I write this as someone who has never wanted to be a parent, and never wishes to be. This in itself might put some people off, because child-free people are often viewed as ignorant of the huge responsibility that parenting entails. Our voices are often swept to the sidelines, with the accompanying question of what do they know?
I do, however, know a fair bit about parenting. It’s just from the other side of the coin. I’m someone who’s spent 30 years recovering from the neglect and narcissistic abuse of my father and his wife. And I’m also someone who supported young people for years as a mental health engagement worker. Prior to that, I worked for a domestic abuse charity.
During these years, I offered support to mothers who were terrified for their children’s lives as they tried to flee their abusive husbands. I’ve walked young people to A&E after they had harmed themselves. I’ve read their suicide notes and talked them out of taking their own lives. I’ve run anti-bullying groups, held mental health workshops and given talks to hundreds of young people in schools, colleges and universities. And I’ve met many parents. The ever-growing waiting list of young people needing free mental health support meant that in my early years, I was talking to parents all day long. Later on, my role entailed managing weekly hubs where young people and their parents could drop in and chat to our team of trained volunteers about what kind of support we could offer them.
One thing struck me quite early on. While talking to all of these parents, it occurred to me that many of them were solely focused on having us ‘fix’ their child, while displaying problematic behaviours themselves. There was little to no awareness of how their child’s issues were most likely a direct result of their own unacknowledged and unhealed issues, blindly inflicted upon their offspring. Many parents were anxious, controlling and some were downright aggressive, very rarely taking accountability for the harm they’d caused to their child. Young people came to us to talk safely and confidentially about the various issues they were experiencing in their homes, and as a charity, the government and various funders were footing the bill for all of this, not the parents themselves.
All of this was familiar territory for me. Having lost my mother at the age of nine, not only was my overwhelming grief never addressed, but my father - who had never actually wanted children and who openly stated that he ‘didn’t know what love was’ - started seeing my school friend’s mum within 8 weeks of my mother dying. She’s a white British woman whose father had served in the British Army in India, and I was to be intimately schooled in colonial dynamics as her narcissistic abuse deepened. Eventually I left the family, but with severe emotional scars and c-PTSD. It took me years to recover from the heartache, grief and psychological damage that I went through at their hands, and I had to do it by myself.
All of these experiences led me to reflect deeply on parenthood. Thankfully, I’d never felt the biological urge to have children, so the inner should I/shouldn’t I? conflict was never there, but what if it was? What would I do?
The irony of parenting isn’t lost on me. Despite it requiring almost inhuman levels of self-sacrifice, it’s also a self-centred endeavour. Unless we’re giving birth to the next enlightened master, we’re not having children for the sake of humanity at large. Most of the time, we’re doing it because we want to. And there’s nothing wrong with that - we just need to be more honest about it.
The truth is, being a parent doesn’t assign higher moral value to a person, nor does it mean they’re more loving, considerate or understanding than anybody else. A person with a child is no more important than a person without a child, which sounds incredibly obvious, yet sometimes it needs to be said out loud to cut through the unspoken assumptions we’ve been collectively conditioned into.
If you’re reading this, I can probably assume that you’re the kind of person who’s aware of the many issues we’re collectively facing right now. I write this during the UK’s second heatwave and many places around the world are facing even deadlier ones. We’re already experiencing environmental catastrophe due to the greed-fuelled resource exploitation of a few. We’re facing the era of AI and are yet to know how this will fully transform not only our earth and communities but also the way that we learn and process information. We’re seeing settler colonialism and genocides live-streamed on our phones daily and mass migrations of people fleeing their now-unliveable homelands. We’ve never seen a time like this. A time where we have no idea what our world will look like by the end of the year, never mind in ten years time or fifty. Extreme change is upon us in every way imaginable, for better or for worse.
This is where my reflections on parenting usually enter the space. When we have children, they’re not just ours, as much as we like to think they are. They’re everyone’s. They’re members of society. Humanity as a whole. They’re the ones who will not only live in the future we’re co-creating, but they will shape it.
