Thanks for writing this!
I appreciate this conversation.
I think if I had been aware of your assertion that dads are typically more on the fence about having kids but still happy to have them, I would have been more excited to have kids with my partner earlier, so I especially valued that point.
I want to reinforce your message that it’s important to think about this and maybe weight the “have kids” option more heavily than the average EA might do by default.
Anecdata:
I am a woman who planned not to have kids. I allowed for the possibility I’d change my mind, but I wanted to prioritize my career. Around 35 or 36 I started to want kids. I found that health issues meant that having kids is not an option now. I did test my fertility in my early 30s and it was normal, but things changed rapidly. I am quite heart-broken about it and expect this to be one of my greatest life regrets.
If it helps anyone else, here were my reasons for changing my mind. (It wasn’t just my biological clock, though of course that was part of it):
I didn’t want kids because I expected to put ongoing, lifelong energy into my romantic relationship(s), career, and hobbies. I’ve always had some health issues so I didn’t expect to have surplus energy for kids. But in fact, I reached relative career stability and relationship stability by 35 and knew how to manage my health. I strongly desire personal growth. While I expect to continue to find that at work sometimes, the rate has slowed down more than I expected. I felt a growing interest in adding another lifelong endeavor to my portfolio of projects, outside of work. I love contributing to others’ development and my hobbies are compatible with kids. Kids started looking like a great addition to life that I would have energy for. Planning for kids actually made my work and hobbies feel more fun because I was excited to teach my kids about them at home and to discover their own related or differing interests.
The responsibility of parenthood seemed overwhelming to me. As I aged, I noticed that new responsibilities always feel overwhelming at first but that is something that can be overcome. This no longer seemed like a good reason not to parent.
I previously worried that parenting would reduce my impact. I now think that having a large impact is uncertain anyway due to my health issues and the kind of work I do. With less certainty about my impact at scale, I actually felt more motivated to keep pushing in my job because I thought I would be working toward supporting a family.
I previously thought kids might be boring or I might not be a very interesting or engaged parent. Seeing my nieces and nephews change over time has been really rewarding for me though and has brought a lot of happiness and engagement with my extended family. I noticed I found it really rewarding to contribute to the kids’ learning, they inspire me to create more in order to share new experiences with them, and they make familiar experiences more engaging because they interpret the world in unexpected ways. I find myself very engaged in supporting and discovering who these people will become as they grow up!
I worried I’d lose my individual agency and identity to motherhood. It is definitely true that I’m less focused on my own needs and wants when I’m around kids, so this is a real risk. However, my attitude changed about motherhood: having kids means creating new agents, and then (ideally) supporting them in becoming independent. I felt excited about taking on the goal of being a role model of agency to my kid(s).
As I age, I value stability more than I used to. I saw that my social life and community would be more stable if I had kids. When I was planning to be child-free, I planned to build a community of close friends instead of a nuclear family. My partner and I both thought we’d pursue a variety of potentially high-risk work projects as well. A lot of EAs probably want the same in their twenties and some do pull it off! I’ve become less extroverted, less social, and more risk averse with age, however, which makes pulling that off less likely.
I underestimated how hard stable community is to maintain in the US. I underestimated just how much of US culture pushes against non-nuclear family structures and how much that’s still true even in an unconventional community like EA. I’m the US, so much of society is organized around the atomized nuclear family that it is really much harder than I expected to buck the trend. In my circles, parents+kids create the bulk of social connections outside of work and generate a lot of common experiences, especially in secular communities. Even among my poly+EA+queer friends (where innovating around family is expected), it’s most common for people to make long-term plans that default to a nesting partner and/or kids, rather than making long-term plans with multiple partners or friends. My EA friends are also globalists who move to different states or countries fairly frequently. Those with kids tend to stay in one place more often.
I also overestimated how much I would personally feel motivated to buck nuclear family norms. I’m not as interested in that as I expected to be! In my 20s, I was happy with innovating on various family and friend living arrangements. In my mid-30s, I find I’d prefer to be able to focus on work, health, and home a lot of the time, but I’d like to do that without being (a) lonely or (b) needing to deal with a lot of roommate turnover. While I have a fairly stable, small peer group of late 20-40yos who I care about a lot, we don’t want to live together and we have ended up living in different neighborhoods or cities for a variety of reasons. Everyone is busy and we don’t see each other as much as we did pre-COVID.
COVID and working from home has made the world even more atomized! It’s extra valuable to live with loved ones now.
I currently prefer to spend most of my downtime with a small, consistent, core set of people. My 20s were focused on meeting new people. Now, I’d like to go through the daily ups and downs of life with an established core set of people, and keep doing that for a couple decades+. Raising kids through various life stages with my partner and extended family would have produced that dynamic, and likely attracted friends who valued stability as well.
