TO BREED OR NOT TO BREED: The Pros & Cons Of Having Kids vs. Not Having Kids

IN THIS EPISODE, we explore the biggest decision you can probably make in your life

We dive into parenthood, looking at the landscape of it in culture and in personal life. 

We see how parenting has evolved from a social obligation to a personal choice.

And we lay out a list of reasons you just might want to skip the Parent aspect of a long term relationship

And reasons why you would want to embrace it.

On today’s episode we are breaking down one of the most important choices you can make in your life, and how it impacts your relationship and the world

This important choice is whether to become parents.  

This might sound ominous, and it is a topic that instantly causes controversy, especially in family circles.  Who hasn’t nervously sat through the “when are you having a baby” interrogation, innocently administered by everyone from strangers at the grocery store, to casual friends, to your own anxious parents?

So often, there’s this expectation when you are in a deep, committed relationship, that the next logical -and required- step is to start a family of your own.

It’s a social script.  It isn’t a real requirement in life, and really it never has been.  Sure, in the agricultural age or earlier, the more kids you had the better, so the choice became more enforced, and the expectation became codified through law or religion.  But we live in a different age.  

Thanks to science, children have a far greater chance of survival into adulthood; not just in the developed world but throughout most of the developing world too, children have far fewer fatality rates than in ages past.  In fact, child mortality rates in the US alone have gone from 46% in 1800 to 0.7% in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/

Higher standards in the world of health, education, and even the relative liberation of women’s roles in much of the world have brought about a Golden Age of baby-making.  It used to be your child had a 1 in 5 chance to see adulthood.  Nowadays it’s closer to a 1 in 5 chance that they won’t.  Just since 1990 alone, the child mortality rate (under 5 years old) has halved, and the childhood survival trend is still growing. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

All to say that a New Normal is here:  Whereas the past dictated that we personally must procreate or humanity itself could face extinction, there are now enough people in the world, making enough babies, that we can truly see the wonders of parenthood as a personal choice we have the privilege of making, and not as a cultural obligation.

But we are just at that turnover point in history where that is becoming true, only in the last couple of generations has the personal idea that you could choose not to become a parent started to take hold, and there’s still plenty of stigma surrounding that choice.  

Socially speaking, there really is a kind of dividing line between parents and non-parents.  Parents normally seem to just assume that you want the same for yourself.  And in social spheres, distance can grow quickly between friends who are parents and friends who are childless.  This isn’t all due to conscious choices or some prejudice, a lot of it is logistical; lives become very different between the two groups.  Priorities change, life-rhythms change…

…Budgets change.

Before we go further, I want to make clear that this isn’t a talk where we tell you you have to have a baby.  We are also not telling you you shouldn’t have a baby.  As usual, we strive for more nuance than that.

We are exploring the pros & cons of each choice, and illuminating both paths in an attempt to help clarify what each choice entails.

We honestly believe that