I would love to see research into people that grew up under purity culture. I like many of my peers got married the summer after graduating from our Christian college. I never wanted a career, I wanted my MRS degree 😬 I ended up in a happy healthy marriage but I’m sure many did not.
I also still have multiple friends still single in their 40s. Never dated or had sex. Wanted a family but never got it after being so hamstrung by a belief system telling them the man had to find THEM and they better stay pure for him.
And it’s just not affordable to be a single mom by choice without family and financial support.
Mother’s Day should be a vacation day for mothers in my opinion. But instead, when our kids are young, we spend time packing them up making sure we have everything we need so we can go and travel to our own mothers or grandmothers. If my children decide to have children of their own (and as of right now they are in the Camp of young adults who don’t believe bringing children into this world is a good idea right now) I have already decided I will not make them come to me. I will make their Mother’s Day easier and travel to them. And on the topic of rejoicing with other mothers, my neighborhood group of moms on the Saturday before Mother’s Day this year left our children with the husbands and went winery hopping throughout the day and out to dinner at night at a bar with live music where we danced the rest of the day away. It was perfect.
I’m behind on listening this week, but had some time today. I’m so glad I decided to catch up with this episode instead of jumping to today’s, it was so good. I especially loved Beth’s lesson from her grandmother: don’t try to control other people or the universe. Also that you can be progressive and still want traditional things, and you can acknowledge all the barriers and the scary things in the world and still have hope for the future and do the thing anyway.
I want to spend more time with the comment too, but just wanted to say thank you to Sarah and Beth for modeling bravery all the time being willing to talk about hard things that don’t have easy answers ❤️
Goodness this conversation was frustrating. So many assumptions made. Anyone here read Strangers? Belle would surely have some thoughts. I don’t have daughters but I would have them read that book before planing to get married and I’m for sure glad I was in my 30s with my own money, 401k, etc before I got married and started having kids.
I’m one of those women who didn’t find the person I wanted to build a family with until my 40s. And now I don’t know if we ever will be able to conceive. I think I could make peace with it but I also know he badly wants to be a father and would be a good one. Sometimes I think about how the timing around being emotionally ready to be a parent often doesn’t coincide with how our bodies are made. I’m grateful for the life I have. I choose to not look at life with regret. I do wonder how I will feel in 30 years from now. But also know that if we can’t have our own children we will find other children and younger people to help and support.
I know I am late to this game, but I feel like the biggest and most important decision you will make in life is who you marry. I think waiting until your brain is fully developed is not a bad idea. I married my high school sweetheart at age 21 and no regrets, but I felt too young. I waited to have kids until things felt right and it still cost my career. Because I had children my personal financial situation is so dependent on my spouse. And while it is working for me right now, I can look around to many of my girlfriends and see how they are trapped. I am encouraging my children to not rush in to marriage and children. I would rather regret not have a child than to regret the children I have, and it was heavily stressed to me growing up to never have more children than you can support alone. My grandmother told me spouses come and go, but hopefully children are with you the rest of your life. The whole topic is super personal and hard to make generalized statements about. And I think speaks to how some people can just wing it because they have a support system of family and friends to catch them and other don't , I wish that was acknowledged.
I got married at 22… and then divorced at 32 due to his infidelity. Married again at 37, divorced at 45, due to my changing political and religious beliefs. My two kids are 24 & 26 and I advise them to wait as long as they need to wait before getting married.
As for me, I'm happily partnered again, but have zero interest in officially being married again. If a legal reason to be married arises, we'll do it, but until then…. Why ruin a good thing?
The young people I know who do not plan to have kids point to the future predictions of the impact of climate change rather than economic reasons. With governments around the world (les by the US) not willing to do the heavy lifting to curb it, they see a doomsday future.
I am 33, married to an amazing man recently bought an house and really want children. We have not started a family yet because we want to give them what our parents were able to give us. In 2026 that is so much harder than it was when we were growing up. We both have stable loving homes where creativity and travel were priorities and possible. Not perfect homes but what we want to be able to give our children. Most of my friends who have kids are having a hard time financially and unable to buy a home or vacation or have enough time for their kids.
Listening late to this episode. This may have already been discussed but on this past Saturday, The Newsworthy posted an episode about mothers. They discussed statistics on how much more parenting involves now compared to the 80s. It was pretty interesting to see how much more is expected of mothers in particular including in the workforce. I think this aspect must factor in to people deciding to have children.
