Why Are So Many Women Today Opting Out of Motherhood?

PLUS: Memoirs of a Working Mom in the Mad-Men Era. It's our Mother's Day Edition!

May 2023: Mother’s Day Edition

I AM A VETERAN of the “Mommy Wars” of the 1990s. A generation ago, women battled in magazine articles and newspaper columns about how to balance work and motherhood: Return immediately to the office? Lean in? Or rethink and recommit? I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for those rancorous days. But now I do. 

This whole issue — an issue that consumed the women of my generation — has completely gone poof! for the next. And that’s not because the problem of staying home vs going to work or the shortage of affordable day care has been completely solved. It’s because younger women (and couples) are ceasing to have children at all.

According to a recent report in Forbes:

Millennials and Gen Z are less enthusiastic about having children than their parents. The reasons are many: financial, social, and biological, along with the preference among younger generations for “freedom.”  America’s falling fertility rates have been a cause for concern for several decades. During the Great Recession in 2008, millennials delayed marriage and having children, causing fertility rates to drop. Then, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a short-lived “baby bust,” when conceptions fell slightly. Months later, the rates rebounded but were inconsequential compared to the huge number of daily deaths. 

Apparently, the only way the U.S. population will be able to replace itself will be through increasing levels of immigration. In other words, yet again we will need immigrants to do the job Americans won’t do.

This depressing news is not news, however, to my peer group of parents who are staring down our kids, tapping at our wrists, and saying, “Well? When …?” I’ve had several discussions lately with young couples and singletons alike, who pretty much parrot the talking points from the Forbes report. “I’m not earning enough money.” “I’m not ready to get married … maybe I don’t want to ever get married.” “Why would I bring a child into this effed up world?” “I have a dog.” Etc.

I certainly can understand the economic concerns. The first cohort of Millennials graduated during the great bust of 2008, after all. Yet I don’t believe this is the whole or even the true story  Women bore babies during the Great Depression. The world was surely more effed up during the great wars of the twentieth  century, let alone amid  the diseases and general brutality of previous ones. Until as recently as the 1950s, it was extremely common for women to die during childbirth — yet they still took the risk! Whatever problems Western civilization faces today, there has never been a safer, richer, or more medically advanced time to have children.

So let’s be honest: the most true Forbes talking point here is “the preference among younger generations for ‘freedom.’” It’s why marriage rates are plummeting among the same demographic groups. With no longer any societal pressures to marry or pro-create, why bother?

And I get it: Parenthood from the outside looking in seems terrible. You see a squalling baby on a plane and think, “No way.” Or someone’s screeching toddler ruins the atmosphere of the restaurant on a first date. You wake up at noon on the weekends and flip open your devices to binge watch TikTok or play games undisturbed. You liken the thought of an interrupted night’s sleep to being subjected to North Vietnamese sleep deprivation tactics. You love brunch.

But it’s always been true that if you make a list of pros and cons for having children, the cons win. That’s because the vast pros can’t be known until you actually go through with it. It’s why my generation of women were so startled after they bore their first child and found themselves suddenly reluctant to return to the office.

“This is maybe the greatest surprise upon becoming a mother,” I wrote in my first book, published in 2000: What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.

Before you have a child, and even while you are pregnant, you anticipate a certain period of mayhem immediately following the baby’s birth: nights without sleep, feedings, and unstoppable crying, etc. That much is familiar from Hollywood comedies. But what isn’t familiar, especially to women raised to believe in the importance of their work, is just how much a child will dominate a mother’s mind. The woman with the slightly enlarged belly who announces that she plans to return to her office six weeks/six months/two years after her baby is born may genuinely believe she will do so — and in many cases she will do so. But what she is also revealing is how little she really knows about what is about to wallop her. For until you are holding your actual baby in your arms — the baby you think looks exactly like you if you were a bald martian — and marveling at the curve of his ear and his unearthly bright eyes that squint at you with astonishment and curiosity, you can’t know how you’re going to feel when you become a mother. This surprise is motherhood’s greatest joy and its darkest secret. Suddenly you can’t stop thinking about your child.

The kid in the high chair smearing ketchup on his face is not your kid in the high chair smearing ketchup on his face. It looks messy and unpleasant from afar. Until it’s your own child, you can’t possibly imagine the compensating joys and soul-expanding experience of having children. The demands of infancy are short-lived (and even then, babies are still pretty adorable most of the time). One day soon, there is this miniature person discovering the world for the first time — and you are looked up to as the Odyssean hero leading this remarkable journey!

