either like oh my God, seriously think about this decision. It upends every single part of your life and it's very, very, very difficult. Or it it's like this is the greatest joy in the entire world. You have to do it. You'd be missing out on the greatest level. Well, I mean, it's just. It's like oh my god, okay, um, and you know, like one oh my god, sorry, sissy, stop it.
Speaker 1:Um, one of those people is my partner, you know, who had a kid when he was really young and had to work so much and absolutely loves being a dad, but also has never gotten to relax because of it. And it's just these kinds of considerations like what know, what does this mean for? I'm like really into art right now. What does it mean for getting to do the things that I love. Will I ever have a chance to paint again or, like, read a full book again, and will I ever travel again?
Speaker 1:And I mean, I think the answer to all these things is yes, but it's, it's just curbed, um, and yeah, it's like I just have to jump in, and I don't know that anybody, when they're having a kid, feels like a fully formed adult. Um, it just feels like you have to jump into an ice bath and it's like something you've been trained to always want, and I have always wanted. It's always been the default. Like I'm going to have kids and that's still the case. Um, but reading some of this child free research was a little bit illuminating. And it's one of these things where, like, I have no idea how it's going to go down One, because I don't actually know what it's like to be a mom. I've never even had younger siblings, so I never had to care for a little kid, so I have no idea what that's going to be like. Once you have the kid, it's out, you can't do anything about it, and the other thing is because you don't know what kind of kid you're going to get.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a huge gamble and it's almost like we're trying to look into the research to see if there's an answer of should I have kids or not? Is this a good idea? Right? And to introduce some choice, or at least like, like, some informed decision making, to something that we, that a lot of at least, like I speak for myself like women, take for granted, like I know I'm gonna, I know this is my path, but now people are making all sorts of decisions, right, we have the power to do it. A lot of people, a lot more people, I think, now are deciding not to have kids and, um, it's, it's really interesting to make that decision as a 30 year old not knowing what life is going to look like when you're 50, 60, 70s, with or without kids. Right, that's, that's a lot of time, that's a lot of life. Um, that's impacted by this decision we're making now. So it's the rest of it.
Speaker 1:It's the rest of your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it felt more. Yeah, this kind of these questions were introduced to me when I was going through fertility treatments and thought, oh my God, like what if I don't have kids? Like what if I am unable to have children of my, of biological children on my own? Does that mean I want them so badly that I look into other options like donor egg or surrogacy or adoption. You know, do I want that? What does that look like? What would life look like if I didn't have kids, right? So, like I think me like when I had trouble conceiving. That's really when it felt like a loss. It felt like a loss of something that I took for granted, that was something in my life, but then it was a little like it was presented now as a choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas before I just could you know it was like almost not a choice, it was like all right kids now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I mean just, I mean I'm not in fertility treatments right now, but just working at the fertility center. I mean I'm just inundated with these choices. You know my patients are making them and exactly it does kind of present this like, okay, do you really want kids or do you really want biological kids? Mm-hmm, interesting. Do you really want three kids or actually, would one kid be the compromise where you know you get most of your freedom but you still get to be a mom and you still get that experience and so.
Speaker 1:And then I think inflation is the other big thing. This, you know, I was watching Bill Maher, who I have mixed feelings about, last night, but he was saying that a majority of Americans don't know how strong the economy is because everybody feels poor right now because of inflation, and the idea that kids are expensive has never been more relevant. Where I'm actually thinking about reducing the number of kids I want, simply because of that, because I just I just don't want to be poor and struggling all the time and arguing with my partner about money, and so it it feels like the costs of having kids are I mean, they've probably never been higher outside of like a recession.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I heard that the biggest increases in expenditure is childcare. These days yeah, so it's like it's a real investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess I'll go into what I did find from the involuntarily childless research, and actually I kind of had to rely on qualitative studies. So just for those of you all who don't know the difference between qualitative and quantitative quantitative studies they usually have much higher sample sizes and they will use things like measures like questionnaires, or maybe physiological measures like heartbeat, to basically get numbered values of information from a big swath of people, whereas qualitative studies typically rely on interviews with a small set of people. I'm kind of oversimplifying it for the sake of this, because these studies were interview studies, but one I mean, to be honest, like the studies that I found were pretty grim, but I do want to talk through that after I kind of go through them. So one qualitative study on involuntarily childless women who are 40 to 55 years old, which is like great, okay. So now I mean, the youngest cohort here might be just out of fertility treatment, but we're at least we've got some time.