-In sum: US EAs who are pinning their hopes on stable, non-nuclear family structures maybe should expect it to be harder to coordinate that than you think. (This may also apply in most western countries; I just know the US context best).
I know there are EA group houses in a few cities now, and that’s great! In my 20s, I predicted that I’d love that. I don’t want to have very many roommates anymore though. I value privacy and, again, stability more than I used to. I also want more separation between my home life and work life than I can get when I’m living with past/present/future EA colleagues. I think EA neighbors in a cohousing community where couples/families each have their own house, would be great. I was excited about raising my kid(s) near EA neighbors.
All that said, if you’re positive you don’t want kids, that’s great! There are some good reasons not to have kids and people obviously create great lives without having kids. I personally expect I’d have had more long-term happiness and actually plausibly more impact as a mom. Other men and women may find they have similar thoughts to mine in their 30s, even if they don’t lean toward having kids now.
Thanks for a very valuable, thoughtful, and insightful comment. I agree with almost all of it, and I appreciate your effort in turning a painful personal disappointment into some specific and useful advice for others.
I especially appreciated your points about the strong cultural forces (e.g. in US, UK, etc) that make the single-house nuclear family arrangement very hard to escape over the long term—no matter how expert one is at living in EA group houses, polycules, or other coliving arrangements.
Ideally, it would be possible for EAs (or people in any like-minded subculture) to set up their own neighborhoods or streets, with a dozen or so houses, restricted to people who share their values and life-goals. But that kind of ‘freedom of association’ is not actually legal in most countries (it would violate various anti-discrimination laws). And trying to do coliving on a smaller scale within a single property raises very thorny problems in terms of the home ownership, shared equity, and what happens if couples get divorced or inhabitants get into too much conflict.
Like it or not, the single-family nuclear house seems a pretty strong ‘focal point’ in the space of possible living arrangements, especially for parents with kids (and maybe elderly parents), and especially given the current economic, legal, and cultural context.
Looks like your last sentence got cut off. I mentioned it briefly in my first comment, but cohousing seems to be growing in popularity as an antidote for the lack of systemic support in the nuclear family and also for people who are just generally interested in living in a more connected and cooperative environment with a chosen family. Here are some interesting links including Atlantic articles (paywalled after reading two for free) and the website for the Foundation for Intentional Community:
Thanks for writing this! I appreciate this conversation. I think if I had been aware of your assertion that dads are typically more on the fence about having kids but still happy to have them, I would have been more excited to have kids with my partner earlier, so I especially valued that point. I want to reinforce your message that it’s important to think about this and maybe weight the “have kids” option more heavily than the average EA might do by default.
Anecdata: I am a woman who planned not to have kids. I allowed for the possibility I’d change my mind, but I wanted to prioritize my career. Around 35 or 36 I started to want kids. I found that health issues meant that having kids is not an option now. I did test my fertility in my early 30s and it was normal, but things changed rapidly. I am quite heart-broken about it and expect this to be one of my greatest life regrets.
If it helps anyone else, here were my reasons for changing my mind. (It wasn’t just my biological clock, though of course that was part of it):
I didn’t want kids because I expected to put ongoing, lifelong energy into my romantic relationship(s), career, and hobbies. I’ve always had some health issues so I didn’t expect to have surplus energy for kids. But in fact, I reached relative career stability and relationship stability by 35 and knew how to manage my health. I strongly desire personal growth. While I expect to continue to find that at work sometimes, the rate has slowed down more than I expected. I felt a growing interest in adding another lifelong endeavor to my portfolio of projects, outside of work. I love contributing to others’ development and my hobbies are compatible with kids. Kids started looking like a great addition to life that I would have energy for. Planning for kids actually made my work and hobbies feel more fun because I was excited to teach my kids about them at home and to discover their own related or differing interests.
The responsibility of parenthood seemed overwhelming to me. As I aged, I noticed that new responsibilities always feel overwhelming at first but that is something that can be overcome. This no longer seemed like a good reason not to parent.
I previously worried that parenting would reduce my impact. I now think that having a large impact is uncertain anyway due to my health issues and the kind of work I do. With less certainty about my impact at scale, I actually felt more motivated to keep pushing in my job because I thought I would be working toward supporting a family.
I previously thought kids might be boring or I might not be a very interesting or engaged parent. Seeing my nieces and nephews change over time has been really rewarding for me though and has brought a lot of happiness and engagement with my extended family. I noticed I found it really rewarding to contribute to the kids’ learning, they inspire me to create more in order to share new experiences with them, and they make familiar experiences more engaging because they interpret the world in unexpected ways. I find myself very engaged in supporting and discovering who these people will become as they grow up!
