Why some people don't want kids

"There's no natural internal drive to nurture another human for 18 to 25 years."  More and more people are deciding not to have kids. Here's why ...

Transcript

00:00Not having children is the best decision that I ever made for my life.

00:04I will be 32 next month and my husband and I are child free as f**k.

00:09Statistics show that the happiest people on earth are unmarried women who don't have children.

00:19We have this belief that people who don't have kids are going to die

00:24alone. They're going to die bitter and lonely.

00:30If you ask child free people who are in their older ages if they regret their choice,

00:37if they're unhappy, the answer is no. And if you look at how they live their lives,

00:42they live in communities where they are engaged.

00:47In fact, they're more engaged in their communities than parents tend to be.

01:00Society is always asking us, when are you going to have kids? How many kids are you going to have?

01:05I'd like to better understand why people are so

01:08up in arms when they meet somebody like me who chose not to have children.

01:12We tell ourselves a lot of false stories about a supposed natural drive to become a parent.

01:18We don't have that as humans. We have a natural drive to have sex with each other,

01:22which can lead to parenthood for some. But there's no natural,

01:28internal drive to nurture another human for 18 to 25 years.

01:32I don't want to have kids because I want my money to go towards more important things.

01:38Me.

01:56Babies are romanticized in our society, and so is motherhood.

02:00You think of the covers on the women's magazines.

02:04Activism around the child-free choice and around raising awareness of non-parenthood as an option

02:11really dwindled as we went from the 1970s to the 1980s.

02:17We saw this period of real political movement and growth of the religious right,

02:25which certainly takes a position that people should not opt out of parenthood.

02:30In fact, we should all want to be parents and have as many kids as possible.

02:35I think the Lord made it pretty clear, both at the beginning with Adam and Eve,

02:38and then he also said it again to Noah and his sons, to be fruitful and multiply.

02:47I'm someone who assumed my whole life as a kid and into early adulthood that I would become a

02:53parent one day, and I trained myself really well for that role. As I started getting older,

02:59into my late 20s and early 30s, I started really thinking, you know, I like the life that I have.

03:06I realized when I started reading the research on this topic that there was a room for more research.

03:13There was a lot of good work at the time, but I still had questions that didn't seem to be answered.

03:20Can we discuss how awesome it is that we can sleep in on weekends for the rest of our lives?

03:31Randomly, my husband will look over at me and be like,

03:33you want to take a train to Paris this weekend? Yes, yes, I do.

03:38Many child-free people say that they didn't have kids because they wanted to prioritize

03:43their relationship with their partner, that they really value nurturing that relationship.

03:50Don't get me wrong, I think that children are beautiful and wonderful,

03:59and there have been many times where I thought about wanting to have them,

04:02wanting to bring them into this world, but the repercussions.

04:05I think that the messages that we get from our, sometimes from our friends and family,

04:10and certainly from the larger culture, is that parenthood is the be-all, end-all experience of

04:15life. And it is for some people, but it's not for everybody.