Always love when yall talk about this stuff!! I got married in 2006 and started having kids quickly after that and it kind of feels like that was the last era of being able to be young and dumb when you get married and have kids. Big proponent of marrying a high school or college sweetheart and growing up with them!
To Beth’s comment about gratitude to those who love her daughters & help make their family life function, I always have the village concept in my mind. I obviously have regularly thanked those people along the way if raising my son, but I took his imminent high school graduation to really put pen to paper & acknowledge how much a slew of people meant to me along the way of parenting my son thus far. Last summer I made a list of everyone from the day he was born to the day he graduated who contributed invaluably to our village. I love a long project with goals, so every week I had a certain number of letters I needed to write. I saved them & put them in my son’s graduation announcements. We sent a lot more announcements than we may have otherwise… I dug up addresses for people who are not part of our daily lives anymore, but we’re integral & vital at certain phases. It was a big project, but it meant a great deal to me to look back & recognized I really always was showing my son how to use & appreciate his resources & how to build a village. It’s not a project for everyone, but it’s been a delight & the outpouring of love & surprise (sometimes people really don’t fully know how vital they were to you) has been truly a highlight to his time in high school ending. It’s also provided my son & I a chance to discuss much of his little kid years that are hazy with time to him. Expressing gratitude is always rewarding & has filled my heart with the goodness of humanity.
I’ve read through all the comments and I’ve listened to the whole episode. I cannot believe no one has mentioned technology in relation to this phenomenon. The way that Sarah talks about feeling the Indiana Jones boulder rolling right behind her in terms of education? Yeah that’s how I feel in terms of dating. Which is what leads to everything else. We are so addicted to our phones/games/TVs and we are having this loneliness epidemic and it seems like the only way to actually meet people now is through dating apps which are cesspool. I’m tempted to say that the typical male in his mid twenties to mid thirties is actually the worst in terms of dating, but I know plenty of men who have horror stories about women too. Our access to technology and what “everybody else is doing” has made the pressure and also the desire to live a certain lifestyle enormous. Our access to technology also limits our interest in the real world. I have other thoughts but what I’m seeing most clearly is the link between technology and our inability to form relationships of any kind, including romantic ones.
And finally just for the sake of demographics, I’m a 1993 baby. I got married at 30 and feel like it was a miracle I even met my husband, let alone that we met at a time that we were both ready for a real relationship. I hear about other peoples relationships and how poorly their husbands participate in the household ecosystem and feel like I won the lottery. And I’m having our first baby sometime in the next 2.5 weeks. I’m 33 and we’d like to have 3 kids, so we’re definitely feeling a little time pressure. But, to Sarah’s point about luxury, we are both ministers in a denomination that provides us BOTH with 12 weeks paid leave. My church has a preschool and the tuition coverage is part of my compensation. We are not worried about health insurance. Our parents are financially well off enough that we expect a decent inheritance and we know that in an emergency we would be absolutely fine. We also each have a sibling who is married but not having kids, so we have a lot of family support but are also mourning that our kids won’t have cousins and we won’t ever be aunts or uncles. AND I STILL WORRY ABOUT MONEY. Like we have so many things working in our favor but I am still stressed that we won’t have enough to give our kids good lives.
My second thought is that my husband and I have been really considering the ways that the pandemic lowered our threshold for discomfort. It shows up differently in us bc we are different people, but the change is there and obvious and sometimes a little sad. We’re trying to work on building that muscle up but it takes intentional work and I don’t think a lot of folks are thinking about their own thresholds and how they’ve changed let alone working to build back. And boy what’s more uncomfortable than having kids 🤣
This was such an interesting discussion. I don't have kids and have never wanted kids, but I think the majority of people do, and the idea that people aren't having kids for economic reasons is kind of sad to me. I know things are expensive, but also, I think we've set extremely high expectations for what we "should" be able to afford for our kids. You can grow up without a lot and live a full and happy life (and probably be more resilient that someone who had a lot more.)
I do question this notion that everyone needs to keep increasing the population. Both Sarah and Beth dismissed (even scoffed at) the idea of overpopulation, but...do we think that land and resources are infinite? They are not. The earth can only hold so much.
