I have three socially acceptable reasons for not having children. The real reason is my mother, and a quiet vow I made watching her live a life she wasn't allowed to admit she resented
I'm thirty-eight. I have two dogs. I don't have children, and—barring an unlikely turn of events—I'm not going to.
When people ask me about this, which they do, more often than I'd have predicted, I have a small set of answers I rotate through depending on the room.
If the room is professional, I say something about wanting to focus on my work and travel. People nod. They get this. The reasoning sounds reasonable, even admirable.
If the room is political, I say something about climate. About the responsibility of bringing a person into a world that may, in their lifetime, become significantly worse. People nod again, sometimes a little sadly. The reasoning sounds principled.
If the room is financial, I say something about money. About what it actually costs to raise a child in a major city in the 2020s. About the impossibility of providing the kind of life I'd want a child to have. People nod a third time. They've done the math themselves.
All three answers are partially true. I do care about my work. I do worry about the climate. I have, in fact, done the math on what it would cost to raise a child the way I'd want to raise one, in the kind of city I'd want to raise them in, and the math is not encouraging.
What I almost never say out loud, in any of these rooms, is the actual reason. The actual reason isn't a policy position. It isn't a financial calculation. It isn't even, really, about children. It's about my mother, and about something I watched her live for forty years, and about a quiet vow I made in my late twenties that I've been keeping ever since.
I'm going to try to say it here, because I think there are probably other people who have similar versions of this answer they don't say out loud either.
What I watched my mother do
My mother became a mother at twenty-six. She had two children, my sister and me, in fairly quick succession, and she gave essentially the next twenty-five years of her life to the project of raising us.
I want to be careful in how I describe this, because I love my mother and I don't want to write a sentence that suggests I think the work she did wasn't valuable. The work was extraordinary. She did it well. My sister and I both turned out fine, by most measures, and a significant amount of the credit for that is hers.
But the work was not, I now understand, what she would have chosen if she'd been given a fair set of options. She'd been training for something else when she got pregnant. She had a career path that she set down—not because she was forced to, in any obvious sense, but because the version of motherhood she'd been raised to expect required setting it down, and the version of part-time motherhood that might have let her keep some of the career was not, in our specific economic circumstances, available to her.
She set the career down. She raised us. She did it, on the surface, cheerfully. She was, by every external measure, a happy mother.
What I noticed, very slowly over my teens and twenties, was that the cheerfulness was not the whole picture. There were small signals, almost imperceptible, that the cheerfulness was being maintained at a cost. A particular tone in her voice when she'd talk about old colleagues who'd kept going. A particular kind of silence when other women her age would mention their work. A particular wistfulness, very rarely expressed, that would surface for half a sentence and then get tucked away again before it could be looked at directly.
My mother, I came to understand, resented her job—not the children themselves, but the totalizing structure of the role she'd been given and had felt compelled to accept—in a way she was not, by the rules of her own generation, allowed to admit she resented.
The rule that wasn't allowed to be broken
I want to talk about the rule, because I think it's the central thing.
The rule, in my mother's generation and the one before it, was that mothers were not allowed to be ambivalent about motherhood. They were allowed to be tired. They were allowed to be stretched. They were allowed to make small jokes about how hard it was. What they were not allowed to say, out loud, ever, was that some part of them—not all of them, but some part—wished they had not done it.
That sentence, said in the wrong tone in the wrong room, was, in my mother's generation, more or less the worst thing a woman could say. It produced shock. It produced judgment. It produced the suggestion that there was something wrong with you—that you were a bad mother, or worse, a bad woman, for harboring even a flicker of regret about the most important role you'd been assigned.
So you didn't say it. Even if you felt it, you kept it private. You kept it private from your husband. You kept it private from your friends. You often kept it private from yourself, because the consequences of acknowledging it, even in the privacy of your own head, were too large to absorb. The acknowledgment would have meant that the life you'd built, the children you'd raised, the years you'd given, were in some sense not what you'd have chosen if you'd been able to choose freely. And what could you do with that information at sixty? You couldn't take any of it back. You could only carry it.
My mother carried it. I don't know how heavy it was. I don't know if she'd describe it the way I'm describing it, even now. I know that I watched her, for thirty years, manage a small private grief that she was not allowed to name, and I know that the management of it cost her something that she will never be able to itemize.
That's what I don't say out loud, when I'm asked about my own choices. I'm not willing to spend my forties carrying a similar weight. I'm not willing to commit to a version of life that, twenty years in, I might quietly regret in a way I can't say out loud.
Why this isn't a verdict on parents
I want to be careful here, because I'm aware of how this could read, and I don't want it to read as a critique of people who have children.