Speaker 1:And one thing that was found was this complicated grief effect. So a lot of these women seem to have symptoms more akin to complicated grief than any other disorder, and the reason for this is that it's a really ambiguous loss. It's the loss of a dream, it's the loss of what could have been. It's not the loss of a particular tangible person or thing. And so a lot of these women actually haven't gone through a normal grieving process or a healthy grieving process Because in a sense, they don't even know that that's what they're doing or that's what they need to do. They don't, like, qualify this as or characterize this as grief, because they're not mourning the death of someone.
Speaker 1:Um, and that kind of brings up questions about like, okay, so how can we adjust complicated grief treatments for someone who doesn't have this tangible loss? New worries emerge, like that their husband could find a younger, fertile wife. Yeah, I know that one was a bit of a gut punch, but honestly, that's how I would feel too with a different partner. I mean, I know Jason's cool either way, so that's helpful, but I get it because, honestly, if Jason were infertile, I'd be like okay, are you willing to use donor sperm? Like I don't know?
Speaker 2:Oh my God use donor sperm like I don't know, oh my god. Yeah, when you just said that, I like I felt the gut punch because I remember I I was infertile and you know, and it's not. It's. What's terrible about this is that who know like now there's who knows where the source of infertility is right, like, men and women both have problems, but the women tend to take on this the shame of it, right, the blame. And definitely that's the way I felt with my two years of infertility with my previous husband.
Speaker 2:And then I remember divorcing and then having to, you know, think about dating and starting to date my now husband and I remember one of the most painful I wouldn't say it was a fight, but the time that I got really emotional and overwhelmed and shut down was when we started talking about, like, the fertility timeline. We were on vacation and we're just talking about, like when we would start trying and the idea he was suggesting to to wait a little bit, um, so he could finish grad school. But then I was like all the shame of, like I'm in, I'm infertile, right, I don't have choices and it's gonna be my fault, and then if I am I not able to produce quote, not able to produce a child. Will that mean the end of our relationship? Or will that mean, yeah, that he would just like eventually leave to find someone else? Um, who can? We were just younger, more fertile, so, yeah, I can imagine that the complicated grief for women might also be like this kind of feeling of it might be my fault, like I'm broken.
Speaker 1:You know like, oh yeah oh god, that one comes up. Yeah, and I think even for women just in their mid-30s who maybe they don't know if they have fertility issues, but it's, it is difficult to date. It is difficult to go on a first date and be like I need to find out if this guy wants kids and like how quickly, and yeah, and, and people don't this. What drives me crazy is that people don't know about the biological clock. They might think they do, but then these articles come out that you know, cameron Diaz had a baby at 53 or whatever, and all the time I'll be like I need to have kids soon.
Speaker 1:People will be like, no, my mom had a baby at 40. You've got time. It's like, no, your mom had time. A lot of women cannot have babies at 40. Everybody's body works differently. So people just think that it's like you're the same level of fertile until you're like 43 or something and then maybe you're not anymore. But that's not true. It declines pretty sharply at 35. And so, yeah, and so dating is just, it becomes really pressured.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then it's like the question if you're dating and then you find someone who doesn't want kids Right, or you can't have kids for whatever reason, are you going to stay with that person because you're choosing them?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Like it's the dream that you find someone who wants to be with you, no matter what. Right. Like who says the magic words of you know, whether we have kids or not, I love you, I want to make a family with you, whether it's the two of us or with children. Right.
Speaker 1:But that's not always oh, that's so nice. That's probably because he doesn't want to be poor and stressed out again.
Speaker 2:Do you choose the partner, or do you choose the dream of having like a children or not children? Right, it's like what do you dude?
