CHAPTER 1The Externals
In 1991, Ann Davidman, a marriage counselor by training, teamed up with Denise L. Carlini, another therapist, to found a support group for women who were unsure about whether or not they wanted to have children. Davidman and Carlini were looking to expand their practice and decided that the life transition around motherhood would be a good topic for group work. Setting up weekend workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, they invited women to come together to reflect on their unresolved feelings about starting a family. Davidman eventually branched out on her own and began to offer the program remotely, allowing English-speaking women from all over the world to participate by phone. The “Motherhood—Is It for Me?” founders were among the first to recognize the growing demand for opportunities to explore the question of whether or not to have children in a therapeutic setting. Thirty years on, Davidman’s course remains one of the only programs of its kind, and certainly the best established.
Over the span of ten to twelve weeks, participants try to penetrate their ambivalence and discover whether or not they really want to become parents. This insight will not necessarily translate into a decision—perhaps they will realize they don’t have an innate desire to have children but choose to have them anyway because it is important to their partner; maybe they will discover that in fact they want them very much, but circumstances render having them out of the question. Whatever happens, they will, at least, know what they want—a necessary precondition for making any well-considered choice.
One of the key tenets of Davidman’s course dictates that participants distance themselves from what she calls the “externals” to the decision: age, fertility, health, finances, their relationship status and partner’s preferences, familial expectations, the fate of the environment. These factors, she counsels, can interfere with the ability to truly get to know oneself, and only by putting them aside, at least temporarily, can one reach inner clarity. “What needs to be known first,” according to the course book, “is what you want for yourself regardless of the circumstances of your life.”1 The “externals” are literally cast away: participants are instructed to write out their circumstantial concerns on scraps of paper and place them inside a “tightly lidded jar.”2 If they’d like, they can make a craft project out of decorating the container—perhaps this will help them see its contents in a new, lighter way!—before placing it squarely out of sight.
After the course Rachel took part in concluded in fall 2020, we spoke to some of Davidman’s former students about their experiences. The call to mute external influences, even temporarily, could be liberating, they said. All too often, women are asked to prioritize others’ desires before their own. For such women, the invitation to focus on their own wishes and needs was a welcome change. For others, it was an immense relief to shrug off, if only for a moment, the material anxieties that had hijacked their decision-making process. Whatever might have been holding them back, the promise was the same: Cut through the static, and you will finally be able to hear your inner truth. An authentic desire lies dormant within you ready to light your way forward, if only you can uncover it.
Still, sidelining their externals wasn’t always easy. Some participants in the program struggled with the demand to silence their worries: they might run out of time, disappoint their parents, damage their careers, or lose their partners. When we asked them what they might have changed or added to the program, they expressed surprise that they did not get to return in a meaningful way to the externals they’d initially been instructed to put away. The course book includes a short final exercise prompting readers to revisit these factors, in order to see which “no longer apply and which have shifted in importance.”3 But there’s no serious attempt to investigate what those externals mean to the women and men taking the course, let alone guidance on how to confront them in view of the new insights they’d gained. Of course, there’s only so much one can cover in an hour-long biweekly call, especially in a group setting. But, like it or not, when the twelve weeks are up, participants must return to their lives—to their partners, parents, and bank accounts. In the end, the externals can’t stay in the jar.
The decision whether or not to have children is too important to be made according to someone else’s preferences or the vagaries of circumstance alone. But no one lives in a vacuum; taking personal responsibility for the choice can’t possibly mean bracketing off everything else that goes into making it. After all, becoming a parent is not a self-contained activity, and this is not just because having a child comes with many personal and social repercussions. To have a child is to reconstitute the shape of your life. If you are doing it with a partner, it will mean binding yourself not just to your mutual offspring but to them, in one constellation or another, in perpetuity. It will also likely mean radically reconfiguring your existing material and professional priorities and your relationship to leisure, to your existing family members, to time itself. The “externals” aren’t just distractions from what matters; they make up the substance of our lives.
