Mingaile Kieraite remembers what it felt like observing those close to her become parents. As family members shared updates on their pregnancies and friends dragged her to kid-friendly events, she began to feel isolated, as if she wasn’t being let into an exclusive club.

But Kieraite, 33, had already decided she didn’t want to join the club. From a young age, Kieraite never had an intense, or even middling, desire to have kids. She’d helped raise her cousin, a responsibility that was foisted upon her, and found the experience challenging. Now with more control over her circumstances, she considered what she really wanted. And it wasn’t children.

But at some point in her 20s, she had a confounding experience. The hosts of some of her favorite podcasts and YouTube channels announced they were having babies, and instead of parasocial excitement or even apathy, Kieraite was caught off guard by what she felt — a little sad, jealous even. She started to wonder if she should follow suit. 

As a thought experiment, Kieraite tried to imagine what being a parent would be like. Her mind immediately went to the good parts — feeling useful, having company — not the early mornings or the ultimate sacrifice of free time. “But that’s not how it works,” Kieraite told Vox. She was still adamant in her choice not to have children, but she felt a sense of loss for an experience she will never have. 

“How is it,” Kieraite said, “that I grieve something I don’t want to have?”

Whether it’s the choice of having kids or some other path not taken — a job offer you turned down, that person you never quite got the courage to ask out — the finality of major life decisions is wrought with a complicated and very relatable sense of grief. Not quite regret, the tension between who you are and what you could have been can dredge up feelings of self-doubt. What if? can give way to Did I make the right choice? Accepting who you are now means letting go of who you could have been. 

The number of American adults who don’t want kids is growing — 47 percent of non-parents under 50 say they’re unlikely to have children, up from 37 percent in 2018 — but they’re running headlong into an increasingly pro-family culture and political sphere. While alternative family structures are becoming more common, most people say they want children. And remaining childfree — intentionally choosing not to become a parent — remains relatively niche. Women between the ages of 30 to 50 who don’t have children are among the minority. Only around 20 percent of adults in their 50s and 60s do not have kids. Cultural messaging and social rituals surrounding marriage and child-rearing — weddings, baby showers — reinforce the idea that having kids is the norm, and a milestone worth celebrating. Bucking those trends can inspire a deep sense of FOMO, or even profound loss.

Like Kierate, childfree people may be surprised by their emotions. After all, they’ve made a deliberate choice. But they still experience a loss: a life they don’t get to live, a future they need to relinquish, even if it wasn’t what they wanted in the first place. Rather than signaling regret, this grief is often rooted in a desire to be seen and to be included. And there are ways to navigate these thorny, undiscussed emotions.

Unrecognized and alienated

Though there are more adults who don’t want kids than ever before, a stigma remains. People who choose to not have children, particularly women, are seen by society (and, at one time, the pope) as selfish, callous, lonely, and potentially regretful. “We do have that natural expectation of people to have children or families in traditional ways,” Brittany Stankhe, an assistant professor in the department of social work at East Tennessee State University, told Vox. 

In a culture that values parenthood, childfree people can feel alienated or carry shame, even if they know not having kids is the right choice. Their extended family might not understand why their loved one chose to be childfree — they can’t afford to have kids, are concerned about the future, or simply don’t want to — and thus not see it as a legitimate choice. They might also be excluded from family-centered get-togethers. “Maybe you really don’t want to be part of all these kid events,” Bella DePaulo, the author of Single At Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, told Vox. “But it’s still another way in which you’re getting the message that you don’t really count, or you don’t count the way people who are parents count.”

When a baby is born, the parents’ wider community traditionally hosts baby showers, provides material support in the form of gifts and childcare, and recognizes they have entered a new life phase. “Choosing not to have children usually has no corresponding ritual,” licensed psychotherapist Annie Wright told Vox. “No one gathers to celebrate the life you’ve deliberately built or the clarity and pain it took to choose it. So many people can feel so deeply confident in their decision and still feel sad it isn’t witnessed or celebrated or understood in the same way.”

Holly, a 46-year-old who asked Vox not to publish her last name so she could speak freely about her friendships, didn’t feel that her multiple advanced degrees were sufficiently celebrated by loved ones compared to her friends’ pregnancies. “I got a couple congratulations, but it’s like, freaking do something for me,” Holly told Vox. “Give me a cake. I want to pick colors for something, and all those little novelty things I appreciate and enjoy that don’t really come from many other things other than having a baby.” She sees the glorification of traditional milestones as only furthering the stereotype that women are only worthy if they get married and have children.

