If Millennial Dread Could Kill: a response to pro-natalist propaganda in the New York Times

Millennials have been accused of killing many things: diamonds, paper napkins, golf, canned tuna, casual dining chains, mayonnaise, breakfast cereal, beer, light yogurt, handshakes, starter homes, traditional retail, marriage, and cable tv. It seems, according to a recent New York Times article originally titled “Why Millennials Dread Having Babies,” but now showing up under the title “There’s A Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness,” we’ve killed the joy and simplicity of having babies, too. I immediately clicked on this article, because I am a voluntarily childfree Millennial who always dreaded the idea of having a baby. I’m also currently working on a book about being voluntarily childfree, and how that can be an act of existential heroism, rather than terrorism. This vilification of the childfree-by-choice and the way they’ve been pitted against mothers has always confused me. People who don’t want children are not a threat to the idea of motherhood, but rather an opportunity to deepen and expand our understanding of and respect for not only what it means to be human but also what it means to be a mother. We can learn a lot about the experience of motherhood and how it’s contextualized, supported, undermined, and weaponized in and by society from the people who vehemently do not want to experience it. So I’m always excited to see conversations about parental ambivalence or flat-out refusal to become a parent take up more space in media. This article is decidedly not that, and not only Millennials, but all generations, should dread it. The author begins by listing reasons Millennials are dreading having babies: “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. They’re swearing off parenting because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they are perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can.” To me, these are all serious and valid reasons, which is why the inclusion of “perennnially commitmentphobic,” especially in the same sentence as “overturning of Roe v. Wade,” demonstrates a weird and insulting rhetorical mismatch. Being picky and avoidant is not the same as having not legal control over your own body. Equally weird and insulting is the suggestion that popular culture has made motherhood seem daunting and full of unpleasant burdens rather than acknowledging that a country so structurally hostile to motherhood (no federally mandated parental leave, no free childcare, prohibitively expensive healthcare, etc) is making it actually daunting and is worsening unpleasant burdens. She later reveals her disappointment that parenthood is increasingly something to “opt into,” and a “consider”ed act, rather than the default. Given that we are in a country where the ability of people with uteruses to opt out of the parenthood default (and lets be clear, it is still the default) is under attack, the maternal mortality rate is the highest of any developed nation (especially for black pregnant people), and where, according to a very recent study, maternal happiness is at an unprecedented low and parental stress was declared a public health crisis, shouldn’t we be celebrating a more considered approach to these monumental life choices? This list also notably does not include the idea that some people simply don’t want kids. She almost gets there with the convoluted sentence “maybe women are having fewer children simply because they can.” Even in her flaccid demi-concession, there is no acknowledgment of desire, or the validity of the lack of desire - that some women do not want to have children. She skirts this reality with creepy phrasing (“because they can”) that, to me, either implies the intervention of a specious permission granted by an invisible external force, or that these women are being somehow petulant and stubborn in their refusal to have children. This option is also presented at the very end of the list, and she switches from the declarative tone used for all preceding reasons to a speculative one, diluting the force of the declarative auxiliary verb “are” by prefacing it with the epistemic uncertainty of the modal modifier “maybe,” as if simply not wanting kids is too absurd and frivolous an idea to seriously consider, certainly isn’t grounded in journalistic fact, and isn’t even worthy of assertive grammar.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind a little, and go back to the original headline. The choice of the word “babies” in a headline for an article that purports to reflect on procreative ambivalence reveals a fundamental, staggering, and, honestly, babyish, lack of understanding of what parenthood entails or how to write or think about it. The state of being a “baby” accounts for roughly 1.25% of the average human lifespan, and around 4% of the parenting experiencing (if we assume active parenting concludes after approximately twenty years, which it often does not). People who become parents are not just “having babies,” they are creating people, people who become grownup individuals, which is something the author also balks at. Let me try to summarize the ethos and thesis of this article, as I understand it, with my own nihilistic POV sprinkled thickly on top: human beings upon whom sentience was nonconsensually thrust (the origin story of every living being) into the fundamentally anti-human system of capitalism where their autonomy and the ability to self-determine have to be continually clawed back while basic resources to keep the life they were given, well, alive, are being reduced and hoarded by the one percent, are somehow whiny little bitches whose standards are too high. To be clear, everything but the final 10 words represents my personal assessment of the human condition, but the last 10 words are a pretty accurate summary of her thesis.

