The Dream I Had That Has Completely Died

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We all have dreams for our children.

As for most parents, I believed that my two daughters were gifted — my oldest as a dancer and my youngest as an artist — and I hoped that they would continue their studies in those areas.

It didn’t happen. Starting in early adolescence, parents begin to realize that our dreams are rarely their dreams, and we have to let them go. We have to trust that we’ve given them the tools to make good decisions about their lives.

But there’s one dream that dies hard: The desire to be a grandparent.

I always assumed I would be one. My daughters grew up with 10 cousins, and it just never occurred to me that they wouldn’t want to carry that rollicking, mostly joyful chaos forward. It’s the way I grew up — all eight of us sleeping on hot summer weekends on my grandparents’ wrap-around porch or dancing wildly while the grown-ups were in another room doing their thing. We didn’t need their attention. We had each other.

But I only have a single grandchild, and both of my daughters have laid down the law — this is the end of the line. My oldest daughter says she has “aged out” — at 42. And my youngest says simply: “I have a cat.”

As the birthrate continues to fall in the U.S. — down to 1.62 children per woman in 2023, according to the National Center for Health Statistics — I know that increasingly, women my age are having to let go of the dream of having any grandchildren at all.

It’s an intensely personal kind of pain, and many women don’t want to talk about it. At 70, my friend Karen spoke to me about how she is struggling to accept that her 28-year-old daughter has made up her mind — no children.

“It’s heartbreaking for me,” she says. “But she has made it clear time and again. ‘The world is too messed up. The planet is burning up. Why would I want to bring a child into it'?" Karen adds that her argument back is: "We need to bring people into the world in order to fix it."

Francine Toder, a clinical psychologist and emeritus professor at California State University, Sacramento, says people of childbearing age may have a very different view of the world than their parents did. She is the author of Your Kids Are Grown: Parenting 2.0.

“I live in Silicon Valley, and it’s prevalent for women who are very well educated to not want to quit things they’re doing to start a family,” says Toder. ”But for their parents, it can create a lot of anxiety.”

David Chaddock, a Presbyterian pastor and licensed marriage and family therapist in Indianapolis, says there are other reasons young people choose not to have children. These include evolving social norms around having children, the high cost of raising them and the fact that people are living longer and farther away from their families, who can help with child-rearing.

In his practice, the reason that causes the most pain is when “the parent may realize that their child does not wish to have children due to the hurt and pain the child felt growing up, and how the child fears passing this hurt on to the next generation.”

Therapist Toder adds that wanna-be grandparents need to separate their needs from the choices their adult children are making. And differing views need to be heard and respected.

“If you want them to listen to you, you have to listen to them,” Toder says. “They are intelligent people with a different view of the world.”

For Karen, who struggled with severe infertility before she had her only child, “I feel like I’m infertile all over again.” She says she’s been cleaning out the attic and giving away most of her daughter’s toys. “All of her children’s picture books, wooden handmade toys and American Girl dolls. We bought these as heirloom toys to pass on."

The nostalgia is real, for wanting new babies and passing on old toys. Babies are sweet and cuddly, but as Toder points out, being Grandma “isn’t all Norman Rockwell. Not every grandkid is easy to get along with. You may not have access because of conflicts with your own adult children. And when a child becomes 10 or so, they may not want to spend time with their grandparents.”

Thus, and for a lot of other reasons, not all women have the grandparent itch.

Marcy Brode Curland has been told by her 35-year-old son that he and his wife do not plan to have children. He is her only child. “They do a lot of traveling, and they adore each other,” says Curland. “I really just want them to be happy in their own lives. Whether that includes having their own children or not, it doesn’t really matter to me as long as they continue to love and respect each other. I see my son very happy in his life, so I am very happy.”

Those words resonated with me. So what if my granddaughter doesn’t have siblings or cousins? She seems happy. My daughters are happy. The only person with a problem is me. I can choose to wring my hands about it, or I can choose to be happy, myself. Guess which one I’m choosing?

 
Do any of you have kids who don't want to have kids? How do you feel about that? Let us know in the comments below.