According to the narrative of the course, one’s internal desire, precious and pure, needs to be rescued from outside interference. But these so-called external factors—chief among them concerns about money and relationships—are inescapable. It is hopeless to try to rid ourselves of their influence over our deliberations by fiat. We have to examine these forces, and not just because of their immediate consequences for our lives; in facing them, we find ourselves confronting some of our deepest and most entrenched attitudes toward family formation. Behind the façade of straightforward concerns about financial security or the difficulty of finding a partner lies an intricate web of convictions and doubts: What ought to matter to us? What goals should we pursue and how should we adjudicate conflicts between them? To determine the proper place for such considerations in our deliberations about having children, we will have to do nothing less than probe the very frameworks of meaning and value that constitute our lives.
* * *
THERE ARE MANY reasons people give for hesitating about or choosing not to have children: climate change; mental illness; health problems; traumatic family histories; intellectual, artistic, religious, or other higher callings; simply not having the desire for it. But which factors are most decisive for those facing the dilemma?
To find out, we interviewed dozens of Zoomers, millennials, and Gen Xers and conducted in-depth qualitative surveys that received responses from three hundred more. We distributed the surveys through our social media platforms, friends, and acquaintances. Our goal was to get beyond the media headlines and hear, firsthand, from as many people, with as many diverse perspectives on the question of children, as possible. The vast majority of the replies came from people we do not personally know. The median age of respondents was thirty-six; 75 percent identified as female, 24 percent as male, and 1 percent as nonbinary. They were mostly highly educated: 95 percent of respondents had a college degree, and 68 percent had an MA or above. Their education levels and careers suggest most, though not all, were middle to upper-middle class. Most were either married or in a serious relationship, and roughly 40 percent had kids. Some of the people we spoke to came from religious backgrounds, though most did not. The majority identified as straight or mostly straight, but we heard from queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, and pansexual people as well. We did not ask them to identify their race or ethnicity; based on volunteered information, we know it was a diverse group, but we estimate that most were white. (All names of interview and survey subjects have been changed.)
When we asked our survey respondents and interview subjects what might have made it easier for them to make the decision, they cited some variation on financial security more frequently than any other factor. Of course, given the demographic composition of our surveys and interviews, we cannot assume that any particular response or trend is representative of the American, let alone global, population. But in foregrounding financial anxiety, these respondents were expressing a widespread mood. Responding to a news story about the “crisis” of declining birth rates, the millennial political phenom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter in March 2021 to express her annoyance: “The actual crisis,” she said, “is how entire generations are sunk with inhumane levels of student debt, low incomes, high rent, no guarantee of healthcare and little action on climate change which creates a situation where feeling stable enough to have a kid can feel more like a luxury than a norm.”4 Ocasio-Cortez’s cry sounded a familiar refrain. The high cost of raising a child is one of the most tangible external obstacles to starting a family today, certainly in the United States. Concerns about the affordability of housing, feeding, dressing, educating, and entertaining children are exacerbated by anxieties about the lack of affordable health- and childcare, student debt, and the state of the economy. As the feminist Guardian columnist Moira Donegan has argued, these pressures are felt especially acutely by women, who suffer from career and pay stagnation, pregnancy discrimination, and the unequal distribution of housework and childcare duties, and who, in the United States, are not entitled to paid parental leave by law: “Women are not given enough material support by the state to be able to raise children while still leading prosperous, economically productive lives.”5
Among our respondents, financial anxiety took many forms. For some, the risks were straightforward. Camila, a thirty-four-year-old graduate student in anthropology who said she would eventually like to have children, told us that “precarious labor conditions and increasingly expensive healthcare and education systems make the decision seem more momentous—more of a ‘gamble,’ even.” Similarly, Anthony, a gay thirty-two-year-old attorney, said that the challenges of his own upbringing had affected his attitude toward parenting. He fondly recalled his experience babysitting in France after college: “I really enjoyed spending time with the children and teaching them about Black American history and culture. I taught them how to sing Aretha and Whitney, and memorize poems by Langston Hughes. I got excited about the idea of having children and passing on culture and tradition.” But though he was happily married and gainfully employed, financial concerns made children a distant hope. “Seeing how my mom and everyone else struggled makes me not want to be unprepared financially for kids.” He was “just waiting to crawl out of a mountain of debt and make sure that my mother is secure.” He added that the situation was “very stressful.” Amal, a literary agent who, at forty-three, did not have kids, put it most succinctly when we asked what might have swayed her: “A shit ton of money.”
