I’ve known from a young age that I wanted to wait to have children. My mom had her first child when she was 27, and I’d planned to follow in her footsteps. When I told other family members my plan, everyone was shocked. Older women always had a comment: “You don’t want to wait until you’re that old,” or a question, “You want to wait how long?”
When our grandparents were growing up, many women saw marriage as a way to get out of their house. They would meet a man who seemed nice, stable and respectful, then marry and have kids at 18. Our parents’ generation kicked off the trend of having kids a bit later, going to college first and usually marrying their college sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with these ways of starting a life. Many people have created happy families. They were young when their children were growing up, and they look great in all their children’s baby photos.
Millennials, however, aren’t satisfied with marrying straight out of the gate. We want to travel. We want to live alone. Alternative lifestyles have become more accepted (yay progression!) by people nationwide. 20-somethings want to further their careers before they start a life with other people (if they decide they even want to have a lifelong partner). We’ve created a new stage of life for ourselves in between leaving education and starting families.
Comedian and writer Aziz Ansari goes into great detail about the statistical differences between the family views of baby boomers versus the family views of millennials. In fact, he notes in his 2015 piece in TIME, “Everything You Thought You Knew About Love is Wrong” that for the first time in history, the average American spends more years single than married. To me, this makes more sense. I’ve been lucky enough to travel to so many different countries and some of my most memorable experiences and long-lasting friendships have resulted from these travels. I have all these ideas I want to put into action and make into real life change. I have career goals, and financial goals. I want to reach a certain level of self-love, acceptance, and stability before I start a family.
I’ve seen many an adult project their feelings of inadequacy and regret onto their children, which affected their relationship with their children in the long run. These are the people who never grew up and into themselves, and never got to experience things they could only experience without the burden of children. If they had time to “find themselves”, they may have been more comfortable raising a child in the long run. Children are great, don’t get me wrong, but they are a huge responsibility and take a financial and emotional toll on people. I may never be completely ready to take on that toll, but I want to be as ready as I can be. I don’t want to bring a child into this world until I’m much more confident that I can support it correctly, in every way.
To clarify, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a child at a younger age. I’d like to think my parents turned out okay and ended up being great parents themselves. I see friends from high school documenting their pregnancies and I'm elated for them. I’m just sick of feeling rushed into doing something with my own body. I'm sick of having biased opinions forced onto me. I'm sick of our elders telling us we aren't serious enough about our lives because we don't rush into living the cookie cutter life. If anything, I'm more serious about it then ever because I'm making a concrete plan to experience all I need to before I support a family. Unless the people who've criticized my reasons for not having a child at an early age want to push a baby out for me, they can live their lives the way they want to, and I’ll live mine the way I want to.
