"What Will People Think of Me If I Don’t Have Kids?"
One of the questions that many young women contemplating whether to have children ask themselves, or feel, is: "What will people think of me if I don't have kids?"
It's an understandable worry, given the enormous pressure on women to become parents.
The truth is that people will potentially feel all sorts of things about you — some of them negative, some of them positive, and some of them neutral. And you can't control any of them.
What you can control is how you feel about yourself, and about the words that people use to judge you.
"Selfish" is, for instance, one of those words that frequently gets lobbed accusatorily at women who choose not to parent. The people who use it may mean it negatively, but it is, in reality, a neutral word when it comes to the choice to remain childfree.
Yes, I am selfish. I am selfish with both my time and my limited resources — and I have used that selfishness to accomplish things I could not have accomplished had I been a mother, things that have helped other people. So I hardly consider that particular flavor of selfishness a negative.
What I have discovered is that how you feel about your own choice to be childfree strongly influences how other people view your choice. I am neither defensive nor ashamed of my choice, and I don't make florid pronouncements about it that suggest I have big feelings about it: I state it plainly. It's just another fact about me, like my age or eye color. Thus people tend to receive the information matter-of-factly, too.
If people do have pointed negative reactions, or judge me harshly, I simply choose not to care. Those reactions are about them, and how they feel about their choices; they're not really about me.
The best thing we can do in this, or any, situation is spend less time worrying about whether people like us or respect us for our choices and consider whether we like them or have any reason to respect their opinions.
And you may be surprised in the end how many people will react positively to what is still, to many people, a brave choice to make in a society that admonishes you to make another.
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