Did anyone else choose to be childfree due to their childhood?

[moderndaywitch]

I have never been especially maternal, and I put this down to being the oldest in a family with four children.

I love my siblings, but from my perspective, my parents having so many children ruined my life. There was no money, time, quiet, space - it was just chaos. My parents were very irresponsible and lazy, which meant I was often the 'third parent' to the youngest siblings, getting them up for school, making their school lunches, washing their hair etc when I was still a child myself. I even had people tell me I would make a good mother one day when I was about 12.

Any attention my parents had, when they could be bothered, would be directed at the youngest as I was 'more grown up'.

I found my siblings, and all younger children, irritating. The crying, the tantrums, the demands.

I do sometimes see children out and about and think yes, they're cute when they are well behaves. I think it would be nice to have family days out at farms etc like you see on Instagram, but then I see parents struggling with a child having a tantrum and I think how hard that life must be.

I do wonder if I will regret having no family but I think my childhood has scarred me too much. I feel resentful that I don't have 'normal' experiences as now I will be living an 'abnormal' life in the eyes of society.

I think so. Alcoholic, emotionally unavailable father. Mother who turned my eldest brother into her surrogate husband to compensate for how shit my dad was. She and eldest brother would do things like speak in German (they'd both learnt it at school; I hadn't ) so I couldn't understand what they were talking about. They'ddiscuss the rest of us in quite negative terms and he'd tell her what she was doing wrong in bringing me up! She'd take his side in any argument the rest of us had with him (he'd run to complain to her; the rest of us knew not to bother). She completely screwed him up, and the rest of us are fairly resentful of how we were treated. I've no confidence I'd do it better though, and I'd hate to put in all that effort and still screw things up and not have a good relationship with my children. I don't want to keep spreading the rot.

Op, your parents definitely did not show you the care you deserved. Hard to know why. I think most adults can think of times when we felt our parents didn't act the way we thought they should but some of your examples would have been very upsetting for you. Some parents definitely put their own interests ahead of their children's.

I think my parents separation and resulting ongoing conflict is a factor in my decision to be CF. It's the realisation that if you have kids you're never truly free from a person when you split and how messy the whole thing is. I love my DP so wouldn't want risk damaging/detonating our relationship when it's so good as is.

Yes, I never connected emotionally with my mother and we had a horrible relationship consisting of her trying to mould me into the type of daughter she wanted, and me lashing out as I needed to just be myself.

Add into that the fact that I see so much of her in me I decided I wasn't going to risk history repeating itself with another shit mother / daughter relationship

Yes. I had a miserable childhood and decided before I was 12 that I'd never risk inflicting a repeat on anyone else. I have no patience for children beyond casual interactions, and this is just the way mum was, so it stands to reason any child I was a mother to would be as miserable as I was. I was a burden. A noise to be stopped. An inconvenience. A nuisance.

My main act of loving my children was deciding not to have them.

My childhood, like it or not, probably definitely shaped my lifestyle now. I'm the middle of three and the scapegoat for being the second of the 'wrong gender.' (Her erstwhile best friend told me in a letter that I was meant to be a boy.) Anyway a truly shit time, where at home I was hated and sought to get away constantly. Just get upstairs, out of the way, and suffer the blows the rest of the time, and try not to cry at the sneers and the shaming etc. Decidedly not cool at all.

It led to me only really feeling safe when alone. When all the people have gone, then I can be myself. So that led to not really enjoying living with a man, and to an ability to tolerate what is not quite right, as I grew up tolerating what was blatantly wrong.

Then I got a charity job supporting survivors of trauma and often they had children with them and I used to see what the reality of parenting was like - the non stop drudgery, the having to go home, the not being able to earn proper money and thus have a 'safe place to call my own' (which became super helpful once I discovered it having left home - GOT to be able to afford my own place) - anyway the combination has led to my current single and child free life.

I am not unhappy with it. Many relationships I see, I would not tolerate. And while I can see that my friends with kids now who are all in their 20s have good times with them, I do think that the drudgery and endless work of having kids is not right for me. I need space and down time and peace and I like a nice tidy home.

This is one of the most interesting and relatable threads I think I’ve ever seen on Mn. I was the dutiful eldest of a large, very poor family, with parents who were themselves from deprived, dysfunctional backgrounds and had no idea there was any more to parenting than pumping out children and giving them (minimal) food and clothing. It was a miserably overcrowded, chaotic childhood, and I learned very early on that I had to protect my parents from the world, that there was no space for my emotional needs, and that what parental attention there was went to the physical needs of the younger ones.

Education was my escape, and I never wanted children. I did in fact choose to have a child at 39, partly because I didn’t want my childhood to limit my choices, but my siblings are without exception childfree by choice, and it is very clear hat our childhoods predisposed us to see all the bad in having children and none of the good. People’s responses to an entire sibling set being childfree are always interesting.

@TrickleWell , that's a very sad and difficult story. What a lot of deprivation you've experienced. How has parenting been for you?

Thanks, @Lottapianos. I don’t want to talk much about parenting as it’s the Childfree board (I do read it, as I’ve been happily childfree for far more of my adult life than I’ve been a parent, and identify strongly with much of it — the strange, intrusive comments to childfree women, pitying assumptions of infertility, the assumption that, should you not have children, you absolutely need to be either some Boardroom Boss Bitch or Mother Teresa, or jetting off to Bali every ten seconds, and what you are absolutely not allowed to be is just ordinary etc etc), but don’t generally comment. On this thread I was really commenting on behalf of my childfree sibling group, because a lot of people have very strong reactions to an entire family choosing not to reproduce. )

Parenting has been generally interesting and enjoyable, and DS is lovely.