Other middle- and upper-middle-class millennials worried not so much that children would be unaffordable but that they would not be able to give their children the same standard of living that they had growing up. “I think about student debt a lot,” said Meera, a twenty-eight-year-old magazine writer who grew up in India and now lives in New York, “because I don’t have any.” She was afraid that she would not be able to guarantee the same for her own children: “I would consider it a failure (both to the child and to my parents) if my child had to have debt, or if it were not able to benefit from or maintain the security I grew up with and that my parents worked so hard to give us.” Danielle, a thirty-six-year-old diplomat, shared this concern: “I would not want to raise kids if I didn’t feel I could provide them with the same standard of living I enjoyed growing up, which included things like summer camp, sports lessons, vacations, and private college tuition.” For these respondents, bringing up children responsibly meant not only shielding them from financial precarity but providing them with the same opportunities they had access to in their childhood, or more. Trouble was, they hardly felt confident in their capacity to secure either.
* * *
ACCORDING TO A widespread generational narrative, millennials and Zoomers have experienced substantial precarity, especially as compared to their predecessors. This impression is hardly baseless: by many gross economic metrics, millennials have gotten off to a very shaky start. They graduated into the worst recession since the Great Depression and have been saddled with historic levels of student debt.6 Despite being the highest-educated American generation to date and having worked in the most productive economy in history, millennials have suffered from job insecurity, rising costs of living (especially in large cities), record levels of personal debt, stagnant wages, and a tattered social safety net.7 Meanwhile, millennials have earned the unfortunate distinction of being the “first American generation to experience as much downward mobility as upward mobility,” with 49 percent in lower-status positions than their parents.8 Though they are currently the largest cohort in the American workforce, and with the oldest millennials now entering their forties, millennials have amassed just 5.6 percent of the national wealth.9 They struggled to gain professional footing well into the peak of their productive years and then had to contend with the effects of a global pandemic. “After accounting for the present crisis,” the Washington Post reported in May 2020, “the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history.”10
The Great Recession hit at a formative moment in many millennials’ lives, shaping their self-understanding and life choices. It’s no wonder that, amid such continuous disruption, they have grown disillusioned with the promises of progress. In a 2023 YouGov poll, nearly one in four people under the age of forty-four responded to the question “How attainable is the American Dream for you personally?” with “the American Dream does not exist.”11 Promised that education and hard work were the only sure pathways to success, by now many millennials have lost the blind confidence in the system but have kept its obsession with productivity. And while millennials are well aware that they may have to work even harder to offer their children a standard of living comparable to the one they have enjoyed themselves, they must also contend with an even more basic dilemma. In our hyper-competitive economy, where the gap between rich and poor only continues to grow, will having children cause them to lose their edge and forfeit whatever gains they have managed to claw away for themselves?
