Brut America
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"There's no natural internal drive to nurture another human for 18 to 25 years."

More and more people are deciding not to have kids. Here's why ...
Transcript
00:00Not having children is the best decision that I ever made for my life.
00:04I will be 32 next month and my husband and I are child free as f**k.
00:09Statistics show that the happiest people on earth are unmarried women who don't have children.
00:19We have this belief that people who don't have kids are going to die
00:24alone. They're going to die bitter and lonely.
00:30If you ask child free people who are in their older ages if they regret their choice,
00:37if they're unhappy, the answer is no. And if you look at how they live their lives,
00:42they live in communities where they are engaged.
00:47In fact, they're more engaged in their communities than parents tend to be.
01:00Society is always asking us, when are you going to have kids? How many kids are you going to have?
01:05I'd like to better understand why people are so
01:08up in arms when they meet somebody like me who chose not to have children.
01:12We tell ourselves a lot of false stories about a supposed natural drive to become a parent.
01:18We don't have that as humans. We have a natural drive to have sex with each other,
01:22which can lead to parenthood for some. But there's no natural,
01:28internal drive to nurture another human for 18 to 25 years.
01:32I don't want to have kids because I want my money to go towards more important things.
01:38Me.
01:56Babies are romanticized in our society, and so is motherhood.
02:00You think of the covers on the women's magazines.
02:04Activism around the child-free choice and around raising awareness of non-parenthood as an option
02:11really dwindled as we went from the 1970s to the 1980s.
02:17We saw this period of real political movement and growth of the religious right,
02:25which certainly takes a position that people should not opt out of parenthood.
02:30In fact, we should all want to be parents and have as many kids as possible.
02:35I think the Lord made it pretty clear, both at the beginning with Adam and Eve,
02:38and then he also said it again to Noah and his sons, to be fruitful and multiply.
02:47I'm someone who assumed my whole life as a kid and into early adulthood that I would become a
02:53parent one day, and I trained myself really well for that role. As I started getting older,
02:59into my late 20s and early 30s, I started really thinking, you know, I like the life that I have.
03:06I realized when I started reading the research on this topic that there was a room for more research.
03:13There was a lot of good work at the time, but I still had questions that didn't seem to be answered.
03:20Can we discuss how awesome it is that we can sleep in on weekends for the rest of our lives?
03:31Randomly, my husband will look over at me and be like,
03:33you want to take a train to Paris this weekend? Yes, yes, I do.
03:38Many child-free people say that they didn't have kids because they wanted to prioritize
03:43their relationship with their partner, that they really value nurturing that relationship.
03:50Don't get me wrong, I think that children are beautiful and wonderful,
03:59and there have been many times where I thought about wanting to have them,
04:02wanting to bring them into this world, but the repercussions.
04:05I think that the messages that we get from our, sometimes from our friends and family,
04:10and certainly from the larger culture, is that parenthood is the be-all, end-all experience of
04:15life. And it is for some people, but it's not for everybody.