Is Volunteer Childlessness Becoming Commonly Accepted

Posted on by helpingsoul

Women with No Children by Race and Ethnicity Pew Research CenterMillennials are waiting longer to get married and start a family.  In the meantime, they are more educated than any other generation and making more conscious lifestyle decisions.  Cameron Diaz recent announcement opens the doorway for an important discussion on the implications of choosing to have children or not.

Diaz recently declared she is not having children

Cameron Diaz announced that she has decided not to have children.  It stirred a huge public debate regarding the issue and how her life is easier without children.  She claimed, “To have lives besides your own that you are responsible for — I didn’t take that on. A baby, that’s all day, every day for 18 years. Not having a baby might really make things easier, but that doesn’t make it an easy decision. I like protecting people, but I was never drawn to being a mother.”

Cultural norms redefining femininity

Diaz’s comments generated a lot of buzz around a bigger and very complex cultural question about how we view women, what their purpose is, and the larger issue of making a conscious choice whether to have children or not.  It is no longer the default and women like Cameron Diaz are not only giving us the opportunity to discuss the topic but be a role model for being confident in a choice of not having children.

Diaz says, “I think (the reaction) comes from people wanting to feel good about their own decisions. Just because I don’t have children now, they might look at their life and think, ‘Oh, you have a choice? I didn’t have to do this yet?’

It’s about choice and choosing happiness

The most important thing is being happy in the moment and in our choices.  According to a 2007 University of Michigan study, women’s happiness later in life is more correlated to being married or having a partner than whether or not she has children (Science Daily, 2007).

Society is evolving.  In 1988, sixty-one percent of Americans agreed with the notion that being childless is means an unhappy life. Times have changed.  In 2010, forty-one percent say childlessness implies you’re unfulfilled (Slate, 2010).

Testing those norms

Diaz isn’t setting the trend.  She is just one of the first to make a public declaration.  Decline in births have been steadily going down and are at the lowest in recorded American history.  From 2007 to 2011, birthrates have declined nine percent and have spawned across all racial and ethnic populations.  Today one in five American women remains childless versus one in ten in the 70s (Time Magazine, 2013).

Choosing personal femininity

Even though Diaz chose to speak out about her decision, it is a private choice.  In a culture where womanhood is defined by motherhood, Diaz is offering an opportunity to redefine womanhood in the modern world.  Women are often scolded by American culture for being childless as was Diaz.  There is more to femininity than paternity.   Just as women have a choice in deciding to have children or not, women have a choice in deciding how to define their femininity.

Choosing reasons to have or not have children

It is still expected to provide a good reason why not to have children.  On the other hand, it is not required to have a reason good or bad when having kids.  Upon the decision not to have children, it is automatically assumed, she is infertile, she must be lesbian, she is selfish, or she is too career-oriented.  Whatever the reasoning, an explanation is owed.

The rules change upon parents of a newborn.  They are not asked, “Why did you give birth” or “What were your reasons behind having a child?”   Double standards permeate the choice to procreate.  No thought or justification is needed for having children but there better be a good reason why you chose against birth (New York Times June 2012).

It is time for a discussion

People are changing societal norms.  Gen Y is of childbearing years but deciding not to have children at least for now.  Americans are becoming more educated, self aware, and consciously thinking about the pros and cons of lifestyle choices.  Either way a discussion is necessary.   It’s not a matter of right or wrong.  It’s a matter of being happy in our choices and in our lives.

I would love to hear from you.  What are your thoughts on childlessness?

The Heart Grows Smarter

Posted on by helpingsoul

By 

Published: November 5, 2012   For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

If you go back and read a bunch of biographies of people born 100 to 150 years ago, you notice a few things that were more common then than now.  First, many more families suffered the loss of a child, which had a devastating and historically underappreciated impact on their overall worldviews.  Second, and maybe related, many more children grew up in cold and emotionally distant homes, where fathers, in particular, barely knew their children and found it impossible to express their love for them.

David Brooks_New York Times
David Brooks

It wasn’t only parents who were emotionally diffident; it was the people who studied them. In 1938, a group of researchers began an intensive study of 268 students at Harvard University. The plan was to track them through their entire lives, measuring, testing and interviewing them every few years to see how lives develop.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the researchers didn’t pay much attention to the men’s relationships. Instead, following the intellectual fashions of the day, they paid a lot of attention to the men’s physiognomy. Did they have a “masculine” body type? Did they show signs of vigorous genetic endowments?

But as this study — the Grant Study — progressed, the power of relationships became clear. The men who grew up in homes with warm parents were much more likely to become first lieutenants and majors in World War II. The men who grew up in cold, barren homes were much more likely to finish the war as privates.

Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful. As George Vaillant, the study director, sums it up in “Triumphs of Experience,” his most recent summary of the research, “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”

Of the 31 men in the study incapable of establishing intimate bonds, only four are still alive. Of those who were better at forming relationships, more than a third are living.

It’s not that the men who flourished had perfect childhoods. Rather, as Vaillant puts it, “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” The positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen.

In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability. The men who could be affectionate about people and organized about things had very enjoyable lives.

But a childhood does not totally determine a life. The beauty of the Grant Study is that, as Vaillant emphasizes, it has followed its subjects for nine decades. The big finding is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The men kept changing all the way through, even in their 80s and 90s.

One man in the study paid his way through Harvard by working as a psychiatric attendant. He slept from 6 p.m. to midnight. Worked the night shift at a hospital, then biked to class by 8 in the morning. After college, he tried his hand at theater. He did not succeed, and, at age 40, he saw himself as “mediocre and without imagination.” His middle years were professionally and maritally unhappy.

But, as he got older, he became less emotionally inhibited. In old age, he became a successful actor, playing roles like King Lear. He got married at 78. By 86, the only medicine he was taking was Viagra. He lived to 96.

Another subject grew up feeling that he “didn’t know either parent very well.” At 19, he wrote, “I don’t find it easy to make friends.” At 39, he wrote, “I feel lonely, rootless and disoriented.” At 50, he had basically given up trying to socialize and was trapped in an unhappy marriage.

But, as he aged, he changed. He became the president of his nursing home. He had girlfriends after the death of his first wife and then remarried. He didn’t turn into a social butterfly, but life was better.

The men of the Grant Study frequently became more emotionally attuned as they aged, more adept at recognizing and expressing emotion. Part of the explanation is biological. People, especially men, become more aware of their emotions as they get older.

Part of this is probably historical. Over the past half-century or so, American culture has become more attuned to the power of relationships. Masculinity has changed, at least a bit.

The so-called Flynn Effect describes the rise in measured I.Q. scores over the decades. Perhaps we could invent something called the Grant Effect, on the improvement of mass emotional intelligence over the decades. This gradual change might be one of the greatest contributors to progress and well-being that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.