'I love being childfree but people treat me with outright contempt' affiliate
Where once it was commonly expected for women to become mothers at some point in their lives, over recent years things have started to change. At a time when first time parents are becoming older, with half of women in England and Wales being childfree by their 30th birthday, more and more women are removing the stigma from being ‘childless by choice’.
But for me, at the age of 46, I identify as “childless-by-choice”, having known from an early age that motherhood was not for me. And it’s a decision that has been met with a mixture of disbelief, curiosity and outright contempt. It’s easy to forget that these stats reflect the deeply personal, sometimes controversial and often highly conflicted life choices of millions of individual women. So often, those like me, who don’t become parents, are painted as sad, selfish or somehow dysfunctional.For younger generations especially, climate fears rank highly – 2050 is cited as the tipping point beyond which “climate collapse” will become inevitable.
In a move that felt like the opposite of settling down, we moved to New York. There, I started my own online magazine and landed my first book deal aged 38. Not once did it feel like anything was missing. The latest figures put the average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 in the UK at £202,660, including housing and childcare costs. That’s around £11,250 a year, or £938 a month. So it’s perhaps not surprising that a 2022 poll of childless adults in 30 different countries saw financial concerns ranked highest among their reasons for not having kids.
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