Speaker 1:I've had so many friends and patients who are in these relationships where the men are like I'm like 60 40, don't want kids, want kids, or I'm 80 20 and they wait and they wait to see if they are worth the man changing their mind and they run down their clock and it makes it gives me so much anxiety and so much frustration. Um, because I get that the man is like, well, those actually that actually is how I feel, like maybe I'm open to kids, it's like okay, but if you are with someone in their 30s, you gotta figure it out and let her know, because otherwise it's cruel.
Speaker 2:I was just talking to a friend who is my age, I think. She's like 36, 37, like around that age, and she's dating someone who has kids from a previous relationship and he is she describes as like 20% wanting it, like he would be a no, but he says I would if that's what you want, and she's like I don't know Right. Like you know, it's really common for people to be like I'm actually not sure if I want kids or not. That's kind of like. Actually, what inspired this episode too is like then she has to make the decision right. She has to be the one who goes okay, yes, let's do it and make my partner, who's like, really farther on the fence. You know, like, and that's a hard thing to choose because then it's like what. That has a lot of implications. It's might change a relationship, it might change where I live, it might, you know, there's they. This decision carries so much weight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I cannot imagine being that stressed out like indecision about major life events. I mean, that's what threw me on Lexapro at first and being with somebody who was trying to control me all the time, but like being so much on the fence just lodged there and watching your time tick down. It's an awful feeling. So, anyway, and then probably one of the things she's worrying about is what these women also talk about as being a source of grief is that they'll die without ever having had this experience. And yeah, I mean so.
Speaker 1:Much of the way I think about having kids is like this is the greatest love you'll ever experience. You get to watch psychology in action. You get to watch this little blob develop into a full person. You get to share your teachings with them, you know. You get to see how your genes look rearranged with somebody you love, and I mean how that turns into a creature. You get a new sense of fulfillment. You get to see yourself change into a new role and take on, you know, a new, put on a new cloak and that's just. That's such a profound experience and I am terrified of never having that and I completely understand why people would regret that.
Speaker 1:Um, then there's a sense of meaninglessness. What is my worth and value? Uh and oh, this one kick. This one's a killer. Lack of evidence of positive outcomes of involuntary childlessness to draw hope from. We need this research and we need people to step up. Well, we don't need it, but it would just be nice, I guess, if people who couldn't have kids and who actually wound up loving their child free lives could share that experience with people. And then there's the question that you and I talk about, which is who will take care of me when I'm older, and I still don't have an answer for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I imagine that's really culturally different because, you know, even just seeing in the US, or like the idea of putting your older parents into a home or somewhere else, right, yeah, you know that's more common here than in Hong Kong, where my family's from, where it's so different to be an older person. There there's so much respect for elders, like there's a lot of it's like here all the eyes are pointing to the young people as like the focal point, and in Hong, the young people as like the focal point, and in Hong Kong it feels like the opposite.
Speaker 2:All the eyes are pointing to the older people. You like everyone, everyone like gathers around them and works hard to you know, make sure they have regular, you know gatherings with them, like it's when the older you get, the cooler your life looks, because people are really into you and really into like taking care of you, whereas here that's a question, and so yeah, it sounds very, very lonely to be old without kids, and but maybe it's not, and that's another story I would like to hear is like is it that lonely or do you have more freedom to build community when you know, when you don't have kids?
Speaker 1:I don't know if I would buy that necessarily, because 90% of Americans do have kids and so it might be harder. And so it might be harder, but if you're child-free, like do you find child-free communities and kind of grow up with each other and take care of each other and that's how you spend old age? I don't know, but I know that's one of my bigger fears and it feels like a sort of a stupid reason to have kids, like it's very practical. Then I have to remember that I have very profound reasons for having kids.
Speaker 2:But I do understand that anxiety. Yeah, I mean I think you know. To counter the research that you are quoting, there is a study looking at over 40 years of data from like the General Social Survey about like 14,000 adults from 50 to 70 age range and it's really consistent that older parents with minor children at home still at home are less happy than their empty nest contemporaries by five or six percentage points. Um so um. It's. Children in the house make men less happy. I don't think that's a surprise.
