The Influence of Culture

I have been researching and writing about the childless by choice in North America for four years. One thing I have learned is many of us are pressured to have kids, or stigmatized because we don’t, because of the culture in which we live.

The culture may be a mixture of religion, race, family, or tradition, but the results are the same. Our decision making and our coping mechanisms are influenced by our culture.

I recently signed a book deal with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, to write a book on the Childless by Choice in North America. Yesterday I was working on a chapter in which I profile couples who have arrived at their decision to remain childfree in very different ways. The couples I interviewed are a very diverse group. Some are children of immigrants from India and the Middle East, some are atheists, some are lapsed Catholics, some are devout Jews. Each of them has found their own unique way of navigating what is very often a pronatalist culture.

As a young black woman, how do you remain childfree in a culture where fathering a child is considered a critical rite of passage for most of the young males of your race? Do you date outside your race, do you remain single or celibate, or do you defend yourself by arming yourself with condoms and praying he knows how to use one, or by going to your doctor and begging for a tubal ligation?

If you are an observant Jew do you pass as infertile, do you isolate yourself, do you lie when asked why you haven’t done your part to produce a child for the tribe. The future of Israel is at stake!

It’s tough. So tough in fact that I have yet to meet an observant, orthodox Jewish woman who is intentionally childless, or a African American couple who remained childfree through a lasting, fertile marriage or partnership. I know they exist. They are out there, I’m sure of it. It’s just that I have not met them, even though I have worked and lived along side orthodox Jews and I have mentored young black women.

Fortunately, I have had the pleasure of knowing so many others, who despite being raised in a culture that assumed parenthood for all their members, became one of the few who resisted the pressure, based on a hard-won sense of who they were and what they truly wanted. (Click here for a short excerpt of a Mexican couple who did just that.)

The decision to remain childfree is not made in a vacuum. You may be caucasian, 5th generation American, atheist, and surrounded by childless and childfree siblings and friends, but you probably still had a parent who hoped for a grandchild one day; who said,

"You would be a good parent if you just put your mind to it."

[Flickr photo by Stephanie Booth - cc]
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