I worried I’d lose my individual agency and identity to motherhood. It is definitely true that I’m less focused on my own needs and wants when I’m around kids, so this is a real risk. However, my attitude changed about motherhood: having kids means creating new agents, and then (ideally) supporting them in becoming independent. I felt excited about taking on the goal of being a role model of agency to my kid(s).
As I age, I value stability more than I used to. I saw that my social life and community would be more stable if I had kids. When I was planning to be child-free, I planned to build a community of close friends instead of a nuclear family. My partner and I both thought we’d pursue a variety of potentially high-risk work projects as well. A lot of EAs probably want the same in their twenties and some do pull it off! I’ve become less extroverted, less social, and more risk averse with age, however, which makes pulling that off less likely.
I underestimated how hard stable community is to maintain in the US. I underestimated just how much of US culture pushes against non-nuclear family structures and how much that’s still true even in an unconventional community like EA. I’m the US, so much of society is organized around the atomized nuclear family that it is really much harder than I expected to buck the trend. In my circles, parents+kids create the bulk of social connections outside of work and generate a lot of common experiences, especially in secular communities. Even among my poly+EA+queer friends (where innovating around family is expected), it’s most common for people to make long-term plans that default to a nesting partner and/or kids, rather than making long-term plans with multiple partners or friends. My EA friends are also globalists who move to different states or countries fairly frequently. Those with kids tend to stay in one place more often.
I also overestimated how much I would personally feel motivated to buck nuclear family norms. I’m not as interested in that as I expected to be! In my 20s, I was happy with innovating on various family and friend living arrangements. In my mid-30s, I find I’d prefer to be able to focus on work, health, and home a lot of the time, but I’d like to do that without being (a) lonely or (b) needing to deal with a lot of roommate turnover. While I have a fairly stable, small peer group of late 20-40yos who I care about a lot, we don’t want to live together and we have ended up living in different neighborhoods or cities for a variety of reasons. Everyone is busy and we don’t see each other as much as we did pre-COVID.
COVID and working from home has made the world even more atomized! It’s extra valuable to live with loved ones now.
I currently prefer to spend most of my downtime with a small, consistent, core set of people. My 20s were focused on meeting new people. Now, I’d like to go through the daily ups and downs of life with an established core set of people, and keep doing that for a couple decades+. Raising kids through various life stages with my partner and extended family would have produced that dynamic, and likely attracted friends who valued stability as well.
-In sum: US EAs who are pinning their hopes on stable, non-nuclear family structures maybe should expect it to be harder to coordinate that than you think. (This may also apply in most western countries; I just know the US context best).
I know there are EA group houses in a few cities now, and that’s great! In my 20s, I predicted that I’d love that. I don’t want to have very many roommates anymore though. I value privacy and, again, stability more than I used to. I also want more separation between my home life and work life than I can get when I’m living with past/present/future EA colleagues. I think EA neighbors in a cohousing community where couples/families each have their own house, would be great. I was excited about raising my kid(s) near EA neighbors.
All that said, if you’re positive you don’t want kids, that’s great! There are some good reasons not to have kids and people obviously create great lives without having kids. I personally expect I’d have had more long-term happiness and actually plausibly more impact as a mom. Other men and women may find they have similar thoughts to mine in their 30s, even if they don’t lean toward having kids now.
Thanks for a very valuable, thoughtful, and insightful comment. I agree with almost all of it, and I appreciate your effort in turning a painful personal disappointment into some specific and useful advice for others.
I especially appreciated your points about the strong cultural forces (e.g. in US, UK, etc) that make the single-house nuclear family arrangement very hard to escape over the long term—no matter how expert one is at living in EA group houses, polycules, or other coliving arrangements.
Ideally, it would be possible for EAs (or people in any like-minded subculture) to set up their own neighborhoods or streets, with a dozen or so houses, restricted to people who share their values and life-goals. But that kind of ‘freedom of association’ is not actually legal in most countries (it would violate various anti-discrimination laws). And trying to do coliving on a smaller scale within a single property raises very thorny problems in terms of the home ownership, shared equity, and what happens if couples get divorced or inhabitants get into too much conflict.
Like it or not, the single-family nuclear house seems a pretty strong ‘focal point’ in the space of possible living arrangements, especially for parents with kids (and maybe elderly parents), and especially given the current economic, legal, and cultural context.
Looks like your last sentence got cut off. I mentioned it briefly in my first comment, but cohousing seems to be growing in popularity as an antidote for the lack of systemic support in the nuclear family and also for people who are just generally interested in living in a more connected and cooperative environment with a chosen family. Here are some interesting links including Atlantic articles (paywalled after reading two for free) and the website for the Foundation for Intentional Community:
https://www.ic.org
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/01/generation-x-women-are-facing-caregiving-crisis/604510/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/millennial-housing-communal-living-middle-ages/501467/
Thanks! I’ve edited my comment substantially. I’ll have a look at these resources.