I’ll have to ask you to excuse me. This one is quick and dirty, but it’s been on my mind & I have to get it out.
Unpopular opinion: We need to start telling young women and girls not to have children. Unless they have a *burning* desire to become mothers. Not to have babies. To become mothers. Because those are two different things.
I think the #Childfree movement is a beautiful and important thing. But we need to go farther. We need to focus on the fact that mothering should be viewed as a vocation, as a calling. Something to be sought out with desire. Especially because modern science has made it possible to make motherhood a life choice. It should no longer be an expectation or assumption.
I know this perspective, that we should discourage women from having children will be difficult to accept. It will ruffle some feathers. It goes against certain religious teachings and many societal imperatives. But before you reject it outright, let’s look at who it benefits.
First and foremost, children.
Not who you expected?
If the women who are having children are those who have a burning desire to become mothers, the children who are born to them are wanted. They are loved even before they are born. Their mothers welcome them into the world with excitement. Their mothers have considered the extremely serious life choice, the vocation, of parenting and have signed on for the long-haul. Have you met an unwanted child? Even one who was not told that they were unwanted knows. The emotional scars are there. And worse, one who was told lives with severe emotional damage that lasts their entire lives. That damage reverberates into every aspect of their being as they seek that maternal love they never had. The damage spills over into their relationships with others. And if they become parents themselves, that damage can seriously harm another generation.
Ask me how I know.
Secondly, women benefit if they choose to only have children if they want to become mothers.
As I’ve said, motherhood needs to be viewed as a vocation. We treat it far too lightly. We treat it with disrespect, actually. I don’t mean to belittle fatherhood. I’m only speaking to motherhood right now because I’ve never been a father, so I can’t talk about that experience. But a cursory look at social media, at the thousands of blog posts, of research studies, of books available on Amazon all point to the lived experience in Western countries that the expectations fall on mothers to be the primary parent and, if mom works, work as though she’s not a parent, but parent as though she doesn’t work. A woman’s career advancement takes a hit if she has children and continues working, or – and especially in the United States due to expensive childcare – she must stop working to stay home and care for the kids, sometimes sacrificing the career she was working towards throughout her education. Where does the woman’s sense of self go in all of this? Where is her identity as an individual? If being a mother nourishes who she is at her core, this works. But if it does not? In the 50s and 60s stay-at-home moms were prescribed Valium to cope. More recently we’ve seen the Wine Mom culture. Why do these women need to cope? What do they need to escape from? What if they had made choices that nourished them? Would they need to turn to numbing substances? Is it normal that whole swaths of a generation of women need to get drunk almost every evening? Isn’t that a sign that something isn’t quite right?
Some will say that these women are just selfish, that I’m being selfish. I’d ask why? What is selfish about thinking that women who deeply want to become mothers should become mothers, and that women who don’t, shouldn’t? That’s what I think.
Unless you feel that all women owe society children.
Which is kind of stupid.
Some women are poorly suited. And forcing them to do so would be bad for the children that they would have. It wouldn’t be fair to them.
Some people are bad at math. You aren’t expecting them to become actuaries.
Some women would be fantastic mothers because they would be excited to do it. The children of those mothers would benefit from that excitement.
The current default in society is the expectation of children from most women. As I said, #Childfree is a good start. But to reach the goal of young women focusing on what their vocation is, we need to actively discourage having children.