The Petrified Forest - SUMMARY POST
From Po:
* In 1976, 10% of women age 40-44 had no children.
* In 2004, 19% of women age 40-44 have no children.
What's going on here, we've asked? It used to be a tenth of women never had children - now it's a fifth of women. A major demographic change has happened in thirty years.
Is it just that people aren't pairing up, aren't even getting married? We know there's a lot of skepticism about marriage out there, but if you've read WDILTP, you'll remember from the halftime chapter that while we might delay marriage, we still get around to it. For the women turning 40 this year, over 83% of them had already married by the age of 35. And the Census Bureau expects about 92% will marry at some point in their lives. Pairing up, it seems, is still very popular.
The crucial words there might be "at some point in their lives." You can marry right up until the day you die, but biological children have a window of time. And that window is shrinking quickly. I don't mean the window is closing on us ... I mean that a woman today is expected to do some other things before she has kids - she needs to go to college, she needs to gain her independence, she needs to get her career going ... and she has fewer years left in which to pair up with the right person, and fewer years even then to get pregnant. It's no wonder, with all that going on, that another tenth of our society can't manage to get it all worked out in time.
Unfortunately, many women who haven't pulled all that off are labeled as having "chosen" to forego bearing children ... when it's not been their first choice at all.
But this "So Much To Do - So Little Time" explanation doesn't fully explain the doubling in childless women. The numbers are similar for men. Let's be honest: the decision to have a child can be scary. We might be reasonably well-off today, but it seems that the tradeoff has included greater uncertainty about our future. With such uncertainty looming, and with nobody able to see more than a year or two into their own future, making a decision that will impact the next 20 years (having a child) is hard to make.
So when I used "The Petrified Forest" to describe the big group in the middle who's scared of having kids, readers backed me up - yes, becoming a parent can be terrifying. It's hard enough to just take care of ourselves.
Thirty years of divorce culture has been a factor, too. But it's been a factor both ways. For every guy who doesn't want to get married or have kids because of what went down in his own home, there's another guy with the same backstory who senses redemption in marrying and having children.
Ashley looked into the theory that it's mostly liberals who aren't having kids - is that partly why the country has shifted to the right? It might be, if not for the Hispanic women keeping the fertility rate high in the blue states.
So the optimist in me still finds solace in the fact that over 4 out of 5 women (and almost as many men) will overcome all these stated obstacles and manage to have children.
Lastly, we've met some women who have decided to take men out of the equation, at least temporarily. One less piece of the puzzle to find, one less problem to avoid. Sperm can be bought. It's not cheap, and the few thousand women each year who do it are very wealthy and very white ... (37 times more likely to be white than black.) Ashley gave Jennifer Egan a shellacking for the way she told this story, but to me, in a world where it's so easy to be pessimistic and so easy today to find reasons not to have children, I found only admiration for the women willing to raise a child alone.
So I'll put it back to you, readers:
How did you decide whether to have children, if you were a person who had your fears?
And how do you counsel someone (a friend, a daughter) who is confused about whether to have children?
* In 1976, 10% of women age 40-44 had no children.
* In 2004, 19% of women age 40-44 have no children.
What's going on here, we've asked? It used to be a tenth of women never had children - now it's a fifth of women. A major demographic change has happened in thirty years.
Is it just that people aren't pairing up, aren't even getting married? We know there's a lot of skepticism about marriage out there, but if you've read WDILTP, you'll remember from the halftime chapter that while we might delay marriage, we still get around to it. For the women turning 40 this year, over 83% of them had already married by the age of 35. And the Census Bureau expects about 92% will marry at some point in their lives. Pairing up, it seems, is still very popular.
The crucial words there might be "at some point in their lives." You can marry right up until the day you die, but biological children have a window of time. And that window is shrinking quickly. I don't mean the window is closing on us ... I mean that a woman today is expected to do some other things before she has kids - she needs to go to college, she needs to gain her independence, she needs to get her career going ... and she has fewer years left in which to pair up with the right person, and fewer years even then to get pregnant. It's no wonder, with all that going on, that another tenth of our society can't manage to get it all worked out in time.
