Why Tho? Are friends who question your decision to not have kids actually your friends?

[petrea_mitchell]

Dear Lizzy,

I’m a woman in a long-term relationship but decided in my 20s not to have kids. I am quite happy with my decision. I can go on trips and sleep whenever I want for as long as I want. But I have several old friends who still cannot seem to believe me when I say I am happy. There are the sort of sideways remarks like, “What about when you’re old?” or “We’ll see…” implying I will change my mind and get pregnant. But also blatant things like, “You don’t know what love really means until you have a kid.”

I know what love means and also, I legitimately am happy! What can I do to make them understand I don’t need their pity?

A Childless Cat Lady

Dear Childless Cat Lady,

I think you may be mistaking jealousy for pity – your friends haven’t slept a full night in years and they look into your bright, rested eyes and feel like they may have made a mistake.

I suggest when they treat you in such a condescending manner, you take pity on them. They are very, very tired.

Here’s something I firmly believe about children: You should only have them if you want them. I have one and I am very happy about it and love her more than anything on planet Earth. Also, I don’t think anyone should ever be forced, pressured or cajoled in any way into having kids, so it is incredibly irresponsible and uncool of your friends to put even a little pressure on you.

And suggesting someone can’t experience real emotions or is lying to themselves doesn’t scream “awesome friend” to me.

Am I suggesting you drop your friends when they treat you this way? Maybe! You’d be well within your rights to not hang out with people who seem to disrespect the choices you’ve made about your own body and life that have literally zero impact on theirs.

Except: It does have a little impact on them. It makes them self-conscious (why ARE they always talking about their kids?) and it reminds them of all the things they can no longer do (remember when they used to have hobbies?). Misery loves company and you are not miserable, in the way they are anyway.

So, don’t immediately drop them if you don’t want to, but maybe expand your circle and find other child-free people to hang out with and at the very least gripe about your breeding friends with. Earlier this year I interviewed two women who have a podcast about the joys and struggles of being child-free. If you live in the Portland area, they do events sometimes.

And feel free to ignore your friends when they talk like this, or say, “Hey, that actually hurts my feelings.”

They are parents so hopefully they are working on talking about feelings.

Good luck!

Lizzy

Comments

[conuly]

> What about when you’re old?

Downside: LW won't have kids to take care of her.

Upside: Listen, raising those kids costs a lot of money, and if LW is smart she's putting a good portion of that into a retirement fund, which is a lot more reliable than adult children.

[michelel72]

Anybody who assumes the kid(s) they have today will automatically be their free eldercare in the future deserves a nasty wake-up call.

[resonant]

That's always struck me as an awful thing if you look at it at all closely. "Kid, you were born to be my old age safety net. It's literally the reason why I brought you into this world."

[princessofgeeks]

Oh yeah.

[castiron]

Yep. See: numerous letters from parents estranged from children/children estranged from parents -- yes, some of that is in the parent's control, but a lot isn't.

[full_metal_ox]

Particularly adult children she didn’t really want—-which is damn near impossible to deny indefinitely, especially to said children.

[leeshajoy]

I wonder how much time, money, and effort these "friends" are putting into taking care of their parents.

[melannen]

Yeah, as I watch my mom and her friends get older, I can say that money isn't a replacement for having a network of people around you who love you and can help you with things like driving to doctor's appointments or mowing your lawn or figuring out how to get you better paid care.

I can also say that adult children aren't a replacement for building that network, either. They can be a big part of it, if you have them, but they aren't obligated to, and so can a lot of people you know all kinds of ways, and childless people often have a lot more opportunity to build a wide friendship network among adults of a variety of ages. And also if you hit the point of needing that kind of help while you have *child* children (or child grandchildren, or in the case of one of mom's friends child great-grands you're raising) and you don't have that wider network, wow are you out of luck.

[conuly]

Yeah, as I watch my mom and her friends get older, I can say that money isn't a replacement for having a network of people around you who love you and can help you with things like driving to doctor's appointments or mowing your lawn or figuring out how to get you better paid care.

On the flipside, if you have the money you can pay people to do those things for you, and since you're paying them you can tell them to do it like you said and fire them if they won't. We see it often enough in advice columns and reddit and wherever, people rely on family and friends to do things like this or childcare, and then they have to put up with whoever it is smoking or eating all their snacks or wearing political t-shirts or not showering. You can't fire them because they're your family/friends and you don't have money to hire anybody else anyway.

[melannen]

I mean, yeah, but it's easier to hire people for some things than others. I have a friend who was in that nebulous area of disability where there's just a few things she needs help with and as far as we could tell it was literally impossible to hire professionals to do something like "come by twice a week to carry the trash can to the road and do a walk around the part of the property I can't access to make sure nothing needs maintenance work" - everybody who was willing to do that kind of work for pay with a reasonable amount of accountability was only offering a much higher level of services, and by the time we'd figured that out, she had different needs anyway. If she wanted to pay someone it would have literally ended up with essentially "hire the neighbor kid" which has all the same downsides as asking friends to do it for free.

There's definitely a point at which literally everyone should be hiring professionals for care, and a lot of people try to rely on their adult kids long after that point. And there's various government/nonprofit safety nets to help you out even before you need more extensive help, but a lot of them require so many hoops to get signed up that you need someone to help you with that. And stuff like "I had surgery and I need to not be alone for the next 24 hours" or "I broke my leg and can't easily carry stuff up the stairs for the next three weeks" happens a long time before that point.

And "you can fire them if they won't" only works until you end up in a situation where you need them too badly to fire them, and there's nobody else with openings, or all the people with openings have requirements you can't meet.

Like, both ways of handling this are hard and have holes, but "money to hire people *and* an extensive support network who will cover the gaps for free" is what you actually need.

[azurelunatic]

"Oh, I don't think I'm responsible enough for a child. My parenting instincts are ice cream for dinner every night, and a new puppy to soothe every meltdown."

[mrissa]

"Please treat all other childless people as though they are immature children with zero impulse control as well"? I get enough of that without adding to the stereotype.

[mrissa]

I really don't like the "they're just jealous" approach. Lizzy hasn't provided any of the kind of details that would allow LW to tell the difference between people who are jealous of her life choices and people who are contemptuous of them, so this is basically taking a situation where someone is behaving as though it's impossible anyone could NOT want what they want and...adding another person behaving as though it's impossible anyone could NOT want what they want. What if we acknowledged that some people don't want kids BUT SOME DO, EVEN AFTER HAVING THEM? Amazing.

Also, speculating about their motive doesn't really HELP. You're still left with "I have friends who don't behave respectfully toward my life choices." Maybe see how calling them on it goes? "I don't rag on you for having kids, please do me the courtesy of respecting my life choices the way I respect yours. We don't have to be the same," is a good starting place, and if they double down on, "but yours suuuuck," well, you'll know who they are.

[cereta]

What you said. That whole bit left a sour taste in my mouth.

[movingfinger]

What can I do to make them understand I don’t need their pity?

Say, "Anyway, I'm gonna follow this goose for a while and see where I end up."