One person impacts countless others in their lifetime, and if that person is burdened with the damage from unconscious parenting - the kind where the unhealed wounds of their predecessors are simply inflicted upon them - we all suffer. However that wound manifests, whether it’s depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal tendencies, right through to abusive behaviours, this will never just stay in the family. It will become the added responsibility of the children and teachers at school, the local neighbourhood, the wider community, and ultimately, society as a whole. And not just on a national level - online bullying and trolling reaches its tentacles all across the globe. These keyboard warriors (when they’re not bots) are usually people who experience powerlessness, resentment and pain from adverse life circumstances and feel that inflicting this pain onto others will somehow make them feel better.
It’s clear to see that the way children are parented in the so-called western world differs greatly to the more tight-knit communities that exist almost everywhere else. Capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism have corroded our idea of family and reduced it to one or two parents living separately with their children, with no community to support them. Without over-romanticising them too much (as abuse has always been prevalent), there is much to be said for family systems that exist outside of the western model, even if imperfectly. While parents worked during the day, children were with aunts, uncles, grandparents and other members of the community, who they often saw as extended parental figures. The adults around them also saw themselves as responsible for the child’s wellbeing and acted accordingly. There was an understanding that the child belonged to everyone, and everyone belonged to the child, because they were an important part of society.
But the isolationist ways that we’ve been cornered into through the pressures of capitalism have severed us from these nourishing support systems, leaving many parents without community members to help them look after the children. The burden remains solely on them for financially providing for, emotionally supporting and bringing the child up in society. Everything stays within the four walls of the nuclear family home. As a result, when many parents imagine the future, they tend just to centre their lives and their children’s lives, fantasising about their graduation, career, marriage and families. Their focus then arranges itself around achieving these future accomplishments, without much thought to anything else. It becomes I want over we need. And this delusion contributes to what we’re collectively experiencing today. The stresses of colonial capitalism lead parents to make consumer choices out of a need to quickly ease their burdens so they turn to big companies. But it’s these very companies that exploit our earth and contribute directly to the climate change, genocide and other catastrophes that their children will inherit. Meanwhile, they’re encouraged to concentrate on achieving the highest grades and financial accomplishments, when none of those things will save any of us in the world we’re all walking into.
There still seems to be backlash around mentioning the fact that more children create a larger strain on the earth’s resources, leading to more demand and more extraction, therefore worsening the climate change those children will have to survive one day. Despite being a fact, this is somehow deemed a patriarchal, heartless thing to say when it’s often coming from a deep concern for not only the existing humans, but for the many species of wildlife that are already on the brink of extinction due to our greed and lack of ability to protect them from further destruction. The earth herself is showing us all the signs we need to see, yet many are unwilling to acknowledge them because they stand in the way of their desires.
With many parents I’ve encountered, there seems to be a prevailing assumption that everyone else will somehow fix these societal issues so that by the time the child grows up, it’ll all be fine. The foresight and sense of collective responsibility simply isn’t there. Instead, there are complaints about how hard it is to raise a child, and while no-one is denying that, there was never a magic wand that was going to be waved to accommodate their every need simply because they chose to bring a child into the world. Ultimately, it is all of our responsibility to create that world, whether we’re busy raising children or not. No-one is exempt.
It’s still uncommon for parents or soon-to-be parents to prioritize their wish for their child to be a responsible member of society over being financially comfortable or well-educated. To heal their own emotional issues and shadows so that they don’t inflict them on their child. To contribute to co-creating an earth that will be liveable for their child, others’ children and wildlife after they’re gone. To try to change the oppressive systems that have made life unbearable for so many. To build a safe community so their child is also brought up by other members of the village. To decolonize so their child inherits a healthier worldview. These are things that need to be thought about by every parent. When we leave our children behind, what are we leaving them with, and equally as important, what are we leaving everyone else with?