Can I ask those of you who chose to be childfree because of your childhoods, did your siblings, if you have them, choose similarly or differently, and have you talked about it with them either way?

'I don’t want to talk much about parenting as it’s the Childfree board'

Oh sorry, that's my fault! Forgot where I was for a second 😁 thanks for being more sensitive than I was!

I have one sister and one brother. Sister has one child (my only nephew, who is just wonderful), brother has no children

Can I ask those of you who chose to be childfree because of your childhoods, did your siblings, if you have them, choose similarly or differently, and have you talked about it with them either way?

I've three siblings, and none of us have had children.

Three siblings, only my brother had a child. He had 2 step kids, who I consider family, but yes, just 1 child from 4 siblings.
Quite telling, I think.

Same here.

I've also, over the years, noticed a very weird physical sensation in myself around kids.

The only way I've been able to describe it is 'somebody else's fury'; it's a bubbling rage, but it's not mine – I know what my anger feels like in my body and this isn't that.

I don't know enough about epigenetics and inherited trauma to speak with any authority on this, but I feel as though in a very subtle and embodied way, I internalised the misery and frustration of my mother (and maybe her mother too) and it has a weird life of its own within me.

I'm well aware of how bonkers this sounds, and I do really enjoy being around other people's kids – I just couldn't risk whatever this internalised pain is being inflicted on my own child.

I think I am childfree because of my unhappy childhood. I never 'decided' not to have children, but at 36 I am still dealing with the mental health consequences of my upbringing and resulting lack of financial stability and think that by the time I sort myself out it will probably be too late. I don't feel particularly bad about it - a little sad that the option was taken away, but I don't seem to have any sort of urge to have children and count myself lucky for that.

Can I ask those of you who chose to be childfree because of your childhoods, did your siblings, if you have them, choose similarly or differently, and have you talked about it with them either way?

None of my siblings have had kids. They are more ambivalent to it than me and also still have a relationship with my parents. We haven’t talked about it as such but I know they haven’t ruled it out as they’ve mentioned in passing the “what if we have kids” scenario.

But I do think it’s interesting that none of us have done it (yet), and we’re not young anymore.

My mother physically and emotionally abused me, my father did nothing to stop it.

I have no model for good parenting, I'm terrified that I'd end up repeating the patterns of abuse and my mother made it clear that parenting is a horrible experience that you 'have' to do to be normal. She's never dealt with her trauma, so I have to be the adult and break the chain. I have never wanted children (or indeed, to be normal) as I can see the burden they impose.

My brother, who admits that he witnessed the abuse and caught it only slightly, is ambivalent about being a parent. His partner, who got parentified in a large chaotic family, seems mostly inclined to be childfree.

Can I ask those of you who chose to be childfree because of your childhoods, did your siblings, if you have them, choose similarly or differently, and have you talked about it with them either way?

My brother has two children. He was a lot younger than me, and didn't get the brunt of housework/caregiving that I did as an older daughter whilst growingup, and his family life is perfectly normal. He thinks I am a lesser being because I don't have children.

Until relatively late, yes. I was heavily parentified, doing a lot of the raising of my younger brother as well as being primarily responsible for my mother's mental health. She shared WAY too much with me, and the pressure of knowing I was responsible for practically everything, emotionally speaking, was awful. My brother and I were encouraged to be in direct competition and despise each other, even as adults. I never wanted to marry or have kids.

Then at university I made friends with someone whose family were lovely. All the kids loved each other and had each other's backs, the parents clearly loved each other and supported the kids, none had even been smacked (!), and I changed my mind.

I only have kids because of those parents.

@TrickleWell my sister (the eldest) was no more interested in having children than I was, and if my brother fathered any it would probably have been due to contraceptive failure, since he preferred his lovers married to someone else, so I really hope he didn't.

Yes that was a big factor for me.

I had DCs young when I was in a mindset of 'I want a family to replace the one I never had growing up'.

If I'd waited until I was older and had time to reflect I think I'd be like the posters above who chose not to have DCs so as to break the cycle of intergenerational dysfunction.

I'll admit now I've had several failings as a parent often as a result of not knowing what normal parenting looks like.

But it does make me more empathetic towards my parents who were themselves not parented well.

Yes, I think so, although ive never really been bothered about having kids (must be something wrong with me)

There was clearly a lot of intergenerational trauma and probably transgenerational trauma. I'm still recovering from my own childhood trauma, and to be honest I'd make a terrible parent - like my own were - because I just don't have the emotional maturity (like my parents). That sh*t is dying with me.

Although they never divorced I knew from very young that my DP's weren't happy together, they weren't affectionate and Mum was happier when he was away at sea. Back then it was really hard for a woman to be a DM and single so she just stayed and they brushed it under the carpet. I read it as being a DM was a trap, a big negative that spoilt your life. Maybe if I'd felt broody it would have changed things but I just never felt the urge for DC and I don't regret it. When posters say they're staying for their DC I just want to say No, you're not doing them any favours

Yes, my home life growing up was similar. I have watched my mother struggle her entire life due to the number of children she had. Even with financial programs.
Though I do wonder sometimes if there is something missing hormonally when you just never feel the baby fever.
I am 42 and have only had two periods in the last two years. Gunning for that menopause diagnosis!!!!

My experience is the same. But my family never really grew up.