Marriage and children have gone hand-in-hand since the beginning of time. As a culture, we’ve been trained to think that having children is simply what you do after you get married. In the not-so-distant past, many couples would have multiple children because it was a societal norm, and because those children were ‘needed,’ to help work, manage farms, etc. Having between 5-10 children or more was normal in the early-mid 1900s, and while forms of birth control were obviously less readily-available during those times, the idea of having that many kids wasn’t only accepted, but encouraged.
Even in more recent years, children have simply been expected as a result of being married. With women especially, the conversation of getting married and having kids always seemed to be a popular one. Today, though, that conversation is changing.
More and more couples are either choosing to have children later in life, or simply choosing not to have kids at all.
Why are couples choosing not to have kids?
There are hundreds, if not thousands of individual reasons people choose not to have children, and most of them are 100% personal to the couple making that choice, however, some common reasons include: Putting career first, trouble in the marriage, fear of a sluggish sex life, the cost of a child, etc.
Again, most reasons people give for not wanting kids is strictly personal, but as societal norms have changed, so has the pressure of having kids. Granted, it’s not accepted 100% – it’s still more often than not that married couples do have at least one child, but the focus on ourselves, our careers, and our relationships with our spouses and other people have greatly affected our overall desire to have kids.
This certainly isn’t to say we live in a selfish world. In the United States alone, over four million babies are born every year. However, many of those births are not the result of a marriage, and that stigma has begun to float away as well. Many people are seeing the choice to have a child or not to be something a woman has a right to decide for herself, whether she’s with her husband, or on her own.
In marriage, many people want to put their relationship first, especially if it’s a relationship that has had hardships or struggles. Where having a baby used to sometimes be a method of ‘strengthening’ a relationship, more and more couples now realize that bringing a child into a damaged situation can only make things worse for everyone, including the baby. Still, even the happiest of marriages choose not to have kids for personal reasons, and even though it may not be the ‘norm’ as of yet, the idea of not having kids in marriage is more widely accepted than ever before, and there’s no reason to believe those trends won’t continue.
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