Is it okay if I don’t want kids?

I see how it feels so easy to just say no to kids. Having kids is irrational. They do not make us happier. They disrupt the halcyon days of early marriage. And they cost a lot of money.

Pretty much every twentysomething says, at some point, that they don’t want kids, and in 97% of those cases that twentysomething is delusional.

Of course there is a biological urge to have kids – but it turns out it’s actually a drive to have sex, not so much to have a baby. So what, then, makes all the people who say no to kids in their 20s end up saying yes to kids in their 30s? Here’s what I think:

There are only two choices in life: career or family.
You can look at anyone in the whole world who you admire, and you can see they picked either career or family. There are not people who have an amazing career who also put their family first.

Amazing careers come from incredible focus and dedication. That singular focus means you are able to also surround yourself with singular focus. The people who are insanely driven to be high performers in their chosen career do that to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

You are not someone who is going all out at work.
I know this because those people are not reading this post. They don’t care about this topic.

Anyway you know by the time you’re 26 if you love to work. Because 26 year olds who love to work have been working nonstop at a singular, focused goal, since they were 21. Really. Not kidding. Read about Sara Blakely.

If you are 26 and you are not currently exhibiting the drive to meet difficult, all-consuming goals, then you will not have a particularly interesting or fruitful career. Because the careers that are fulfilling are ones you give yourself to.

Just like everything else in life: you get what you give.

The stuff you want in life does not take a lot of time.
Look at people who are 40 years old. Or 50. What are they doing with their days? Probably dealing with family. What do you imagine you will be doing all day, with no kids?

Writing a novel? That takes an hour a day. Doing yoga? That takes an hour a day. Travel? For what? 80 years? At some point you are not traveling anymore, you are homeless.

This is all to say that everyone’s life needs to be about something. Without a career or family the days are long. On the other hand, either a big job or kids can easily consume an entire day.

So there is your big job OR there are kids. I don’t see a choice in life besides career or family. There is nothing else with enough weight to matter in your life.

This is why people don’t take women at 26 seriously when they say no to having kids and don’t already have something big and meaningful that they’re doing instead. What those women are really saying is they thought they would do something big and meaningful with their careers before they had kids.

But look. Everyone thinks that and it’s only true for like 5% of the world. And besides, no big career was built in four years, and that’s when you’d have to stop with the career to start focusing on kids instead.

Let’s be real. The more you put off having kids waiting for that big and meaningful thing to pop into your life, the more you mess up your chances of even being able to have kids.

Having or not having kids is a false choice. 
If you want two kids, scientists say you should start trying at age 27. That’s a tough reality. And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for choice.

Women have a biological clock. They are literally going to miss out on having their own kids if they don’t do it soon enough.

Everyone who has kids says they love their kids more than anything in the whole world. It’s hard to say, in the first quarter of your long life, that you want to give that up. So women just have kids.

What if you don’t? The real thing keeping you from having kids is that you think no one will admire you for your brains and ambition. And this is probably true. This Tumblr post summarizes the problem well. It’s not just that most women are doing the caregiving and that it’s unpaid labor. It’s that it puts your life on a path for low performers:

“The more women care for others, the less care they can receive in return, because they devote less time to waged labor than men and many social insurance plans are calculated on the years of waged work done….Because of the devaluation of reproductive work, practically everywhere women face old age with fewer resources than men, measured in terms of family support, monetary incomes and available assets. Thus, in the US, where pensions and Social Security are calculated on years of employment, women are the largest group of elderly poor and the largest number of residents of low-income nursing homes…because they spend so much of their lives outside of the waged workforce in activities not recognized as work.”

But nothing is going to change that any time soon. The only thing that is changing right now is your fertility. And it’s waning.

Competent parenting begets a child who wants to be a competent parent.
I have no data for this except the hundreds of women I coach who say they don’t want children. I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you that almost every woman I coach who did not have kids wishes, by 40, that she did. And I have never met an adamantly childless woman at 40 who did not have a very, very difficult childhood.

When we have no model for being good parent it’s hard to believe it is possible to be a good parent. But the worst thing you can do after your parents ruin your childhood is to let your parents also ruin your adulthood.

So, for those of you who have a career that you live for, kids could ruin that, and maybe you don’t want that to happen. For everyone else, if you are thinking of not having kids, and you don’t have a career that you live for, you’re not being honest.

This harsh reality is true for both men and women, but men have so much longer to live in delusion of a just-around-the-corner amazing career. Women have to face reality much sooner because of biology. Life is about career or kids. That’s it. There are no other choices. You can spend your whole life trying to balance those two things that are extremely important to you. But don’t risk spending your life having nothing that is extremely important to you.

257 replies
« Older Comments
  1. Ellen
    Ellen says:

    There are things “definitely wrong” with almost every human being, obviously this post touched a nerve. Which is what good posts do. Penelope is doing a good thing by being vulnerable. I don’t agreee that in order to have meaning in life there are only a few ways to get that. Life is meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Lucky for us Penelope doesn’t give a shit when people are mean to her.

  2. Hana Gabrielle Bidon
    Hana Gabrielle Bidon says:

    First of all, we have the choice of raising children whether we give birth to one or adopt one. Maybe you want to push the agenda for having children but not everyone wants to. Frankly, children are expensive and it’s irresponsible to have children without taking care of finances and student loans. Plus, there’s little maternity leave for mothers in the United States so that adds on to the stress of balancing career and family. Personally, I don’t want to have children because I have other goals in life such as traveling around the world and learning several languages which take up a SIGNIFICANT time.