A few years ago, as part of my job, I was invited to a city council meeting where we were thinking about new community groups that would be helpful to introduce. I spoke about creating a group where young people who wanted to be parents could go and learn about the realities and responsibilities of parenting before they made that life-altering decision. To my surprise, no-one said a word. It was as though I’d spoken in an entirely foreign language. Later, a woman came up to me in private and said she agreed with me, but was too afraid to say it at the time. I was shocked, but also angered. Why was it so hard to bring up such an important topic? It seemed ironic to me that before adopting babies, even cats and dogs, there was a rigorous process to make sure that the caregivers were responsible and resourced enough to provide for these innocent beings entering their households. But when it came to deciding to have children via pregnancy, anyone could do it as and when they wished, and the consequences were to be dealt with afterwards.
This isn’t to say that I believe we should police people who wish to have children. I simply wish that we were thinking about all of these issues, before we made that all-important decision. And this would entail a lot of inner reflection and assessment, with the possibility of coming to a decision not to have children if certain key conditions weren’t met. Wisdom comes with being able to look beyond our own desires and see what is beneficial for everyone involved, not just for ourselves.
As for child-free people (by choice), we are often seen as self-centred, clueless and immature, when often that couldn’t be further from the truth. Many of us love children so deeply that we feel fiercely protective over them. Many of us find it unbearable to witness children being systemically targeted in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as in other parts of the world, and feel both powerless and compelled to act. Many of us have sat with these reflections for years and decided not to have children because of that, often working in roles of service or with young people to help create a healthier world. Yet we often pay the price for the decisions and judgements of those who do have children.
Imagine having a group meal at a restaurant. We’ve all been there, where we’ve been on a budget due to limited financial resources. So we choose the cheapest thing on the menu, accompanied by tap water. There are others around the table, however, who order the most expensive meal accompanied by champagne. At the end of the meal, one of these people suggests splitting the bill and the others agree. As a result, our bill is tripled while theirs is reduced. And when we dare to say anything, we are met with defensiveness and guilt-tripping. Similarly, we can often be met with patronizing comments laced with moral superiority by parents, as though they didn’t choose to have their child and they were actually doing a huge service to humanity. All the while, we’re expected to pay up for baby showers and children’s birthdays for years on end, but we don’t receive the same in return. We end up picking up the tab, financially, emotionally, socially and environmentally, for other people’s choice to have children, and we’re expected to understand and stay silent. Moreover, we’re still probed with questions such as why don’t you want kids? yet the opposite, why did you choose to have kids? is deemed offensive when it’s actually a more reasonable question, given that this choice directly impacts us.
Of course, this isn’t the case with all parents. And thankfully, some are open to conversations like these. But for many more, these topics are incredibly uncomfortable to look at and talk about. If we are to move forward together, however, we must put an end to the collective illusions around parenthood and say it like it is.
We’re also talking about leadership here. Healthy leadership is about making informed choices and owning our responsibilities. It also involves saying hard yet important things, knowing that we might upset some people.
There are very few forms of leadership which are as powerful, long-lasting and impactful as parenting. Our children look up to us as role models as they grow. They watch what we do, not just what we say. They pick up our opinions, worldviews and biases and they carry them outside the home. They watch how we interact with others. They absorb our unhealed trauma, prejudices and resentment. They learn what love is and what it isn’t. They become the education system, the workforce, lovers, friends and parents themselves. And when we leave this earth, we leave them in stewardship of it.
Parenting is, no doubt, the most important role one could undertake in a lifetime. I have a lot of respect for parents who do their best to lovingly raise their children to be healthy members of society, especially because they cannot guarantee the outcome in today’s rapidly-changing world. And as we look to our future together as members of humanity, my hope is that these conversations become easier to have as a collective, infused with more wisdom, reflection and discernment.
My Work
For those navigating their own journey with grief and would like a guide through the underworld of death, grief and loss, you may find my poetry book Half Woman Half Grief beneficial.
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