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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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you know, it is like the millennial generation, I feel that has said openly, I don't want to have children, but also finding that conversation difficult to have with their parents who expected to be a grandparent, you know, like the disappointment of being a woman who doesn't want children. People love to say you'll change your mind.
They love to scaremonger you and say you're gonna sort of die a lonely death. And I, as I get older, I'm so happy with my decision more and more.
The American birth rate is declining, and there have been countless theories as to why that is. But we've mostly explored the falling birth rate from the perspective of people who might otherwise want kids. But what about people who don't want kids at all?
To get into all of this, I've got Sarah McCammon, senior fellow at Third Way, and Emma Gannon, author of the novel Olive, which explores the decision of being child-free by choice. Emma, Sarah, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello, hello.
I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Okay, so I want to start off by defining some terms. Like when people talk about, you know, those of us who are adults without kids, there are a couple different terms used, childless and child-free.
Sometimes in other media, I'll see those terms used interchangeably, although they're definitely not the same thing. Childless implies that being a non-parent may be a matter of circumstance. Like maybe you wanted kids, but it didn't work out. But the term child-free is much more rooted in the choice to be a non-parent. That's the group of people we'll be discussing today.
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Chapter 2: What are the reasons millennials and Gen Z are choosing to be child-free?
So for the purposes of this conversation, I will be going forward using the term child-free. So I just want to ground that for everybody watching and listening. That's where we're coming from. Survey and polling data indicates that millennials and Gen Zers are increasingly interested in living child-free. And they've shared a variety of reasons for that.
They are concerned about the cost, the time, the effort required to be a good parent. Honestly, it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to be like an okay parent. So being a good parent is like even more intense. And a lot of them just didn't have that desire, didn't have the desire to do that. Regardless of why, They don't want to be parents.
Their disinterest in parenting has a lot of people in a panic. Why do you think this trend is causing such a stir? Sarah, we'll start with you. Well, a lot of it comes down to economics.
There has been a really rapid shift in the way that people live and form families or don't form families as you just mentioned. alluded to, you know, the fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen to 1.6 children per women. That is about half a point less than replacement. And replacement is basically just the number that's needed to sort of maintain a steady level, stable population.
So we're like heading to a population decline.
Yeah.
Correct.
Yeah. Yeah. If you if you subtract immigration, which is like a whole other conversation. But, you know, this is happening already in some societies, especially in parts of Asia.
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Chapter 3: How does the declining birth rate impact societal expectations?
Those are some of the most prominent examples. And what that means is as a whole, the population is getting older. There are fewer younger workers. This creates all kinds of questions about, you know, pension systems, elder care. the future of the economy, especially in an economy that's really kind of been built on growth.
And so that's the big worry that I hear from sort of mainstream demographers. If you talk to people who consider themselves sort of pronatalists who have kind of an ideological or social or cultural reason for being concerned about this, maybe even a religiously driven concern, then you hear about things like, you know, sort of the future of the family and the future of human flourishing.
And I hear some of those things from sort of mainstream researchers too. There are questions about why people are having fewer kids and what does it say about the choices they feel are available to them.
What does that really mean? What's sort of under that culturally, that panic that people don't want to have children?
Well, it depends who you talk to. I mean, there are sort of socially conservative pro-natalist groups that I think just – I think they would say that they just see – Giving life to a new generation, building a family as sort of a core part of being human, as sort of the way that humans were meant to live. And some of this might be rooted in religious beliefs. but not necessarily all of it.
For some, and I don't want to paint all pronatalists in this way, but for some, there are racial and demographic and cultural anxieties that play a part.
Yes, I've seen, at least in the United States, there are a sizable chunk of, there is a loud minority of people who are very concerned about replacement, the great replacement theory, the idea that there are more non-white people being born than white people. And that's a bad thing.
Yeah. And I, there, there are those who feel that way, you know, and I also want to say, I put that question to a pretty conservative leaning group, the Institute for Family Studies, one of their researchers, and he pointed out that, you know, in the US, at least,
The birth rate has historically been higher in recent years among non-white groups and, you know, especially non-white groups that have a large percentage of immigrants. Those groups tend to have more babies than the white population. And so his response to that was, look, this isn't actually for us about race. It's about a desire to see families built and flourishing.