    Don’t be so pretentious and let people live their life.

  3. Sam
    Sam says:

    In the end there is absolutely no correct answer to having a child. Everyone is different. Don’t let anyone pressure you into having a child just because society sees it as a normal thing. At the same time, don’t sacifice your dream of a family because your partner don’t want kids. When you are in a relationship your life is not yours alone anymore. Your life is part of your partners and every decision either one of you makes affects both lives.

  4. Sam
    Sam says:

    Too ma y people look at choosing kids vs choosing a career as getting something. I don’t want kids its because I don’t want to get something in my life. Kids suck because
    1) you will lose lots of sleep from them crying. When I get home from work, I’m already exhausted and just wanna relax. I don’t wanna deal with even more house work after work. This is why you see so many parent look like shit from having zero rest.
    2) you can do anything anymore. With a kid there is no way you can just choose to leave the house in the middle of the night to hang with friends or do a late dj gig on the weekends. Your stuck with the family.
    3) your going to be broke. What happens when both parents go to work? Your going to have to spend one parents entire salary on a nanny which runs on average 35k a year. Why even go to work when you have a kid. You might as well have one parent quit work.
    4) say good bye to your sex life. I don’t give a f what you say in terms of a solution. I guarantee you when you have a child you will rarely have sex due to the lack of energy and privacy. Tis is why there are so many cheaters in the world because peole are getting none at home. The kid is a direct result of cheating.
    5) lot of peole want a kid to look after them when they get old. For these people ask yourself how often you are there for your parents? Do you visit them a lot or just ignore them like the masses? If hour in America and you think your kids will take care of you good luck. Especially in America, peole neglect the elderly so don’t count on your off spring to keep you company when your old.
    6) This ties with the first reason why it sucks to have kids. The stress and tiredness will cause you to lose your looks. There is no way around it. Women will lose their figure and men will lose their hair. Both parents will look like unattractive zombies due to the lack of energy and exhaustion from raising a child.

    In the end no matter your views on having a kid, I know for sure anyone will love the child more than anything in the world. It’s up to you as a individual do you want to sacrifice your freedom, your looks, your sex life, your time, and your money to have this love that may or may not be with you when you get older. Society said it is the normal thing to do.

    • Penelope Trunk
      Penelope Trunk says:

      The problem with your analysis, is that a person has to live life, so its not have kids or kill yourself. Its have kids or
      Xxx.

      And in fact, we know enough about not-kids to know all the downsides of that, as well. Its just that people are not as honest about it because they donmt want the world to say I told you so. (Fair enough, but not useful.)

      It sounds like you have done great research about life with kids an dno research about life without kids. Becauae you compared with kids to nothing instead of providing an equally knowledgeable list of life without kids.

      Its a useless discussion to talk about the downside with anything without also looking at the downside without. If nothing else, there’s a ling list of hard things about living and a short list if you kill yourself. So killing ourselves is maybe the most rational approach to take to simplify life, proving, alas, that life decisions not as straightforward as your analysis implies.

      Penelope

  5. Sally
    Sally says:

    Ignorant white American is ignorant.
    Or this article is clickbait for generating page views and comments.
    Or she is posting this article because she is salty and trying to make a point directed at someone in her personal life.

    Good luck with whichever it is.

    • Natalie
      Natalie says:

      I believe she is regretting her own choices but trying to justify them in this article. Either way, it’s just ignorant to assume every woman wants the samend thing. And she’s wrong if she says she doesn’t need it.

  6. run 3
    run 3 says:

    Yeah, It’s not wrong not to want kids. They aren’t for everyone. In fact the one of the worst thing possible is to have kids when you really don’t want them.

  7. Natalie
    Natalie says:

    I was looking forward to reading a good article, but my god. This is just awful. Such ignorance. You don’t need to have just 2 purposes in your life as a women. Career OR kids. That just shows narrow mindedness. Life is what you create it to be, what you choose it to be. You can have a beautiful happy life doing what ever you like whether that’s being a mom, a traveler, a career woman, even a gardener, finding spiritual enlightenment. Happiness comes from within. I feel truly sad for you. Your mentality is just brain washed by society values unfortunately. Women don’t have a biological clock. We are caring, and so are men. We can find just as an equal share of enjoyment for caring for an animal, or a homeless person. I hope you find your peace and happiness, and realize where it actually comes from.

  8. LadyD
    LadyD says:

    The first time I said I didn’t want kids, I was 15 yrs old. My attitude didn’t change at all – not when I turned 18, 20, 25, or 30. And on my 32 birthday I happily went through the procedure to have my tubes removed!

  9. Ann
    Ann says:

    I think this blog exemplifies what’s wrong with society and pressure on women. Basically it’s saying if you don’t have children then you better have a stellar career, and if you don’t have that stellar career, you’d better have children who will be perfect and be the perfect mother! I think this is why Xanax is so popular with women these days.
    You know what? I have an average career, 2 dogs, and I live in sin with my boyfriend, I’ve got great friends who I see once a week for a moderately priced dinner, I take a trip once a year and am actually happiest when I travel alone…because I am fun all on my own. And you know every day I wake up wildly excited about my average 2 dogs,1 boyfriend, moderate income life!

« Older Comments

Comments are closed.