This isn't a verdict on parenthood. Most of my friends have kids. Most of them, by all the evidence I have access to, are glad they did. Some of them are, occasionally, ambivalent about it, in the way that anyone is occasionally ambivalent about any major life commitment, but the ambivalence is not the dominant frequency. The dominant frequency is something more like complicated love, mixed with exhaustion, mixed with a kind of meaning that they could not have generated any other way.
I'm not saying parenthood is a trap. I'm saying that for me, specifically, given the specific psychological inheritance I'm carrying from watching my mother, the risk of becoming someone who quietly resented his life is too high. The risk isn't that I would resent the children. The risk is that I would resent the role. And the resentment of the role, I learned from watching my mother, is something you have to carry in silence, because you're not allowed to say it out loud, even if the rules of the next generation are slightly more permissive than the rules of hers.
I'm a man, which means the rules around expressing this kind of regret are, in some ways, more permissive for me than they were for my mother. But the rules are still there. A father who admits he resents fatherhood is, even now, in 2026, not received well. Mothers are at least allowed, in modern life, to admit some ambivalence about the work without being entirely cast out. Fathers, I suspect, are not yet there. The cost of admitting it, for me, would be high enough that I'd probably not admit it. I'd carry it. The way my mother carried hers.
I don't want to carry that. I'd rather not put myself in the position where I'd have to.
The thing about freely chosen ambivalence
I want to make a distinction here that I think matters.
The ambivalence I'm describing—my mother's, and the version of it I'd want to avoid—is the ambivalence of someone who didn't fully choose, or who chose under conditions that didn't feel like a real choice. The role was assumed. The career was set down because the architecture of the time required it. The version of motherhood available was the totalizing version, and the totalizing version, accepted because there was no real alternative, produced a kind of regret that couldn't be honored because the choosing hadn't really been honored either.
Freely chosen ambivalence is a different thing. People who genuinely chose to have children, who weighed it carefully, who entered the project with their eyes open, often do experience moments of difficulty without those moments curdling into the kind of long-term silent grief I watched my mother manage. Their ambivalence has a different texture, because their choosing had a different texture. They are tired. They are not, fundamentally, in the wrong life.
This is the version of parenthood I see in most of my friends. They chose it. They chose it knowing what they were choosing. The hard moments are real but they don't, generally, produce the silent regret that my mother carried, because the architecture of the choice was different. They had options. They picked this one with their eyes open.
My mother, I now believe, did not have meaningful options. She had the option of doing the thing everyone expected her to do, or the option of being significantly punished, socially and economically, for not doing it. That's not really a choice. The fact that she made the best of it, and raised us well, and built a life she loves in many other ways, doesn't change the fact that the original architecture of the decision didn't give her room to make it freely.
I have, in my generation, more options. I can choose not to. The choosing not to is a real choice, in a way that the choosing to wouldn't be for my mother's generation. And the choosing not to, for me, is the version that aligns with the deepest thing I learned from watching her. Don't commit to a version of life that's going to produce a regret you can't speak about. Don't take on a role you might quietly resent. The cost of carrying that kind of regret in silence is, I have observed firsthand, very high.
What I'd say to anyone in a similar place
I'm aware that this is a deeply individual decision, and I'm not making any kind of general argument about whether people should have children. The argument I'm making is much narrower. It's about the value of being honest, with yourself, about why you're making the choice you're making.
If you're a person who's chosen not to have children, and you've been giving the same set of socially acceptable answers I've been giving—work, money, climate—and you have, somewhere underneath those answers, a quieter and more personal one, I'd encourage you to know what your quieter answer is. Not necessarily to share it widely. Some answers belong to you. But to know it, in your own head, with full clarity. The clarity is its own kind of self-respect. It lets you stop performing reasons and start owning the actual one.
And if you're a person who has chosen to have children, none of this is an indictment of your choice. It's just a piece of the inner architecture of one specific man, who watched one specific mother, and who came to one specific conclusion about what he was willing and unwilling to risk in his own life. Your conclusion, with your specific history and your specific circumstances, is yours to draw.
My dogs are asleep on the floor as I write this. They are, by any reasonable measure, much easier than children would be. They're also, by any reasonable measure, much less. I'm aware of the trade. I made it knowing what I was making.
That's the part that matters to me. Not the choice itself. The clarity I have about why I made it.
My mother, I think, would have given a great deal to have had that clarity at thirty-eight. The fact that I have it, in part because I watched her not have it, is one of the strangest gifts she's given me. She wouldn't, in her own dictionary, recognize it as a gift. But it is one. The whole reason I know what to avoid is that she lived, in silence, the version I'm declining.
I'll never tell her that. It wouldn't be fair. It would land as an indictment, when it's something more like gratitude. Some things, I've learned, you keep to yourself.
This article is the closest I'll come to saying it.