Though Holly and her husband don’t want kids, there is some part of her that wishes she did. Holly was reminded of a recent shopping trip where she held her friend’s toddler in her lap while her friend went to the bathroom. She was struck by the warm smiles she received from strangers and felt a sense of sorrow. “No one will ever look at me like that for any reason, no matter what I do,” she said. 

A different kind of grief

For about a 10-year period starting in her mid-20s, many people in Jennifer Chalmers’s life were having kids. Though she’s never wavered in her decision not to have children, she did suspect her friends were experiencing something she wasn’t. “You start thinking, ‘I’m the only one who’s not doing that. Have I chosen the wrong path?’” Chalmers, 61, told Vox. But once her friends moved out of the child-rearing phase of their lives, that existential question abated. 

Chalmers’s experience is among the many documented examples of childfree people who live full and happy lives. According to research, childfree adults do not experience any more regret than parents, and they also report high life satisfaction. Instead of mourning a path not taken, childfree people “might be grieving an identity or a set of rituals or a particular relationship to adulthood, or their imagined place in a future family,” Wright said.

Letting go of these theoretical roles can be difficult because they aren’t necessarily losses. Society has an easier time recognizing the grief of people who want to have kids but, for one reason or another, are unable to. The sadness associated with choosing a somewhat unique path is less concrete. Nearly four decades ago, Kenneth J. Doka, a senior vice president of the Hospice Foundation of America, coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe the sorrow people feel when their loss isn’t acknowledged by society — perhaps the death of a pet or neighbor. “If you want to talk about it, if you want to explore that choice, if you want to process your grief, there’s nobody for the most part who does,” Doka told Vox. Mourning a life you didn’t even want can be a form of disenfranchised grief, Doka said, since you made a conscious choice to be childfree.

Another experience, known as ambiguous loss, developed by therapist Pauline Boss in the 1970s, refers to the grief associated with absences without closure, like a breakup. “Boss’s work on ambiguous loss centered on the soldiers lost in battle,” Wright said. “But her work helps us understand losses that don’t have a clean ending or a clearly recognized object.” Grieving a potential future can be a form of ambiguous loss, too, she said.

But how to process a loss of something you never had — and never wanted? Something that lacks boundaries and closure? According to Doka, admitting to yourself the existence of a loss is helpful, as is communicating that pain to someone who will acknowledge it as such. “Saying, ‘I made a choice. There were things I liked about that choice. I had a good life because of that choice, but now there are some aspects of that choice that I do in fact regret,’” he said. Wright said to consider that the decision not to have kids — all decisions, really — have costs. There will always be a life you didn’t get to have.

As I enter my mid-30s, that alternative life is becoming ever clearer. Like Chalmers in her 20s, I’m at the point where many of my peers are having kids or solidifying their decisions not to. Since my teenage years, when for a school project I was tasked with caring for a baby doll programmed with software enabling it to cry and fuss, I understood the limits of my maternal instincts. Namely, that I had none.

Still, I wonder if my life will have meaning, if having children is the most worthy way to leave a legacy. I’m reminded that my choices reverberate every time my mother sends me a video of a baby doing something silly with the comment “This is why you have kids.” 

But it isn’t a good enough reason to have kids. When I’m saddled with doubt, I open my eyes to the world around me: the privilege of laying in bed on weekends, the thrill of a spontaneous evening with friends, the ultimate blessing of silence. I don’t need to reimagine myself as anyone else, because my life is exactly how I always imagined it. I can lose myself for hours in a run, spend an afternoon reading by the pool, keep my house tidy. These simple pleasures would be made more difficult for me with the presence of a small human.

Nicola Marchant, a 37-year-old who is similarly questioning her purpose in life if she doesn’t have kids, copes with these feelings by confiding in other friends who don’t plan on having children and engaging with childfree content on Reddit and TikTok. Hearing from older people who don’t have kids that their lives aren’t empty and devoid of meaning brings her solace. “It’s content like this that shakes me out of my spiraling and makes me laugh and realize I’m not alone in these doubts and fears,” Marchant told Vox in an email. “My advice to others would be to do the same, surround yourself with voices that feel the same as yours, speak to older people you know without kids; if you don’t know any, find some online.”

Regardless of what you call it — disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss — the feelings are real. Moving through a world that still values and recognizes traditional family structures can be exclusionary. But there is freedom in embracing the life you do have, even if it isn’t celebrated in the same way. It doesn’t make it wrong.

“I actually don’t think the goal is to stop feeling anything complicated,” Wright, the therapist, said. “It’s to make room for the grief without allowing it to erase the meaning and fullness of the childfree life you chose.”

Source: Vox.