How the Therapy Generation Chose to Be Childless

Opinion|How the Therapy Generation Chose to Be Childless

They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

How many times had I read a version of these lines or heard them recited? The opening stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” is a favorite of fictional shrinks and wise folk. I can say them by heart. But it was only last year, my stomach already stretching with new life, that I reread the poem and found myself focusing on the third stanza, which offers the logical conclusion of the earlier two:

Man hands misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

There are few decisions more fraught for members of my generations — the cusp of millennial and Gen Z — than whether or not to become a parent. In 2023 the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low. Some of the decline can be explained by a delay in having children or a decrease in the number of children, rather than people forgoing child rearing entirely. But it still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.

There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child onto this broken planet is too depressing. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can.

I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.