Why are millennials like me so stressed about having children?
Wages are dropping. House prices are skyrocketing. The future of the planet seems dismal. Is it therefore any wonder that birth and fertility rates are declining? Olivia Petter speaks to experts and her fellow millennials about a generation gripped with anxiety over whether they should become parents
By 28, I will be married. By 30, I will have my first baby and call him something adorably pretentious, like Silas. By 32, I will be living in the countryside and expecting my second baby, a girl whose bedroom I will have already painted yellow.
Like many millennials, I imagined a future for myself a lot like this when I was growing up. And yet, the reality couldn’t be farther from it: I’m 29, single, and ambivalent about whether I even want children – that is if you exclude my cat, Blanche DuBois, who is, for all intents and purposes, my fluffy daughter.
It might sound odd: now on the precipice of 30, I should be keeping my waning fertility at the forefront of my mind and make a decision before I no longer have a choice, right? Time is of the essence. Tick tock. And so on. But when it comes to children, even the word elicits a kind of dull ache in the lower part of my stomach. Followed by a mix of juxtaposing emotions spanning the gamut of love and longing to fear and dread. I’m not alone.
Birth and fertility rates have been steadily declining for the past eight years. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report last year found that the US birth rate fell by 4 per cent from 2019 to 2020, marking the sharpest single-year decline in almost 50 years. Meanwhile, in England and Wales, the ONS found that there were 605,479 live births in 2022, a 3.1 per cent decrease from the figures in 2021 and the lowest number since 2002. The ONS said that the figure remains in line with the recent trend of decreasing live births observed before the pandemic.
Anecdotally, though, you’ll see that the uncertainty around having children is rampant among millennials in particular. Ask about the plans of any of the ones you know – who don’t already have children – and chances are you’ll get a watery response that ricochets from references to the climate crisis and the cost of living, to the woes of modern dating and the Tory government, all of which factor into this age of parental ambivalence. That is, if they aren’t already going through fertility struggles, in which case your question will be an insensitive one – I rarely ask any women I know if they want children for this reason, but it’s not a rule everyone abides by.
Nonetheless, with so many contentious contemporary issues making the idea of having children more difficult, how does anyone, presuming they can, ever reach a decision on whether or not to have them? And what happens if, out of increasing anxieties over your fertility, you start trying to have them before you’re ready, only to find yourself pregnant far sooner than you’d planned? Or you might find yourself miscarrying, and dealing with the subsequent trauma that can bring. Or let’s say you decide not to have them, only to then find this is a dealbreaker for the next person you fall in love with? Perhaps you end up sticking to your guns, only then to be met with societal judgment for choosing to live a child-free life?
These are some of the many subjects addressed in a new book: The Parenthood Dilemma: Decisions in Our Age of Uncertainty, by Gina Rushton. A 31-year-old award-winning journalist, Rushton was recently diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition whereby tissue similar to that which normally lines the uterus grows outside of it. She was told it may affect her fertility, and the dilemmas around becoming a parent began.
People have always been aware of how parenthood would interrupt their career trajectory. [But] for those who have invested their selfhood into their jobs, as many of us millennials have, a child threatens to disrupt not just our earning capacity but our identity
“I think the question became a real topic of conversation for my friendship group during Australia’s horrific bushfire season,” Rushton tells me. “I began writing the book in the aftermath of the summer in which bushfires burned through 24.3 million hectares (60 million acres).” She was working as a reproductive rights reporter at the time, regularly interviewing obstetricians about what it was like to deliver babies into maternity wards filled with bushfire smoke. “They described how early in their careers they experienced unadulterated joy chaperoning new life into the world – now every parent was feeling a level of anxiety about the safety of their babies’ future.”
That summer, Rushton says, was a game-changer for her and her friends. For others, the choice simply might not be there at all. “I think some people are delaying or forfeiting having children for reasons that feel outside of their control,” she adds, noting other issues in addition to the climate crisis that are impacting this. “Many people are living through a cost of living crisis in which housing has become unaffordable and wages are stagnating while inflation is soaring.”
Indeed, finances seem to be a common fear for many, particularly in the current climate. “Child care seems out of control if you don’t have family nearby,” says Will, 28, who is single and undecided on whether or not he wants children. “A lot of people can only afford to rent, too, so I think the feeling is that raising a child somewhere that isn’t yours can be equally stressful. I think I could be easily swayed, but it’s very dependent on who it would be with. I wouldn’t be too upset if I never had children, but find me in 30 years and there’s a good chance I may be regretting it then.”