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Chapter 4: What terms are used to describe adults without children, and what do they mean?
But some people also didn't like her and called her selfish and called her, you know, someone that's like self-indulgent and wants to take up so much space in her life. And I think that's still a taboo. You know, women that want to really live on their own terms, like fully do whatever they want. That's new. Women for history have had to do what other people want them to do.
And I think, you know, it's good to talk about it.
I want to touch on that a little bit more. What cultural assumptions does our culture hold about adults who choose not to have kids, or child-free women specifically?
Well, in talking to people, my colleague Brian Mann and I, who sort of pitched this extended series on the birth rate and birth rate decline, we've talked to people all over the world, and several of our colleagues have helped us as well. And I think we've consistently heard
about that, or at least that perception or that fear of stigma for either, you know, not having not becoming a parent or not having more children. There's a for one of my stories, I went to Finland, which is a country that has a very different culture, a very different sort of political culture around support for parents, and yet also has a declining birth rate.
I talked to a woman there who's part of an organization for people who are child-free by choice. This group actually formed to find support around being child-free and just the idea that this is something that is very intentional. But there is a stigma around it for a lot of people, and I think some of that comes from the society and some of it does come from the family. Don't go anywhere.
You know, and I think one of the stories we did recently is about the fact that there is sort of a growing conversation among more progressive people about like, well, how do we respond to this change? And what does it say about society? And what does it say about, you know, the way that parents are or are not supported?
We've got more coming up after the break.
Yeah, I wonder, Emma, you touched on this a little bit where you've seen people respond to a character in your book. What sort of cultural assumptions have you have you noticed our culture holds about adults or women specifically who choose not to have children?
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Chapter 5: What economic factors contribute to the decision not to have children?
I think that this and I'm going to base this partly on conversations I've had with others, but also, frankly, my own life. I think that the perception of that decision varies a lot depending on what community that you're in. I grew up in a very traditional conservative Christian culture where it was expected to have children. It was assumed.
And there was a lot of I don't remember anyone saying that you're selfish if you don't. But it was just sort of seen as being part of.
what a woman would do would want to do being feminine being part of the community cooking or yeah going to church or anything else that you would you would just do yeah and and so like i always and it was also kind of put on a pedestal motherhood was like there you know it was um the women in my church who had lots of children some of them had one i think the largest family was 10 Mine was four.
They were kind of seen as especially sort of... It was like a real achievement. It was maybe even sort of especially spiritual. And I think that there is a correlation between sort of conservative communities, religious communities, and higher birth rates. So I think some of it is based on the environment that you're existing in.
I think it is actually much more normal now, though, to have no children or few children. I mean... You pointed to the data that suggests more and more millennials and Gen Z feel this way. And we talked to so many people who were just kind of like, yeah, you know, I was going about my life. I liked my career. I liked my friends. I like travel, you know, and it just wasn't a priority.
And so I think that it's becoming more normal for millennials. And sort of especially in mainstream culture for women not to center motherhood. Of course, I am a mother, so I don't really know firsthand what it's like not to have kids. And I had them quite young. So, I mean, I had them in my 20s and at just 30, the second one, just barely 30, which for professional women is pretty young.
So, you know, I haven't had that experience. I haven't had the experience of being into my late later thirties without children. And I don't know what that stigma might be like firsthand. I will say, but, um, and if I could say one other thing about that, I think there's also some stigma in the other direction as families get smaller.
You know, I spent a lot of time on social media looking at, um, kind of searching for comments about parenting and motherhood. And, uh, I've seen, you know, this is just social media, but I've seen women with, you know, three or four kids tell stories about being out in public and people making, you know, the joke like, well, you know, you know how, where those come from, right?
You know how that happens, right? Like just sort of sneering at having a large family. Um, and I even remember encountering that in my own family on one occasion. Um, you know, when, when my mother was pregnant with my fourth sibling, uh,
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