The child entrusts its small hand into yours and pulls you into a universe you’d long forgotten about: one with games, talking animals, pretend lands, and the sweet, utter literalness of a child’s view. To the child,  you are indispensable, all-wise, and loved so fiercely and uncritically you sometimes feel you are unworthy of such adoration. But you discover a new type of love yourself, one you never knew you were capable of. It’s larger, more enriching, and more encompassing than anything you have ever known. For the first time in your life you are living for something bigger and more rewarding than yourself. No longer are you someone else’s grown child, but an adult in your own right. The new responsibilities might seem daunting — but in meeting them you realize you have capabilities you didn’t realize you had (or even wanted).

You can’t know this, of course, when you watch that poor, haggard mother walking up and down the plane aisle trying to soothe her restless baby. Sure, she feels your annoyed glares. Sure, she’d rather be watching an adult movie, knocking back white wine, and not having to share her miserable packet of pretzels. But to that upset child she is a whole universe: she is the source of every comfort, a miraculous being from whom radiates sustenance, security, wisdom, and above all, a love that is certain and unwavering, even — or especially — when inconvenienced.

THEN, JUST AS quickly as the children arrive it seems, they leave you. Physically, at least. After 30 years of making lunches, doing car pool, grounding my children, praising them, steering them through storms, sharing amazing world adventures, finding them at turns hilarious and entertaining and yet also endlessly maddening, my husband David and I wake up each morning to a quiet house (if you don’t count the Labrador moaning for breakfast). I can say now without a doubt that having children and raising a family was the greatest experience of my life (our lives). For all the effort that went into being a mother, my children gave back exponentially more. I can’t imagine the person I would have become without them. And I can’t imagine life without their wonderful company, especially now that they are adults. Recently, my youngest daughter and I vacationed together in Mexico. As we sat sipping margaritas, a toddler from another table wandered over to ours. She belonged to a young American couple on holiday, who wore familiar expressions of fatigue and exasperation. Their table resembled an encampment, with a stroller, backpacks, etc. piled up around it. The little girl was very sweet. After we exchanged a few sentences with her, she returned to her chair. I called over to the mother and nodded towards my own daughter: “Hey, before you know it, you’ll be drinking with her!”

I sometimes think the younger generation’s attitude towards having families is like that skinny, small kid at the local swimming pool who excitedly climbs up to the high dive board and then wonders what he’s gotten himself into. The longer he stares at the water below, the farther away it seems. If he’d just taken a running jump he’d have been fine. But by hesitating for so long, he’s worked himself into a terror about all the things that might happen to him if he takes the leap.

A woman who had borne her children in the 1950s and 1960s explained to me the attitude of her generation.  “Children, “she said, “ happened like rainfall.” Nobody tried to schedule the rain. Nobody  asked, “Is this a good time for rain?” or announced, “I never want rain!” It just rained.

And maybe because of that attitude, becoming a parent was not considered such a big deal. Everyone did it: some better, some worse; some more cheerfully, some more resentfully. Parenting was not considered a bespoke full-time profession requiring special expertise or education. You aspired to be a “good enough” parent, satisfied to raise your children into decent, hardworking adults without them accidentally killing themselves or their siblings along the way. It was not a failure on your part if they didn’t get into the college of their choice or remained singularly unaccomplished at the violin.

In going through my archives, I came across a wonderful essay my mother, Yvonne, contributed 25 ago to a magazine I then edited, The Women’s Quarterly. My mom has been a role model for me throughout my entire life (even today, as she breezes through age 87). She managed to be a “career woman” in an era when few were. It was her no-fuss approach to working motherhood that guided me through my own attempts to keep at journalism while balancing babies on my knees. And it was her enduring enthusiasm about being a mother — now a grandmother! — that inspired me to have children when I was wrestling with my own doubts.

Enjoy! And Happy Mother’s Day to all celebrating.

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IN THE BAD old days of the 1930s and ‘40s, my mother, a suburban Australian housewife, employed servants. They were not called servants, of course. Australians, being chauvinistically proud of their perceived lack of subservience to England, the mother country (“Bloody Poms!”), nonetheless aped all its customs and traditions while pretending not to. My middle-class paresnts did not have a lot of money, but having domestic help was not considered a luxury back then, even when mothers stayed home, as mine and every other child’s did, unless they were single parents and had to work.