Speaker 1:So this is when the data starts getting muddy is when we talk about do kids actually make you happier? Let me just real quick run through some coping mechanisms of involuntarily childless women, just because I want to make a couple points about how we can maybe shift some of the outcomes that we're seeing from this involuntary group to the child-free group, where the data I mean spoiler alert is going to look very different. So some of the things these women did were they accepted their identity as a childless woman. And we know like the primary tool we use in the fertility center is acceptance. It's this idea that so many of these women come in and these men come in and they are very, very attached to their life, looking a very particular way. They want X number of kids at Y ages and they will never be happy if this doesn't happen. And, of course, when you go through fertility treatment, you're spending a lot of money on making this dream come true, so you become even more fused to it. It's very hard to accept that actually life can happen to you and that life has a bounty, no matter kind of what path you walk down. You know, I mean as long as you're happy or as long as you're healthy, you have good social life. Whatever you're healthy, you have good social life, whatever. Um, so, being able to turn to acceptance and say, okay, life, do to me what you will, you know like I am now a childless woman, a child free woman that is who I am. I am no longer turning away from that identity, I'm bringing it on and I'm gonna approach life that way now. It's a way help Choosing to move on from the grief and find new goals. Yeah, I mean this is you don't have to stay stuck in this life that you don't want to be living. It could instead be okay. What does this child-free life offer me that otherwise I wouldn't have? And it turns out we'll see from the child-free literature. It offers a lot Taking responsibility for the positives in your life. One woman said I look at what I've got and I think you did this. This is because of what you've built.
Speaker 1:So many women, I think, get stuck in the stigma of not having kids or the sense of failure at not having kids, and they live there and that. And then actually broadening out and saying, okay, you know what? I don't have kids, but that was my body's doing. What I built was my awesome career, my friend circle, this house that I bought you know, these hobbies I have and really owning that. So some of these women reported realizing that they still have the same enthusiasm and interest they did when they were 25. And when they were 25, they weren't thinking my life sucks because I don't have kids. When they were 25, they were probably thinking I don't want kids, I've got too much to do.
Speaker 1:And when we get into our 30s and it feels like this is the major choice we have to make and if we decide to have kids and then can't have them, then everything is lost. If we decide to have kids and then can't have them, then everything is lost. Then it's like, oh my God, all I am is just this meaningless husk, when actually, no, like you, pretty recently, were somebody who had a really full life without kids. Can you reconnect with that former self?
Speaker 1:And so all of this is to say I think a lot of these outcomes for involuntarily childless is to say I think a lot of these outcomes for involuntarily childless women, um, and men are really grim. But they're maybe not taking to account what happens if you get therapy and heal and you know when you really process this complicated grief and you really find out how to wear this new identity and um, look at your, at your life as as something that's bountiful and has a lot to give you. And obviously, your outcomes are going to be worse if you really really wanted something and you couldn't have it than for people who didn't want it in the first place. But what we're going to see from the child-free literature is that it's not an objective truth that kids make you happier. It's not like like we know. It's an objective truth that friends make you happier, yeah, yeah, but it's not so with kids, and so we can go into yeah, I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 2:I think what we're talking about is we're talking about the research that's applicable to people who really wanted kids and found out that they can't have it right. So it's like, as you're saying, a dash dream, like a loss of a dream, someone who has to change their view of what they wanted their future to look like, what they wanted to get out of life, and it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity for therapy to step in and help a person, like with any loss of a dream, right, it could be career, it could be, you know, like many, many different ways of how to accept that, how to find opportunities in that loss right, all the grieving process, processes. So that's like actually sounds very hopeful for people who, like, wanted kids and who, um, weren't able to have it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I think we can turn to the child free literature now and look at like there are actually pretty positive outcomes of not having kids. I would say the most divided data I saw was with men.
Speaker 2:Um yeah, so in this general social survey, as men get older, men who are fathers are more likely to report being very happy the older they get.
