“We live in such a pronatal society. There’s still such a push that ‘having children equates to good’ that makes it very difficult for people not to second guess themselves even if they know having kids isn’t the right choice for them,” says Jennifer Watling Neal, a psychology professor at Michigan State University.
She’s spent the past five years studying child-free-by-choice adults and has found zero indication that parents are more satisfied with their lives than people who choose not to have kids. Her research has also shown that child-free-by-choice adults do not regret their decision when they’re older. That distinction—between sadness and regret—feels crucial. That’s a relief given that the thing I’m most often asked about if I tell someone I don’t want kids (mostly by men of a certain age) is who will take care of me when I’m old. It’s a question I roll my eyes at but also admittedly worry about.
The answers I’m searching for are harder to quantify. Do other people who are child-free by choice ever feel this same sadness—and if so, what are we supposed to do with it?
I asked two of my child-free friends. One, who we’ll call Sam, who is in her late 40s, married and never wanted kids. Still, she sat on the fence for years because of cultural pressures to have children. “I was waiting for some kind of sign or epiphany, something to say, ‘now is the moment we should do this,’” she says. “But that moment never came. There were long stretches of time where I would not think of kids at all—not my hypothetical kids, not other people’s kids. And after a while, it’s like, okay, that is the sign.”
“But do you ever feel sad that you didn’t have them,” I probe.
“I think everyone has regrets,” she says. “There might be a point where I wondered, what would that theoretical kid have been like. But it doesn’t change what I want.”
The other, who is single and turning 50 this year, feels similarly. We’ll call her Mary. We spoke just before the holidays and she admitted this is the only time of year she feels grief about being childfree by choice. “I would love to have had a 20 year old kid coming home for Christmas,” she says. “I’m not surrounded by that and I feel like that’s sad. But I don’t regret it. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get to experience that.’ I’ve given up on some love that I could have experienced.”
Perhaps my musings are bigger than parenthood, she wonders. More about choice, consequence, and time. We’re in our second act now, the back nine. Life isn’t written, but it sure as hell isn’t a blank page where every day felt like a choose-your-own-adventure novel and every decision, no matter how mundane, sparkled with life-changing possibility like you were in an episode of Girls. “When you get to my age, you start thinking, ‘that was my life. It’s not gonna be much different than this.’ And that’s hard,” says Mary.
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