Unfortunately, many women who haven't pulled all that off are labeled as having "chosen" to forego bearing children ... when it's not been their first choice at all.
But this "So Much To Do - So Little Time" explanation doesn't fully explain the doubling in childless women. The numbers are similar for men. Let's be honest: the decision to have a child can be scary. We might be reasonably well-off today, but it seems that the tradeoff has included greater uncertainty about our future. With such uncertainty looming, and with nobody able to see more than a year or two into their own future, making a decision that will impact the next 20 years (having a child) is hard to make.
So when I used "The Petrified Forest" to describe the big group in the middle who's scared of having kids, readers backed me up - yes, becoming a parent can be terrifying. It's hard enough to just take care of ourselves.
Thirty years of divorce culture has been a factor, too. But it's been a factor both ways. For every guy who doesn't want to get married or have kids because of what went down in his own home, there's another guy with the same backstory who senses redemption in marrying and having children.
Ashley looked into the theory that it's mostly liberals who aren't having kids - is that partly why the country has shifted to the right? It might be, if not for the Hispanic women keeping the fertility rate high in the blue states.
So the optimist in me still finds solace in the fact that over 4 out of 5 women (and almost as many men) will overcome all these stated obstacles and manage to have children.
Lastly, we've met some women who have decided to take men out of the equation, at least temporarily. One less piece of the puzzle to find, one less problem to avoid. Sperm can be bought. It's not cheap, and the few thousand women each year who do it are very wealthy and very white ... (37 times more likely to be white than black.) Ashley gave Jennifer Egan a shellacking for the way she told this story, but to me, in a world where it's so easy to be pessimistic and so easy today to find reasons not to have children, I found only admiration for the women willing to raise a child alone.
So I'll put it back to you, readers:
How did you decide whether to have children, if you were a person who had your fears?
And how do you counsel someone (a friend, a daughter) who is confused about whether to have children?
posted by Po Bronson at 2:36 PM
2 Comments:
I will consult a sperm bank late this year and artificially impregnate. It is sad to say it, but the men I meet are nowhere near being good candidates as husbands or father material. Each of them seems to carry a lot of baggage, and all the good ones are taken. I have far more constructive to do with my life than sit around waiting for the unlikely man without issues to magically show up at my door, or worse, go looking for him. He doesn't exist; I've reached this conclusion, and it's set me free from a lot of pain.
Essentially, I can handle the stresses of motherhood better alone. I can be an excellent mother and raise an excellent human being, and all that stands between me and doing it are a few thousand dollars. I already have my children's names planned -- Partridge, Hatcher, Fletcher and Sedge -- and I plan my donor to be Asian. Chinese, specifically.
They will be gorgeous, intelligent, and fully evolved. I don't need a potential cheater or abuser to bring drama into their young lives. They'll be raised without some "him" as the source of that drama; I owe it to them.
Sorry, men: I gave it the college try. At 38 I'm over it. Here's to technology!
I would like to have children someday. I would also like to be in a committed, loving relationship when this happens. I am 32 and naturally assumed I'd be married. I was raised to think this was what was to happen. Unfortunately, I never thought seriously about my career or my future and now I am wondering what direction I want to go, so now, naturally, it has become more about me. I regret not doing this ten years ago. I have had plenty of freedom but I have also been waiting and longing for the "love of my life" to appear. I am a single woman who lives with a cat. I am a little sad about it but I have waited, I have searched, I have dated, I have been broken-hearted, and I have almost given up. Now I am almost too scared to get involved with another one (man that is.) I am not going to sit here and pretend I don't get lonely. I like to think that the decision to have children is between two people, but I do, at times, live in a fantasy world. I guess my priorities have lived in a fantasy world as well. I suppose if I really want children, I can make the decision and adopt one day and hope that I have gotten past my issues with my parents and learned something from it too.
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