Speaker 1:And the older the kid gets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so old men are really happy if they have kids. And it's complex, right. That's one data set. There's a lot of different things that go into it, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we've also found that men not just the older they get, but as time has passed, over the past 70 years parenthood has made men much more happy than it did in the 50s when they didn't really have anything to do with kids.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting, like, basically this study that we're talking about right now showed that women are kind of bummed out by their kids. Their happiness decreases. It's lower than child-free women, but men, their happiness increases with the greater involvement that they have. And I guess I'm wondering like okay, so this could be a gendered thing where men just like kids more than women. That probably is not the case. It might be more like the increased involvement that men get is more enjoyable than the increased involvement that women get.
Speaker 2:Anecdotally yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, the more men get to play with the kids and it doesn't impact their career with the kids and it doesn't impact their career. They just get nice time versus women have to do, maybe the brunt of the unfun stuff and it does impact their career. Then women get a little bit more bummed out. So I mean it's interesting, because the more equitable the roles have gotten, the happier men are. But I guess I'm wondering if then that trend might start to reverse, if it got even more equitable.
Speaker 2:I mean it is quite sad to look at like general happiness studies there's one famous one by Harvard professor Dan Gilbert and another one by Daniel Kahneman looking at just like what makes people happy over their lives? Right, and children do not make people happy. People who have children tend to rate their happiness on a daily basis lower than people who are child-free. And you know the other study I'm looking at we'll post this all on the website but the general social survey mothers are less happy than child-free women from the ages of 50 to 70, especially if the kids are at home. Necessarily take this as the whole like, the whole answer to like should you have kids? Is it better to have kids or not? Because this is where how research is done will really come into play.
Speaker 2:If someone were to ask me, kiddie, are you happy right now? I would probably say no, right, like, because the way if we understand happiness, like, does happiness mean I'm satisfied with my life? Do I feel like I'm living a meaningful life? Versus like am I enjoying myself in this moment? Right, if I'm like feeling the emotion of happiness, I could say that I feel fulfilled with my kid. Right, do I feel happy on a? You know, if you look at me at any time taking care of my kid, like often it's probably a no right. It's like it's tough. It's like most of most of having a kid is is the struggle part where, um, it almost kind of sometimes feels like a lot of the caretaking is like a relief of the bad feelings where I'm worried that he's not eating enough, so like I'm trying to find him food that he likes or he's crying like he's about to be two, so it's like really present.
Speaker 2:So he's like screaming because I'm trying to put on his fucking socks, right, and so me just trying to put on the socks and try to calm him down, that's parenting, and it's probably like the worst feelings I've had, compared to all the times that I was child-free and I don't know what I was doing, you know, sleeping in. What was I doing? Right?
Speaker 1:That's what I do, However, yeah yeah, enjoy it.
Speaker 2:But would I say that I I mean, you've asked me this before like, is this, is it worth it? Right, and times that I've really been struggling with parenthood, you've asked me, like, is this worth it? And there are days where I go, no, yeah, and there are days where I go, yes, I know, overall I would say I'm quote happier with kids than if I didn't, because that's what I wanted. But is it fun every day? No, yeah, in fact. Fact, you know you're saying, oh, the most love you've ever felt, no, frankly, the most love I've ever felt was being on mdma coachella, listening to lady gaga. Oh, my god, that, what, what was it like? A beautiful two hour long set where she just sung her heart out and I'm like dancing with my friends and all the people that I loved. That was the most love I've ever felt. I've had bits of it with my kid. But don't believe the hype, right? There's times where you could chemically make yourself happier than having kids.
Speaker 1:Anyway, go on.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:I think that you bring up a super important point, which is what does happiness really consist of? How are we operationalizing it? Is happiness actually the point of life? You know, these women actually aren't saying that they feel like they'd be happier with kids, or talk about meaning and fulfillment. I feel like I'd have a more meaningful life if I had kids. I feel like I'd have a more meaningful life if I had kids, and that actually seems to be the replacement they need is how can I find meaning in not having kids? It's not. How can I find happiness in not having kids?