I vaguely remember a succession of fresh-faced country “girls” who came in when my brother, sister, and I were little, to help with the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, and the occasional babysitting. Once we were in school, the servants disappeared and my only memories of what would not be called “substitute care” were the odd babysitter at night, and being dropped off once in a while in the city (Melbourne) at a “creche” while my mother was shopping. These creches were not like today’s ubiquitous indoor playgrounds: they had a few broken toys and not remembered with fondness.

When I emigrated to Toronto, Canada in the mid-1950s, I dropped out of my news reporting job (women didn’t pursue “careers”) to have children. I was happy to stay home and raise my son and daughter for seven years, until they were both settled in school. This, too, was the norm for most of my generation. Becoming a full-time mom, after working from the age of 16, was a joy and fulfillment I didn’t think twice about, although money was tight. My first husband and I lived in rented apartments with little furniture, had no car, walked to stores, and traveled by public transit, even for summer holidays when we’d haul the kids on a bus and journey to a rented cottage north on one of Ontario’s many lakes.

The first time I had to hire help was when my husband, then a news editor, inexplicably decided the way to make our fortune was to buy a rooming house. His family in Australian had once owned lucrative hotels and guest houses. Although they had lost everything in the Depression, there seemed to be a landlord gene in him and his brothers. So, with a tiny downpayment, we bought a rooming house in a respectable part of Toronto, and found ourselves suddenly with a huge mortgage and instant landlords to some 13 bachelors.

The large house was subdivided, with accommodation ranging from single rooms to one-bedroom suites with kitchens and bathrooms. A communal kitchen and several hall bathrooms served the single roomers. “Maid service” was included in the rent, and if we were to keep our tenants and pay down the mortgage, we would have to continue to provide this luxury.

The nine months we owned the rooming house were one of the darkest periods of my life, partly because of irresponsible tenants who routinely defaulted on their rent, sometimes decamping in the night owing us weeks’ worth of money. This was easy to do since we didn’t live on the premises — there was no apartment big enough for two adults and a toddler (thankfully our daughter, Danielle, had not yet been born). If even one tenant was late with the rent, we worried about making the mortgage payments.

But my worst nightmare was the maid service. The cleaning women we employed often called in sick at the last minute, and I would have to trudge through the heavy snow of a Canadian winter, pushing my crank, two-year-old son in a stroller, to act as a substitute maid (my version, in retelling the story to my children, of walking to school across the ice in bare feet!).

Cleaning up after 13 bachelors beggars the imagination. Beds had to be made, rooms vacuumed and dusted, toilets cleaned, and dishes washed by hand (one tenant, a financial reporter, fancied himself a gourmet cook and regularly entertained his girlfriends, then lift a kitchen filled with filthy utensils and bed linen with unspeakable stains). I came to dread early morning phone calls, since it was inevitably the maid calling in sick. My son trailed around after me while I was cleaning up, and once ended up in the children’s hospital after sampling the furniture polish while my back was turned.

Finding a buyer for this ill-fated venture (we barely got out with our original deposit) was one of the happiest days of my life, and I vowed never again to be a landlady. The experience gave me a lasting respect for people who provide domestic help (I became the kind of employer who cleans up before the cleaning lady arrives!). Maybe coincidentally, I immediately got pregnant with my daughter and continues to be a full-time mother until the day she left for school at age four.

All photos by Grey Villet from The LIFE Picture Collection. See the full photo feature about a Mad Men-era working mother here.

THAT MORNING, WHEN I returned from walking her to kindergarten, was like a dash of cold water — What would I do with the rest of my life? I’d had my first child at age 25, my second at age 27. Now I was 31 and ready for a challenge, but felt guilty about leaving the children for a job. I tried volunteering with a women’s church group but was bored and admittedly felt completely alienated from women who had mostly not worked since having children and had no intention of going back. Then I considered a part-time job and was about to apply to be a research assistant to an academic when my husband told me bluntly I was a fool not to go back to full-time journalism if I could.

I realize I was fortunate to have an occupation that allowed me to stay at home for a few years without my skills becoming too rusty. I’d kept my hand in with the occasional freelance article, and although I was scared stiff at re-entering the work force, I turned out to be a better writer than before, the result of life’s seasoning.

I got a job on a daily newspaper and was immediately faced with what has become the eternal dilemma facing today’s working parents: how to find good, substitute care. These of course were the days before mothers were going back to work in ever-increasing numbers (I remember being the odd woman out waiting at the bus stop among all the business-suited men, and feeling dreadful about leaving the kids). There were few if any agencies to screen child-care providers or to help with the search for a substitute mom. Unless one was fortunate enough to have willing relatives or friends to help out, one simply scanned the “Domestic Help” ads in the classified section of the daily newspaper and hoped for the best.