The mood of precarity, distress, and resentment is undeniable. But exactly how much worse off millennials are compared to previous generations is not as obvious. In recent years, millennials have started to reach some of the benchmarks of prosperity set by previous generations. While in absolute terms millennials are still poorer than their predecessors—owning seventy-two cents in 2023 for every dollar boomers had when they were the same age, back in 1989—according to economist Jeremy Horpedahl, when adjusting for the significant differences in generation sizes, as of 2022, millennials were roughly equal in wealth per capita to boomers and Gen Xers at the same age.12 In addition, after some years of stagnation, millennials earn more—with a median adjusted income per household of $71,566 in 2022—than nearly all earlier generations on record.13 (In large part this is due to more millennial women participating in the workforce than ever before, and being paid significantly higher salaries.) Their rates of homeownership, though still trailing behind earlier generations, are rising, too; now, more than half of American millennials own their own homes.14
When economists with the Federal Reserve examined the impacts of the Great Recession in 2018, they warned that millennials were at risk of becoming a “lost generation.”15 But when they revisited the data in 2021, they found that millennials had “staged a remarkable comeback,” increasing their median wealth by 29 percent between 2016 and 2019, with more “time to gain lost ground.” While older millennials (those born in the 1980s) were 40 percent behind wealth targets for their age in 2016, by 2019 the gap was only 11 percent. And though millennials’ debt-to-income ratio remains the highest of any age group, the researchers added that, given the high levels of education among younger cohorts, “it is possible that younger generations will simply have a steeper wealth life cycle than older generations … and will eventually make up the difference.”16 Among other achievements, during the pandemic, millennials’ net worth more than doubled, from an average of $62,758 in early 2020 to $127,793 in early 2022 (largely because they were able to buy homes and build equity when interest rates were low).17 And while they may have gotten off to a slow start, many millennials will soon get a lot richer. In what economic analysts are projecting will be one of the “greatest wealth transfers” in history, millennials are projected to inherit as much as $68 trillion from their parents by the end of this decade, coming to hold five times more wealth than they do today.18 Reflecting on similar findings suggesting millennials have caught up with or even surpassed previous generations, in an April 2023 essay in The Atlantic titled “The Myth of the Broke Millennial,” Jean Twenge wrote that, “all in all, this is a generation on the cusp of middle age that looks successful, not lost.”19
These gains are far from evenly distributed and vary sharply by education level, socioeconomic status, and race.20 But the millennial turn of fortune, unequal as it is, is not lost on those lucky enough to benefit from it. Indeed, many Americans report being fairly optimistic about their long-term material prospects. While on average American millennials, like their global counterparts, report lower financial well-being at present than other generational cohorts, a 2019 T. Rowe Price survey on attitudes toward future finances among over three thousand working American adults found that millennials were the most sanguine age group, with 74 percent reporting being “somewhat or very comfortable” that they’re on track to reach their financial goals.21 In a similar vein, in a nationally representative survey in late 2020 of more than four thousand young Americans (aged thirteen to thirty-nine), 81 percent of respondents reported believing that if they work hard, they will succeed in life. Seven in ten said that their hard work will enable them to rise up the economic ladder. And nearly eight in ten maintained the belief that their lives will be better than or roughly on par with their parents’. More recently, in Schwab’s 2023 “Modern Wealth” survey of one thousand Americans of various ages, millennials were the most likely generation to report that they “feel wealthy” today, with a majority of millennials and Gen Zers surveyed saying that what makes them feel wealthy was “being able to afford a similar lifestyle as my friends.”22
One should not be too credulous about the conclusions of polling and isolated survey results, not least when the populations whose attitudes they purport to represent are as large and diverse as generational cohorts. And none of this is to deny that, whatever millennials’ long-term economic prospects may actually be, and however confident they feel about them, there remain many in the cohort who are struggling materially, and for whom optimism is well out of reach.23 The mounting evidence of millennials’ improving material conditions and financial confidence does no more and no less than complicate the caricature of millennials as uniformly financially insecure and terminally anxious. In turn, it raises doubts about the claim, so often taken for granted, that the reason people aren’t having kids today boils down to money. As attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best. Many millennials are not as financially stressed as they are often assumed to be. As for those who are, birth rates by and large correlate negatively with income and still remain highest among women below the poverty line.24
International comparisons put even more pressure on the hypothesis that financial deprivation and precarity are the main cause of millennial hesitancy about having children. Stepping out of the American frame of reference, it becomes evident that there is little assurance that removing financial hurdles to childbearing will reverse the trend of birth-rate decline.25