Speaker 1:So I mean, there are some early studies that showed comparable life satisfaction between child-free versus parents, um, with child-free women having slightly more satisfaction in freedom, friendship, love and financials. And then, yeah, the majority of studies did show positive correlation between child-free and life satisfaction. But like, what is satisfaction? So that seems to be a different concept than happiness. That seems like maybe it could include more meaning, but I don't know. You know you'd have to really define that, and and then the the research subjects would also have to understand what. What they're actually answering Like um, so I don't know, but it does seem like people who don't have kids wind up, totally fine.
Speaker 1:They are maybe enjoying their life a little bit more. And if they don't feel like kids are where their life's meaning comes from, then great. You know, I don't know if there is really a delta between parents and child-free people on meaning. It's difficult when that was where people thought that their meaning was going to come from and they're blocked from that. And then men We've seen pretty bad outcomes for men who don't have kids. Research has shown that childless men have poor health outcomes, especially if they are unpartnered, and we know that marriage is better for men than women. Excessive drinking and smoking, depression, poor sleep, worse physical health, earlier death and increased risk for suicide, oof.
Speaker 2:Men get going on your baby making?
Speaker 1:Totally, yeah. And then you know, I looked at this qualitative study of involuntarily childish. Was that a Freudian slip? Or was that a Freudian slip? Involuntarily childish men that sounds like a condition that many women are afflicted with. That many women are afflicted with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one thing we're missing here and this comes in really strong for men and women is the role of stigma. So I'm seeing that both involuntarily childless people and child-free people, one of the biggest negatives in their lives are stigma, and it's not necessarily better for either of the genders. I mean, women might be seen as like, less feminine. Being called selfish is one of the biggest ones, which I think is just so stupid. You know, like, is it really selfish to not have kids? You might think it's selfish to have kids. You have to create a new human in order to give yourself a source of meaning. Um, but yeah, people see it as like, oh, you know, you don't want a kid because you don't want to take care of another person, you don't want to do the work. It's like, well, who says, maybe you want to take care of different people, maybe you want to take care of animals like.
Speaker 1:So anyways, if you do that, don't do that. And men are often seen as weak or ineffectual. The shame of male sterility is it's just its own unique hell. You know, men love to think of themselves as virile. It makes them feel more manly, which is a belief, not a fact, obviously. And what actually happens is that women, even though the stigma for them is just as strong and painful, they wind up actually pretending that they are the infernal one to save their male partner. Wow, yeah, I yeah. I mean obviously not everyone does that, but that there was a finding that showed that. Oof.
Speaker 2:Women just take so many for the team, don't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does seem that it does also seem like the other. The aging research shows, far and above the way to age. Well, people who are happy when they're older are people who are A physically active and, b have good relationships. That's really strong findings. If the confounding factor is do you have healthy relationships when you're older? Right, like if you're a child free and have a great community, you might be happier than you know. If not, and maybe older people who have kids naturally are. You know they're in a different community, they have kids, grandkids or whatever, so they have more interactions with other people. And definitely for men, that's the case, right, men who are married and have families are a lot more social than men who don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it is interesting seeing the divide between men and women here. It seems as though marriage and kids are more important for men.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and harder for women.
Speaker 1:And harder for women, and maybe that's because women are doing more work. Or maybe it's because women without kids, and maybe that's because women are doing more work. Or maybe it's because women without kids are just more capable, naturally, of building the social foundation for happiness than men are.
Speaker 1:So, and I just like, I chuckle a little bit, because it's usually when I talk to my friends. It's usually the men who don't want kids. Or, like you know, my friends will be dating men who don't want kids. Or, like you know, my friends will be dating men who don't want kids. And I'm like, well, good luck out there, excessively drinking and smoking. I'm sort of kidding, but you know, I do think that child-free men need to be pretty intentional about their health and about their socializing to make sure that they can avoid these bad outcomes.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. It really should now like thinking about the data. It should be the reverse. It should be that men are chasing us should chase us for the chance to have kids and we should be running away from it.
