How child-free people decide not to have kids

Blackstone and Stewart went with a qualitative approach, asking evocative, open-ended questions to 21 women and 10 men who have chosen not to have kids. The participants had an average age of 34, and were almost entirely heterosexual. The interviews, which took 60 to 90 minutes, had three main inquiries: the decision-making process in being child-free, how others respond to the decision, and reflections on all the above. The transcripts of those interviews were then fed into a computer program and coded for themes. The two biggest were “conscious decision” and “process.” Indeed, all but two respondents said it was a conscious decision, and those who didn’t were the exceptions that prove the rule: One woman said she ‘‘always kind of felt this way so I don’t think there was ever a time where I made a conscious decision,” while another said, ‘‘I’m not sure that it was conscious decision. I’ve never wanted to have children.’’

A couple chords were struck again and again in people’s reasoning. Many saw their siblings or close friends have kids and decided that it was not something they wanted to arrange their lives around. The men tended toward individualized decision-making, noting that they wouldn’t be able to travel or pursue other meaningful projects. (“It’s a rational response to what it means to have a kid and what impact [being a parent] has on the rest of your life,” was one primary example). Women were more outwardly focused in their decision-making, referencing how having kids would alter their adult relationships or contribute to overpopulation and other environmental impacts, or that the world as it is isn’t hospitable to new children. The authors reason that the outward-facing decision-making for women may be a result of the greater cultural pressure on them to reproduce. Most of all, it’s an ongoing decision. You don’t wake up one day and declare that you don’t want kids, it’s something you check in with yourself (and your partner, if you’re partnered) about over the years.