My first babysitter was a young Jamaican immigrant named Daisy who seemed competent and willing to do the job, which was to meet my daughter at school at lunchtime, feed her, and stay until I arrived home from work between five and six P.M. (My son, then 7, was considered old enough back then to make his own way home.) Cooking supper, cleaning, play skills, or other chores were not demanded; I simply needed an adult in the house to make sure the children didn’t kill themselves or each other. The going rate for these domestic jobs were about $35 per week, which sounds ludicrous today but was reasonable then, since it was usually under the table and thus tax-free.

Daisy, my kids told me when they were safely grown up, was hopeless at discipline when they misbehaved, climbed on the garage roof, or got up to other praks, all of which I was thankfully unaware, She would chase them around the house, waving her slipper, shouting “You little devils!” which they found hilarious and provoked her even more.

Daisy quit fairly soon, to be replaced by Ruth, a no-nonsense, 60-something widow from Nova Scotia, whom the kids liked and whom I trusted implicitly. She stayed with us through my divorce, a move to a new house, and remarriage to my second husband. In fact, Ruth, motherly and sensible, became so fond of us that she delayed going back to nova Scotia where she planned to marry an elderly lover, until I was safely remarried to a man she approved of. I was still working full-time, although I asked for and got summers off unpaid to be with the children. I gladly sacrificed the pay to assuage the guilt of not being around to enjoy the holidays with them.

OUR LAST SITTER was another Nova Scotian, Mary, a descendant of the American slaves who’d fled to freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad. Mary was an orphan, brought up by nuns, and filled with wisdom and good humor. She must have been close to 60, looked about 40, and doted on her much younger husband named Ted. The kids liked and trusted Mary. I paid her slightly more, since the child-minding chores had lessened and she was supposed to do some light housekeeping. I suspect, getting home tired from my job, that Mary had spent most of the day in front of the television, but since I knew the children were in good hands, I chose not to make a point of the house looking suspiciously unclean.

The day I let Mary go, when the children reached their teens, was a liberating one. I loved having my house back to myself and not having to depend on anyone anymore. Perhaps this says a lot more about me and my life experience than it does about my generation in particular, although I suspect not. I look on, bemused and perhaps a bit impatiently, at the new generation of professional mothers and their struggles to balance the demands of careers, motherhood, and home.

Their expectations are so much higher than mine were, their lives seemingly more complicated. Their concerns about providing every kind of gratification for their children are, to my mind, unrealistic. They generally have far more supportive husbands, who help out with child care and housework much more than my generation’s did, even if the main burden still falls on them. A whole industry has sprung up to provide parents with infant care, daycare, and domestic help.

Governments continue to worry about women’s status and equal pay and treatment in the work place. While no one wants to return to the ‘50s and ‘60s, from my perspective there were fewer pressures on working mothers to be superwomen. We — and our children — seemed to muddle through and be none the worse. Perhaps we were even strengthened by the experience.

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MY APRIL MUSINGS on turning 60 garnered some nice comments from readers. We love your engagement! Feel free also to follow and comment on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds! ~DC

TOM, from Ottawa, Canada:

I enjoy your articles, and as I’ve reached the ripe old age of 63 this one was particularly pertinent, although I’m male.

I’m really sorry, but not surprised, that women who reach your age feel that they are becoming invisible. I think it’s a sad comment on men, and perhaps on women as well. I feel that in my 60’s I have a great deal to contribute, and so far I find that I’m being treated with commensurate respect and attentiveness. You’re clearly a very capable person, and deserve the same.

I think you’re bang-on with the rest of your article, and that’s the course I’m trying to follow in my “autumn” years. In terms of not being respected “just” because you’re no longer gorgeous, I’m afraid that I don’t know what to suggest. I thought that the great feminist fight of the 70s and 80s had made it clear that this is unacceptable behaviour, but clearly I have overestimated people’s thoughtfulness.

The one thing I CAN suggest is, don’t let it get you down. For every man out there who’s a jerk towards older women, there’s someone like me who feels that their life experience makes them well worth engaging, and to hell with the twenty-somethings. Fortunately, in the little that you and David have discussed your relationship, I get the feeling he’s another one. Any time you’re in Ottawa, give me a shout and we’ll go out and drink beer and compare notes. (Sure thing! ~Ed.)

Thank you again for the excellent articles, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say in the future.

DAVID JOHN: Great article. It seems to me that a move from a preoccupation with the surface to an engagement with the interior is a feature of the development of wisdom.

See y’all in June!