The link between childlessness and empathy

It's hard to romanticize "having it all" when you saw it crush your parents

NOTE TO READERS: It’s not a Tuesday and I didn’t publish last week because sometimes life (cough, competing deadlines) intervenes. So please accept this as my Saturday morning olive branch. I appreciate you xx

**

My mother once told my younger brothers and I to think twice before having kids. We were in our twenties at the time, and I was fresh out of a nine-year relationship. Reproduction wasn’t exactly high on any of our to-do lists. But, for reasons that are probably obvious, it was jarring to hear.

Our mother was ostensibly concerned about our genetic legacy. She pointed out that we come from a long line of tightly-wound worriers on one side and problem drinkers on the other, which I took as a warning that our future progeny might be tainted by a less-than-stellar blood inheritance. I also considered that she may have meant it as a comment on our capacity—that maybe we didn’t have it in us to roll with the punches of parenthood, being that we were ticking time-bombs of anxious DNA.

My mother was never one to pretend that parenting wasn't hard, especially on top of other competing demands. She was an elementary classroom teacher in a bilingual public school program that required constant continuing education to keep on top of various certifications and licenses that monolingual teachers were generally spared. Her always-on hustle gave us a preview of what working life would look like today, as generative AI and venture-funded chicanery shunts workers onto a perpetual upskilling treadmill in endless pursuit of continued workforce relevance: through online courses and certifications; networking gatherings and thought-leader reads; a night-school MBA. Keeping her job was a part-time job for my mother, but back then that was relatively unusual. Today it’s the norm.

Despite what we’d seen firsthand, we reacted to her warning about as indignantly as you’d expect. “That’s a pretty messed-up thing to tell your own children,” we said, even though I don’t remember taking her message to heart. An extended relative had just phoned my dad for counsel in a moment of acute crisis; their distress triggered a jolt of panic in my mother, which she promptly needed to purge in whatever roundabout way she could find. Maybe it’s hereditary, but I related to her reflex.

A decade later, my brothers and I remain childless. Our mother’s warning has nothing to do with it, I’m sure; I doubt the boys even remember the episode. I remember it, though, and I’d be lying if I said it never crossed my mind. Especially lately.

For those unaware, The Case of the Childless Millennial is on its way to becoming THE favorite concern troll of mid-2020s discourse. My mother’s three children are a demographic case-in-point. By dint of our childlessness, we’re a thorn in the side of the current presidential administration. We’re also an easy cover for a small but vocal movement of eugenics-forward birthrate boosters whose outsize media coverage far outweighs its actual influence, now and likely forever (sorry Simone and Malcolm). At some point in the last several months, The New York Times Opinion section even went ahead and listed “natalism” as an informal subcategory in its coverage on the family.

The Times’s packaging decision makes sense. If opinions are like assholes, then hot takes on declining birthrates are like farts: loud, often stinky, and annoyingly attention-grabbing.

This week’s timely exhibit comes from Times Opinion editor Michal Leibowitz, who happens to also be a mom in her late 20s. In a lengthy essay published yesterday, Leibowitz diagnoses her peers’ failure to reproduce (which she emphatically has done) as a byproduct of therapy culture.

First, she lists the standard litany of reasons—or as Leibowitz seems to view them, excuses—that millennials are likely to list for choosing to go child-free: the high costs of raising a family; career trade-offs and uncertainties; poor relationship prospects; climate change; the reversal of Roe v. Wade; motherhood’s bad rap. “I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations,” Leibowitz concedes, before proceeding to dismiss them.

She writes:

Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.

Her conclusion? Millennials’ insistence on our own fragility has created an impossible standard for parenthood that we secretly know we’ll never meet. It’s the kind of regressive, finger-pointing pronouncement that’s become standard in today’s opinion-bloated media ecosystem.

And yet, despite my quibbles with her argument, Leibowitz is correct about one thing: Some of us are ambivalent about parenthood because we recognize that we may not be up to the task.

Though I’d argue that the rise of therapy culture is a far-too pat explanation, there’s no question that millennials are more transparent than our boomer parents were about the challenges and responsibilities that come with raising a family. Millennials have comparably far more channels for discussion about, for example, the high cost of childcare or asymmetric pay penalties for parenthood. We have the social internet; boomers didn’t.

Millennials also have significantly lower savings and assets, on average, than boomers did by the time they were our age, and a much more tenuous hold on labor-market security. That holds true even when you narrow the intergenerational comparison to older millennials and later boomers—the two cohorts whose early-adult trajectories both mapped against a major recession and extended labor-market upheaval.

Am I, an almost-elder millennial, suggesting that my life is harder or worse than it was for my later-boomer parents? No, their hardship wins hands down for many reasons. In fact, I actually agree with the cranks who insist on pointing out that in the grand scheme of humanity, there has never been a better time to be alive. But to those cranks, I would also ask: at what cost?

Workers in today’s so-called knowledge economy must always be optimizing, self-starting, side-hustling, and leveling up. This always-on rat-race leaves little room for rest or investment in relationships—at least, not without the psychic threat of a dropped ball or missed opportunity with consequences down the line.

Many of my millennial peers also watched as our own parents struggled to balance full-time work, childrearing, and the sundry demands of adult life. More than any prior cohort, we saw what “having it all” looks like in practice: the good, the bad, the ugly. I don’t think of myself as having been damaged or sold short by my parents’ only-human foibles; I always felt cared for, loved, and provided for. But I sometimes wonder what the strain of those years of intensive childrearing, plus working, plus schooling, did to them.

If you’re lucky, age brings expanded empathy. I’m less inclined to consider major life decisions solely through the prism of my own experience than I was a decade ago, when I was in my late 20s like Leibowitz. It’s become easier to put myself into my parents’ shoes when remembering the past.

My interpretation of my mother’s offhand remark has evolved in kind. I now don’t think she meant to imply that we, or our hypothetical future offspring, were damaged goods when she suggested we approach parenthood with care. Instead, I think she was leaving the door open to the possibility that we might lead happier and more fulfilling lives if we chose a different path. She would probably play coy if we asked her, but I believe she was giving us her blessing to live our best possible lives in whatever way we see fit. In a word, she was parenting.

**

P.S. On the subject of later boomers and the long-term demographic effects of employment prospects in early adulthood, The New York Times published a heartbreaking investigative feature this week on rising homelessness among 60+ Americans, naming those born between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s “a uniquely vulnerable generation.” A devastating and important read.