Having Kids Changes Your Perspective (And That’s a Good Thing)

This isn’t the usual sort of thing we write about here but it’s Friday and I was struck by this NY Times opinion piece published last month titled “There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness.” 

In 2023 the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low. Some of the decline can be explained by a delay in having children or a decrease in the number of children, rather than people forgoing child rearing entirely. But it still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.

There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child onto this broken planet is too depressing.

That’s the intro but most of it is less analytical and more experiential. It’s about the author’s troubled teen years and how she never really saw things from her parent’s point of view until much later, in part because she was in therapy.

I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate.

My teenage and young adult years were not bad, exactly, but they were tumultuous. I had been an emotional, moody child, and I became an emotional, moody teenager and then an emotional, moody young adult. I kept a handle on things, mostly, but there were intermittent crises: An eating disorder when I was 14, abetted by the angsty anorexics of Tumblr…

I was 14 when I saw my first therapist, a middle-aged woman who worked out of her suburban home office…

In our first session together, she suggested that my feelings, my pain, my not eating, were reasonable and rational reactions to my family’s religious beliefs and high expectations. “That sounds very controlling,” she told me, after I’d described the rules we lived by — the fights I’d have with my father over too-tight jeans, chores, daily prayers…

And that’s sort of her point. Therapy puts you in a position of being the person being asked to relate or complain about your problems caused by everyone else, especially your parents. If something is wrong with you, it’s their fault. 

And it goes without saying that sometimes it really is their fault. There is real childhood trauma and real neglect, but her point is that the entire framework of therapy binds this up with more generic complaints about how you feel. And especially, how you feel because of what your parents did to you.

Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional. “With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, ‘If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent’ — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—‘then I owe you nothing as an adult child,’” says Dr. Coleman.

Anyway, the most interesting part is how the author’s perspective changed when she became pregnant.

Like most suffering people, I was self-absorbed. Wrapped up in my own pain and dramas, I didn’t notice much about my mother. My main memory of her in those days is of her squinting over the paper she’d been given upon my discharge from inpatient treatment, which had a list of how many portions in each food group I was supposed to be eating…

It had been years since I’d thought much about this period in my life. But the winter I became pregnant with my son, I found myself dwelling on it. I revisited it over and over, compulsively, pressing on the memories the way you might a bruise.

…it was like peering under the tabs of one of those lift-a-flap picture books. There is my mother sitting at the kitchen table, recording my plum in her notebook. The cup of minestrone soup. And then under the flap, is her own lunch, only half-eaten, her appetite shrunken by chronic worry and fear. (She will force herself to finish it, to set a good example.) There is my mother spending her days driving me to and from the doctor and the therapist and the hospital while I sit like a rock in the back seat. And then, under the flap, is her nearly falling asleep from tiredness, from the nights she lay awake in bed, reading and researching and praying.

I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.

The author’s point, ultimately, is that a lot of people never gain this kind of insight because they’ll never have children. By remaining childless, they’ll never know that feeling or see the other side of their own life growing up. In contrast, therapy may not get you to that same realization and may even lead you away from it.

What she’s saying really does resonate with me. Not about the therapy part so much. I’ve never done any of that so I can’t judge it except second hand (and it has helped people I care about). But the part about how having a child changes your whole perspective seems right. 

I think most parents feel this to some degree. From the moment you have kids, your life is not your own anymore. And maybe that’s a big reason some young people don’t want to have kids at all. They don’t want to be burdened by it. What they don’t know, and you never really do know until you experience it, is that in many ways it can be the best thing that ever happens to you.

Yes it can really be difficult and stressful. It can even be tragic and sad in some cases. But it can also be the best part of your day, month, year. For a lot of people, myself included, it’s the thing you are most proud of and the thing that brings you the most joy. It would be too bad if more people missed out on that for whatever reasons. But of course they can’t know how having kids will change them and their perspective until they get there. You just have to experience it. And I think that’s why the top comment, sadly, is this one.

This is actually not it at all. Maybe for some.

For me having kids would throw me from middle class into being poor, and also the bodily/life sacrifice is too high in a country that doesn’t care about women’s well-being.

Almost 1,700 people have upvoted that. That’s sad because, from my perspective, whatever you think you have as a result of not having kids can’t compare to what you’d have if you do have kids. I don’t mean that in some vague, idealistic way. I mean it literally.

Can you remember what you spent your money on ten years ago? Did you buy a car? Go on a vacation? Maybe you have some good memories from that. But I can tell you, you remember your child’s life in vivid detail. I remember the moment my oldest, now 24, was born. She heard my voice and stopped crying. It’s like it was yesterday to me. 

I don’t really remember anything else I did that year and I certainly don’t remember or care about anything else I spent money on back then. It’s just not remotely comparable. That’s how I see it anyway. It won’t be true in every case of course, but it’s often true. It’s true for a lot of people I know, not just me.