Even in countries with robust pro-family policies—including those that have attempted to encourage child-rearing by guaranteeing free or subsidized prenatal support and childcare as well as paid parental leave—millennials are often no more likely to start families than their American counterparts. In many cases, they’re even less keen on it. For example, while the fertility rate in the United States in 2021 was 1.66 children per woman, in Germany it was 1.58, in Canada 1.43, in Portugal 1.38, in Japan 1.3, in Italy 1.25, and in South Korea just 0.81.26 While the introduction of free universal childcare and generous family leave programs in Nordic countries at first increased marginal fertility rates, even then the long-term effects have been modest.27 Until relatively recently, the Nordic welfare states were viewed as fertility success stories by remaining at or above population replacement while enjoying high levels of gender parity and female workforce participation. Over the past decade, however, Nordic birth rates have declined dramatically across the board, despite public campaigns directed at slowing the trend.28 “The Nordic countries are in general … good welfare states,” noted Nora Sánchez Gassen, a political scientist and demographer at the Nordic research institute Nordregio. “They have good social support, they are stable countries with high levels of social trust. In general, these should be considered good conditions to raise children, but nonetheless we see that fertility is declining.” One reason for these fertility declines, Sánchez Gassen suggested, is that there are more couples remaining childless, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.29 In 2022 Sweden’s fertility rate was 1.52, Denmark’s 1.55, Iceland’s 1.59, and Finland’s 1.32.30 In Norway, which has universal healthcare, free college tuition, a monthly child benefit, public daycare, and one of the most generous family leave policies in the world—granting mothers forty-nine weeks at full pay or fifty-nine weeks at 80 percent pay, in addition to up to fifteen weeks of paternity leave—the fertility rate reached a record low of 1.41 in 2022.31 The fact that Nordic birth rates continue to fall, despite such extensive social support, suggests that additional economic benefits and incentives would likely do little to turn the tide. As a UN report from 2019 put it, “Policies supporting children and families are clearly important, but often other factors and policies not pertaining directly to families”—like changing work, parenting, and gender norms—“might have a stronger impact on reproductive decisions.”32
The prevalent American tendency to suppose that it is economics, and, in particular, the lack of social-welfare infrastructure, that is keeping those who want kids from having them persists in the face of such evidence to the contrary. A representative example: in a popular New York Times essay from 2019 titled “The End of Babies,” journalist Anna Sussman attributed the steep declines in birth rates across the globe to the “barely perceptible contraceptive” of the market economy and its direct economic, as well as social and environmental, repercussions. Sussman’s starting point is the reported gap between how many children people say they want—their so-called ideal family size—and how many they end up having. “It seems clear,” she writes, “that what we have come to think of as ‘late capitalism’—that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities—has become hostile to reproduction.”33 Sussman is keen to reveal how our current economic system makes it “inconceivable” for people to have as many children as they would have liked, not just in the United States but around the world.34 But why is it, then, that the removal of financial barriers to child-rearing in places like northern Europe and South Korea has so little effect on people’s individual choices? Addressing the global failure of existing pro-family policies to raise birth rates, Sussman argues that while it is true that many European states offer generous material support for prospective parents, their citizens nevertheless “find themselves contending with the spiritual maladies that accompany late capitalism even in wealthy, egalitarian countries.”
With their basic needs met and an abundance of opportunities at their fingertips, Danes instead must grapple with the promise and pressure of seemingly limitless freedom, which can combine to make children an afterthought, or an unwelcome intrusion on a life that offers rewards and satisfactions of a different kind—an engaging career, esoteric hobbies, exotic holidays.35
If late capitalism is responsible for declining birth rates both in the United States and in northern Europe, critics like Sussman must show why the ostensible removal of the “inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities” that characterize life in the United States has done so little to alter the outlook on children in Scandinavian social democracies. But by her own analysis, in countries like Denmark, what people are facing is not an insurmountable series of obstacles to having children but rather “limitless freedom.” For them, children are not a longed-for object of fantasy, regretfully out of reach, but “an afterthought.” In other words, their “spiritual maladies” do not render children impossible to afford so much as they make them increasingly undesirable to have.
Many of the social policies considered in such contexts—child tax credits, debt forgiveness, guaranteed livable wages, subsidized rent, healthcare, childcare, and paid parental leave—would no doubt make it easier for American families to raise children with far greater confidence and dignity than they can under current conditions. But the question we are exploring here is not whether such social policies are just, whether they would benefit both children and parents, or whether they should be enacted, but whether such measures would touch upon people’s deepest sources of ambivalence about children and family. If the global evidence is to be trusted, there is little reason to think that they would. Ultimately, it seems that no amount of money or social support can help you answer the question of whether or not you want to be a parent. To begin to answer that question, we must look more deeply into what our contemporary financial insecurities and preferences reveal about what we take to be important in life, and what we no longer do.
Copyright © 2024 by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin
