Did the Childfree Have Bad Childhoods?
A lot of people think that if you don’t want kids you must not have had a great childhood. Because if you had had a good childhood, you’d want to raise a child someday, right? Wrong.
Research tell us that those who choose not to have kids are no more likely to come from troubled backgrounds than those who grow up to become parents. Sure, some childfree who had negative experiences early in life end up choosing not to have them because of these early experiences. But there can be other reasons as well.
Interesting trend data on the childfree and their childhoods suggest that childfree women who babysat early in life and did not like it from the get-go had those experiences influence their later decisions not to have children. Childfree guys often also talk about how they saw their father (or in some cases single mother) stress and struggle to provide for the family and they decided they just never wanted to subject themselves to that in their own adult lives.
Backgrounds also affect people who had “bad” childhoods and grow up to want children. Lots of parents have a desire to raise kids in the way they wish they had been raised, whether conscious or not, as a way to heal their own past. It can be a way to do it “better,” do what they deserved and didn’t get, or just show themselves that even though it did not happen to them in the right way, it can be done right.
Great parenting includes raising children to think for themselves, and instilling the idea you can create the life that you want. In this light, choosing to do something that can be seen as going against the grain of what is generally expected of someone in our society can be a sign of the best kind of parenting--as they were raised to march to the beat of their own drummer, and have the courage to do just that.
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