What Not Having Kids Taught Me About Owning My Choices
Prefer to listen? This is Episode 9 of the No Bullshit Spirituality podcast. Go and have a listen, link below.
The question is not whether you want children.
The question is whether you are making your own choices, or whether you are following a life script that was handed to you before you were old enough to question it.
My choosing not to have children is one example of this.
I knew early that I did not want them. I did not want pregnancy, nappies, childcare, games, homework, or the daily responsibility of raising a child. Nothing about the whole thing interested me.
That was my choice.
But it still took courage to stand by it.
A choice is not something you have to defend
Women are often expected to provide evidence for their decisions.
If you want children, people usually accept it. If you do not want them, people ask why. They want to know what happened to you. They say things like “oh, you just haven’t met the right person yet” and “You’ll change your mind as you get older” and they ask “Who will care for you when you are old”?
I have been asked all of these things.
I have always been very clear within my own mind that I don’t want kids, so, the question for me was never one of whether I was wrong; it was more, am I weird? Am I a loner? Is there something wrong with me because I don’t want the life everyone else seems to want?
But my choice is my choice; I owe no one an explanation, nor do I need to justify it.
I do not want children.
That is enough.
The same applies to every choice you are trying to make. You do not need to explain your desires until everyone else feels comfortable with them.
Your past can inform your choice without owning it
My childhood affected the way I thought about having children.
I was not shown a loving family. I didn’t know what it felt like to be loved, so I did not understand how I was supposed to give that to somebody else. I also knew that I refused to pass the trauma I experienced into another generation.
I was putting my foot in the sand and stopping it there.
As I moved further into spirituality, I came to understand this as part of healing my ancestral line. It does not mean that having children prevents anyone from healing their lineage. It means that this is how I understand my own choice.
Your history can give you information. It can show you what you want to repeat and what you want to stop. It does not get to make every decision for you.
You are allowed to understand where a choice came from and still decide that the choice is yours now.
The life you were sold is not the only life available
Most people are given a version of the same script.
Go to school. Get qualifications. Get a job. Buy a car. Buy a house. Get married. Have children. Take on loans. Work more because now you have children to support. Pay for childcare so that you can keep working.
Then call it life.
You are told to make the best of it because this is what everybody does.
I saw the lies and the script more clearly when I travelled outside the UK. Once I stepped outside the box, I realised that many of the rules I had accepted were cultural expectations, not universal truths.
People lived differently in other parts of the world. Families worked differently. Success looked different. A content life did not always involve the same sequence of milestones.
That distance and exposure to different ways of existing gave me enough perspective to ask what I wanted rather than what I was supposed to want.
You may not need to travel to another country to do this. You may just need to step back from your family’s expectations, your friends’ opinions, your industry, your social media feed, or the version of success you have been chasing.
You cannot make a free choice while treating somebody else’s rules as facts. You need the space and peace to connect to what’s inside so that you can feel your way to your truth, knowing it’s not contaminated.
Other people’s opinions can become your thoughts
I live in Thailand, where children are often viewed as part of the family structure and future security. The generations may live together, support each other, and share their income. Children are expected to care for their parents when they are old.
So when I say I do not have a partner or children by choice, people see me as strange. They ask what is wrong with me and who will look after me later.
Sometimes those questions get inside my head.
I forget that I chose this. I start telling myself that nobody likes me enough to be my partner or want children with me. Then I catch the thought and recognise it for what it is: somebody else’s expectation wearing my voice.
This happens with more than children.
You can absorb the belief that you are selfish for wanting money, difficult for wanting solitude, unrealistic for wanting more, or ungrateful for wanting a different life. You can mistake social conditioning for intuition.
The work is noticing the difference and having the courage to own and act on what is yours.
Your why gives your choice its backbone
A choice becomes easier to stand by when you know why you made it.
My why is freedom. I want to go where I want, do what I want, and be who I want to be. I want to spend my money on myself. I want the space to focus on my spiritual destiny, my work, my solitude, and my own development.
I want to be sovereign and independent.
That does not make my choice better than somebody else’s. It makes it true for me.
Your choice may involve leaving a career, changing a relationship, starting a business, moving country, wanting a quieter life, wanting more money, or finally admitting that the dream you built does not belong to you anymore.
The question is not whether the choice looks impressive. The question is whether you know why you are making it.
The right choice is the one that helps you expand
There is no universal right or wrong choice about having children.
There is no universal right or wrong about most things. There just is.
Having said that, ‘right choice’, the one that takes you closer to your divinity and the experience of life that you want to have. It is the one that aligns you with the person you are becoming. Right choice is the one that helps you continuously learn, grow spiritually, have fun and enables you to stretch your strengths through challenge.
And then there is ‘willed choice’. It is a choice that aligns you to your will. You know what you are choosing, why you are choosing it, and what the choice will ask of you.
A choice made from fear may still be the right choice, but you need to be honest about the fear. A choice made from duty may serve you for a while, but you need to know whether it is still yours. A choice made to keep other people comfortable will eventually cost you something.
How to tell whether a choice is really yours
Remove the distractions and the noise of the world and ask yourself a few direct questions.
What would I choose if nobody in my family had an opinion?
What would I choose if society could not judge me?
What am I afraid people will think?
Am I choosing this from desire, fear, duty, guilt, habit, or genuine knowing?
How does this choice feel in my body?
Does this choice make me feel more fully myself, or does it make me smaller?
What is my real why?
Does this choice take me closer to the future experience of life I want to have? My goals and my dreams?
You may not get a neat answer immediately. That is fine. The point is to stop handing authority over your life to people who will never have to live it.
Own your choices
Whether you want children or do not want children, own your choice.
You do not need permission to want the life you want. You do not need to make your dreams acceptable to people who misunderstand them. You do not need to follow a path simply because it is familiar, popular, or expected.
Make an informed choice. Know your why. Stand by it when somebody else’s fear tries to become your doubt.
You are here to choose, act, and live the life that is actually yours.
Everything is possible. You just have to choose it.
FAQ
How do I know whether I genuinely want children?
My advice would be to meditate and feel your way to the answer. You will need time and space, away from distraction and outside influence, to feel how your body responds. Does it give you clues? How does it feel when you think about having them? How does it feel when you think about not having them?
Is it selfish to choose not to have children?
A question to ask is who are you having children for? Who has to live with the decision? The answer is you. So, you could say it is selfish because you are making the decision for you and no one else. But that is the whole point. If you are considering having kids for someone else’s sake, then this is not a good foundation on which to make the choice. Any choice made out of guilt, indebtedness, or obligation is not a good choice.
How do I deal with pressure from family and society to have children?
Knowing the ‘why’ behind your choice will help you to maintain your boundaries and conviction behind it. Having a vision for your future, knowing your values, knowing what you want to create will help you maintain your foundation when external pressure comes. Knowing your truth vs their voice will help you stay on track.
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