More Americans are saying they don’t want to have children. But what does life without children really look like?
Coffey says she's been able to travel, explore and lead a fulfilling life. In part, because she long ago chose never to have children."This is something that you have to decide for yourself," she says."You can’t make the decision because of somebody else’s desires. I think that’s a huge mistake."
KATHRYN KOZAK: Life is really rich. I've achieved many of the goals I envisioned earlier on. I earned a PhD. I ran the Boston Marathon. And I'm leaving this message from my home in Germany, where I dreamed about living for a long time. ANNA PORTER: I'm 30 years old and I still don't know what I want to do. Sometimes I think, absolutely not. And sometimes I think, I could do that.
So then we had to negotiate that. So, and then through my 40s, there were a lot of different pressures on me in different ways, as I was coming to the end of my childbearing, possible childbearing years. But before we get to the decisions or the instances in your life that led you to the road of not having children, can you tell me, Maria, what are one or two of the things that you have been able to do in the decades and years past that sort of you look back and say,"Yes, it was worth not having children because I got to do that instead."COFFEY: I've had a very full life. So let's just say I always wanted a very adventurous life, an unconventional life.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So hold that thought, Maria, because I want to come back to it and maybe gently nudge you to tell me more, to convince me that you couldn't have done those things if you had children.CHAKRABARTI: But again, as I said, so many people called in. Because I think we, it's not often heard in American society, let alone the media, about the affirmative decision that people make when they choose not to have children.
I guess it's one cost that I'm okay with, is not a few friends or extended network of friends, have the life that I want to live. CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. What I'd love to understand more deeply, when we come to the next segment, we're going to hear your story about how you came to this decision. Interesting, we heard from mostly women. Let me just put that out there. And we can talk about why in a moment, but Gavin Larsen from Asheville, North Carolina. Sorry, no, not Gavin. Yes, Gavin Larsen, though, we're going to play two. Stephen's the guy, we'll hear from him in a second. But Gavin Larsen is in Asheville, North Carolina, and is 49, she's single, and doesn't have any children.
STEPHEN CAMPBELL: She was an obstetrician. And she loved delivering babies. And we talked about it off and on over the years. And I continued to not want children, and she was okay with that choice. Now that she's gone, I do wonder if we had children, if that would give me one more thing to remember her with. But I can say I'm happy with the choice that I made.
I'd become a very needy mother. And also, because I wanted to go traveling and do really adventurous things. And I'd met this man who shared my dreams. I felt I just couldn't merge the two, even though my husband felt that we could. COFFEY: I think, I also, and I guess here's the part people would say is selfish. I wanted; I didn't feel that I could do the things that I really wanted to do.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Because a lot of the places that you've traveled to around the world, that is exactly what we see, right? In India, I was always taken off to the temple and people did pujas, praying to various goddesses that I'd be given a child. I think the hardest reaction for me to deal with was in Africa. We spent quite a long time kayaking the length of Lake Malawi and it was in the early '90s. There was beginning of a drought, AIDS was starting to hit, and malaria was rife.
Am I doing the right thing? Why am I going around the world in a double kayak? Should I be home making my mother happy by having children? So I did go, that was the period, I think, of traveling through those other cultures where children are so important that I started to really reflect and wonder if I was making the right decision.COFFEY: She didn't, but I knew. It's because in cultures like that, children are an insurance, they're everything.
And it seems to me that one thing that parents don't often talk about when we're having public, when there are public discussions about the decisions whether or not to have children, and by the way, I should say in any way, shape, or form, this doesn't have to just be biological, right?CHAKRABARTI: Many people come into parenthood in different ways, but it's not often spoken about how, and this is just my view, Maria, that after my children were born, I experienced and continue...
And I knew that, and I knew that I was choosing not to do that, and it was, because I'm always, like you said, I'm a person who wants big experiences, and challenging experiences, and I knew that I was passing on that to have other kinds of experiences, and also the kind of love that parents describe for the children.
She was a wonderful woman, very powerful, but she wielded guilt like a weapon. And she made me feel very guilty about this at times. And I did all the things to hurt her, I didn't have children. I moved across the world, embarked on these very worrying adventures that worried her terribly.
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