The author is upset that adult children, who then might become parents, have increasingly unreasonable standards for parenting, where “unreasonable” appears to mean anything that demands more than the absence of overt physical or sexual abuse. She goes on to mock what she perceives as a ridiculous preoccupation with one’s own “trauma” and the “invasion” of therapy and its vernacular into the culture. While I agree there can be negative consequences to the TikTokification of mental health issues, it is also deeply irresponsible to cast the democratization and dissemination of mental health resources in a country that makes accessing any kind of mental health resources nearly impossible as inherently and unilaterally bad. She expresses frustration with the number of adult children who are estranged from their parents and that children don’t seem to be fulfilling their side of or “role” in what she clearly feels is a transactional relationship. The author goes on to wax nostalgic for the days children felt so much obligation to their parents they were essentially trapped into submission and sticking around. I’m not sure how this twisted sense of “I brought you here, now you owe me” makes parentood (or being born) look more tempting for anyone. There’s no acknowledgement of how icky and arrogant it is to have a child and then foist expectations on it - expectations of duty and compliance and even the expectation they have to like you and be around you as long as you’re not, what, sexually abusive? It should be noted here that she does not consider “political difference,” even on this “broken planet,” to be a valid reason for estrangement from parents. I urge her to speak to LGBTQ+ kids, 68% of whom report family rejection in some form. Her failure to understand that “political difference” is often coded language that permits one person or group to deny or actively attempt to eradicate the existence of another, a “nice” and deceptive way to name and excuse oppression and violence, is dangerously naive, or maybe just dangerous. To suggest it’s selfish and unreasonable to walk away from “political difference” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that keeps people trapped in systems of oppression - whether that system of oppression is a religion, a country, or a family. She characterizes the new freedom to dismantle and rebuild traditional structures and ideas of family (which, yes, can include various levels of estrangement) as a “bad deal.” I’d encourage the author to look beyond her biological, nuclear vision of family to the queer community, members of which have historically been, and are again now being, barred from traditional modes of family building, who instead construct family not from obligation or genetic ties, but from the need to survive, and to survive joyfully.

Currently “stretching with new life,” which means, in case this cringey attempt at poetry isn’t clear, she’s pregnant, the author bemoans the “hovering possibility” that her child will one day make their own choices, not realizing that the entire endeavor of parenthood is the constant negotiation of “hovering possibility.” She repeatedly emphasizes the audacity of children blaming their parents for their psychological and emotional distress, but not the audacity of someone having a kid and not entertaining the possibility that the kid might have psychological and emotional challenges that the parent is responsible for whether or not the parent’s behavior catalyzed that distress, and whether or not the adult child accurately contextualizes that distress later. Not to mention, psychological distress seems like the only reasonable response to the state of the world. This doesn’t factor in at all for her. In fact, she is mostly concerned about the dereliction of “children’s duties.” Yes, this is an actual term she uses. It’s disturbing that this is not obvious, but don’t have children if, even before they are born, you are ruminating on what your child owes you and that you might care less about how their struggle makes them feel than you will about how their struggle makes you feel about yourself.

Does the author realize that these “babies” in the headline become, if the parent is lucky, actual, autonomous people? In a country where the idea that autonomy (both bodily and otherwise) and the inherent humanity of all people is not only disputed but under attack, I shouldn’t be surprised at this oversight. If she so smugly feels “It is as if every current difficulty” is an invitation to dig into “trauma” and we should just ignore the discomfort of living in, and inviting more humans to live in, a “broken world,” let’s at least talk about the current difficulties facing young people today and the universal traumas threatening us physically and existentially, rather than putting them in a dismissive and sarcasm soaked list. Let’s talk about the dread she feels is an inappropriate reaction to everything in the following, very earnest list: income inequality, climate change, rampant end-stage capitalism, Christo-fascist oligarchies, threats on bodily autonomy, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, racism, government-sanctioned violence and murder. She is angry that children blame their parents for their unhappiness in such a world, but is it so strange to ask the people who bring someone into this world in order to cauterize their own unhappiness to bear responsibility for however that turns out (of course, here, I am referring to the creation of a child in a consensual context, which is often not the case)?

Why is someone who displays not only shocking insouciance about but also clear disdain for the complicated, nuanced, and ever-evolving parent-child dynamic, the very serious existential and practical concerns plaguing us all, and the challenge of trying to heal within systems designed to harm, given the valuable surface area in a prestigious publication to speculate wildly, narrowly, and poorly about the dread and disappointment millennials feel about having, and being, progeny? She points to the process of having kids as the only viable way to gain clarity on what it means to be human. She identifies the continuation of a bloodline as a “fail-safe” for resolving the cognitive dissonance of being alive and grieves its increasing obsolescence. She is very upset that adult children are starting to prioritize their own reality and desires rather than continually and unquestioningly subjugating them to those of their parents. I find this, for lack of loftier rhetoric, gross. As a child of parents who should never have been parents, and as a writer who wrote a well-received memoir about overcoming my own pain and possible myopia around that pain to understand these people who did not treat me well as human beings who existed beyond their status as my parents, and then cared for them during their rather unpleasant declines (holding up my end of this bizarre genetic “bargain” even when that pact was repeatedly violated by them), I’m particularly exhausted by this article. Despite what she asserts, there are many ways to have revelations about one’s humanity and the humanity of others that extend beyond procreating, one of which is to write about it, but not like this. This isn’t journalism, it’s a pro-Natalist Karen in an unconvincing disguise of curiosity awkwardly trying to feel relevant in a changing world where people are giving (thankfully) much more serious and deservedly serious thought to something that was historically given barely any thought at all. This “dread” is not something to be mocked, mitigated, and explained away, but is in fact reasonable, necessary, and right. Feeling “dread” about procreating is a compassionate (both to the self and the hypothetical child) instinct that should often be heeded and honored, in the case of a childfree life, and be the default exercise preceding a thoughtful, intentional ingress into parenthood. The experience of dread is an essential part of being human in an inhuman world. So keep it up, Millennials. Keep the hope, and the dread, alive.