Beyond this, though, there is the other issue of finding someone to co-parent with, an increasingly fraught task in the famously complex modern dating landscape. In her book, Rushton speaks to numerous millennial women about their views on having children, many of whom articulated this anxiety. “They were hyperaware of who they would want to parent with,” says Rushton. Statistically, people are finding it harder to date now than ever before, with one study from the Pew Research Centre in 2020 reporting that almost half of US adults say dating has become more difficult for most people in the last decade. Additionally, 75 per cent of those surveyed said they’d found it very difficult to find people to date in the previous year.
Even if you do find the perfect partner and co-parent, though, then there is the issue of how having children may interrupt one’s career trajectory. “Work has become, if not the one, then certainly a central place of meaning-making for many people my age,” says Rushton. “Even those who loathe their employment feel somewhat defined by it. People have always been aware of how parenthood would interrupt their career trajectory. [But] for those who have invested their selfhood into their jobs, as many of us millennials have, a child threatens to disrupt not just our earning capacity but our identity.”
This is a major societal shift among generations. Whenever I tell an older relative I’m not sure about whether or not I’m going to have children, I am met with a look that often underpins the same unspoken fundamental societal view: how will you then find any meaning in your life? “For centuries, there has been a general societal awareness that having children might be the only way to find purpose and fulfilment in life,” says psychotherapist Eloise Allexia. “Whereas previous generations might have faced expectations or a sense of obligation when choosing whether or not to have children, today’s millennials are exposed to many types of meaningful lives. More than ever, we can feel like we have a choice in how we’d like our lives to look – and for some people, this might involve rethinking a previous narrative or expectation around having children.”
There are also those in stable relationships – people who society would deem as having “settled down” – who find themselves questioning whether or not they even want to bring a child into the mix. “I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly broody or had the ‘maternal instinct’,” says Imogen*, 33, who has been with her husband for more than a decade. “We spent our twenties working, travelling, and holidaying, and now I have softened towards the idea of having children, especially since my older sister had children and our friends started to have children. But there are many reasons why I’m undecided.”
These range from the cost, as well as the impact on careers and personal wellbeing. “Having children has a huge physical and mental impact on any human,” Imogen says. “Partnered with the other reasons, the thought of the trauma my body and mind could go through during pregnancy, childbirth and post-birth/long-term is enough to make me reconsider. While I’m lucky enough to generally be in good health, have a strong support network and be able to afford private healthcare, it’s sadly not the situation for a lot of millennials – and the thought of needing care and support from the NHS in its current state is also off-putting for many.”
Of course, all this can also factor into the possibility of having children and later regretting it, a societal taboo that is so shrouded in stigma, it’s seldom discussed, even among the closest of friends. “I feel like as a society we are much more comfortable with the notion of child-free people having pangs of regret or uncertainty about their decisions than we are with parental (particularly maternal) ambivalence,” says Rushton. “We expect mothers to be unflinchingly and unrealistically devoted to their children and to their choices when, in reality, most mothers I know have days where they’re over it. And that’s fine.”
Millennials are also the first generation to parent their children online. Know anyone with kids? Check their Instagram pages and you’ll see what I mean. People are incredibly quick to present an idealised version of their family lives on social media, which can exacerbate anxieties about whether or not we want to have families ourselves.
On one end of the spectrum you have parents with uber-glossy, Valencia-filtered lives, and creating an idealised reality you could never possibly live up to yourself. And on the other, you have people sharing the brutal lows of parenting that put you off altogether. At least, that’s how I feel whenever I see someone complaining about starting their day by cleaning their kid’s vomit off of their favourite top.
Ostensibly, this might all seem rather negative. And while a lot of it is hardly encouraging, the fact that more millennials are questioning the traditional trajectories we were conditioned to aspire towards might be a net positive. At least from a societal point of view. “It is a really good thing that we live at a time where people are pushing back on parenthood as the default, or a choice people feel obliged to make,” says Rushton, whose own views have evolved in the process of writing the book.
“My thinking has changed a lot,” she says. “I don’t think it is enough to say the world is screwed and there’s nothing to be done and I can’t face bringing a child into [it]. I think there are so many more questions to be asked and it is important to be specific about your fears in order to clearly appraise them. The conversation needs to go beyond paralysing anxiety.”
In order to do that, we need to keep having the conversation. And today, thankfully, it seems that many people are.
‘The Parenthood Dilemma: Decisions in Our Age of Uncertainty’ by Gina Rushton is out now