Speaker 1:Well, that's how it works in the rest of the animal kingdom. Yeah, right and yeah, but then the men don't stick around, I guess in most cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's easier yeah, I mean, I think it's just like thinking about all this data. It actually sounds kind of heartening and a little scary in the sense that there's not a real yes or no you should have kids or not, right. It's not like a you know binary, like oh yeah, people with kids are happier or less happy. It's a little bit like what do you derive meaning from in life and how can you adjust that sense of meaning and purpose to whether you have kids or not, right? So if you wanted them and didn't get them, then finding a new sense of meaning. Or if you find that you really want kids and have them. It's hard but you might be happier in this, like life satisfaction of you know, having something that you really want, even though it's really difficult on a day to day basis.
Speaker 1:I think my takeaway from all of this is really what I've been trying to get my patients to, which is that, either way, there are gifts, um, I don't have to be so attached to having three kids or two kids, um, and what will? What will happen? Will happen, you know, and and that's, that's a life that will be worth living either way. So I think I found this literature mostly a relief, and also a little bit scary, because I do, at this moment, want kids.
Speaker 2:It's like I will give people a heads up from the data and personal experience and watching friends and myself, that the first year of having a kid, I think it's also like whether you have kids at home and young kids, versus like you're 70 and you have adult kids. It's a very different picture. Right In the first year of having kids, marriages or relationships really suffer and just to know that that happens, that's really. You go from having all of your time together, you know you can really focus your love, affection and resources on each other, right, and then suddenly you're pointing to this other thing, right, and you're tired, you're stressed out, you are, you know you're co, you become co-parents, and I think that adjustment is generally really difficult and comes with a lot of yeah, a lot of changes and a lot of hardship. And couples therapy is really helpful for that.
Speaker 2:I you know say it from my own experience really, really helpful and also just patience, because it does get better over time, and not to just catastrophize and say, oh no, this is what it's going to be like forever. As kids grow up, it changes.
Speaker 1:And that's, I think, especially a good message for you to give people, because you were stuck in that this is going to last forever thinking and you did have pretty bad postpartum depression and to know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel is really powerful and it seems like something that maybe there could be a cope ahead plan about. I mean a loose one like okay, partner, you and I are going to go into the baby tunnel for a year and we're not going to be having as much sex and we're not going to be going on as many dates. Um, do we want to figure out, like I don't know a babysitter now that?
Speaker 2:we can rely on?
Speaker 1:Do we want to figure out child care now? Do we want to have a system in place for what happens when we pull apart from each other? Do we want to get couples counseling now Not because we're in trouble now but because we might be later and we want to have the attitude of we're doing this together and we are going to prioritize our relationship to the degree that we can.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Just for me, assuming that two people is not enough to take care of a kid. So whatever supports that you need to make that happen whether it's babysitter, daycare, family, friends with other kids two people is just not enough. It's too exhausting, and if you want to reserve some of that, some of your energies, for each other, there's got to be at least another person or resource in play.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I don't know for those of you who maybe are struggling to have kids or who decide not to have kids, maybe just opening a window a little bit to the idea that you may no longer have to save a ton of your money, you may no longer have to think about waking up really early. For the rest of your life, you can engage in travel and hobbies that maybe you didn't think were worth starting, because when were you going to find the time? You can date differently without a clock, or you can have a different kind of marriage, so maybe take a second to try to revel in what that could be like as well. If that feels inaccessible right now, that's okay.
Speaker 2:But it is there for you waiting, and if there's still a lot of purpose and value in nurturing the next generation or passing down something, there's so many other ways to do that right Teaching, mentorship, you know, getting involved in organizations that do things for kids right, or animals, or there's other ways to give besides for your, like, biological children, and that can, yeah, very meaningful actually, in a qualitative interview with child free people, two women talked about how, when they were thinking about not being mothers, they were like, wait a minute, just because I don't have a kid doesn't mean I'm not a mother.
Speaker 1:What is involved in being a mother like nurturing, support, care well, I can exercise all of those values in other ways, um, and so that was one way in which they didn't feel like they were missing out on anything. Yeah, so, on that note, if you feel like you need an outlet for nurturing, caring and supporting, giving us a five-star rating on spotify or apple podcast and a nice little note, I think would basically serve that need. So we'll see you all in a couple weeks. By accessing this podcast, I acknowledge that the hosts of this podcast make no warranty, guarantee or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information featured in this podcast.
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