Oh, I also wanted to speak to what Sarah said about not waiting so long for marriage and kids. As other people have said, had I married someone I dated in high school or college, I would definitely be divorced now. I did not know what I wanted or needed when I was a teenager. But also - I'm the youngest of five kids and my parents were 40 when they had me. I never knew either of my grandfathers, my father died when I was a teenager, and both of my parents were gone by the time I turned 40. So there are some advantages to having kids while you're still young (and have the energy to chase toddlers!) But ultimately, I think we generally just all figure it out as we go along.
Religion. The rising number of Nones is a big part of the falling birth and marriage rate. Europe fits that trend. I also think that so many men just aren't marriage material, they're lacking economically or their mental health is terrible or they're jerks (which probably goes along with mental health) or they're addicts. So women just choose to go alone.
Regarding Mother's day, I think I nailed it this year. I got cards for my mom and aunt in March the second Walmart put them out. I made a reservation at a brunch place, and my spouse agreed to skip the kindergartener's flag football game. Then at the end of brunch, I ordered an expresso martini while dad and kids went for a walk, then they picked me up at the door and I went home and took a nap on the back patio. I also planned a mom's day pregame the night before with a group of friends to go see Devil Wears Prada 2. (not to brag or anything...)
Loved the marriage and babies talk. Lots I agree with, some I don’t and of course a lot to ponder.
I’ll echo what some have said here- if I married my high school sweetheart, it would have been abysmal when he came out as gay and if I married my college sweetheart my marriage would have been at best miserable and at worst abusive. Worked out that I married the guy I ended up marrying- we have two kids. The “it works out” argument goes like that though- although I do think it’s a good one, that people “plan-crastinate” a lot in life, and that typically things do work out, they might not. And you only have your own life experience to speak from. I would discourage people marrying young but obviously it works for people too.
The “wish I had more” kids discussion always interests me- because I feel that’s a rose-tinted glasses view as well, but also one that could be made with the wisdom of time. For me, on one hand I would love to have a third kid but I know that my spouse and I are “tapped out” mentally and emotionally at two. We wouldn’t be the parents we want to be to our two who are already here if we had more. I wonder if I will regret this when I am older, or if I will remember and still respect my very solid reason.
Anecdotally, although I have never heard someone say they don’t want to have children because they cannot afford them, I know many people who have limited themselves to only one or maybe two children because of financial cost. Sarah touched on this with the middle children going extinct statistic. Does anyone else have this experience?
I would love to see research into people that grew up under purity culture. I like many of my peers got married the summer after graduating from our Christian college. I never wanted a career, I wanted my MRS degree 😬 I ended up in a happy healthy marriage but I’m sure many did not.
I also still have multiple friends still single in their 40s. Never dated or had sex. Wanted a family but never got it after being so hamstrung by a belief system telling them the man had to find THEM and they better stay pure for him.
And it’s just not affordable to be a single mom by choice without family and financial support.
Mother’s Day should be a vacation day for mothers in my opinion. But instead, when our kids are young, we spend time packing them up making sure we have everything we need so we can go and travel to our own mothers or grandmothers. If my children decide to have children of their own (and as of right now they are in the Camp of young adults who don’t believe bringing children into this world is a good idea right now) I have already decided I will not make them come to me. I will make their Mother’s Day easier and travel to them. And on the topic of rejoicing with other mothers, my neighborhood group of moms on the Saturday before Mother’s Day this year left our children with the husbands and went winery hopping throughout the day and out to dinner at night at a bar with live music where we danced the rest of the day away. It was perfect.
I’m behind on listening this week, but had some time today. I’m so glad I decided to catch up with this episode instead of jumping to today’s, it was so good. I especially loved Beth’s lesson from her grandmother: don’t try to control other people or the universe. Also that you can be progressive and still want traditional things, and you can acknowledge all the barriers and the scary things in the world and still have hope for the future and do the thing anyway.
I want to spend more time with the comment too, but just wanted to say thank you to Sarah and Beth for modeling bravery all the time being willing to talk about hard things that don’t have easy answers ❤️
Goodness this conversation was frustrating. So many assumptions made. Anyone here read Strangers? Belle would surely have some thoughts. I don’t have daughters but I would have them read that book before planing to get married and I’m for sure glad I was in my 30s with my own money, 401k, etc before I got married and started having kids.
I’m one of those women who didn’t find the person I wanted to build a family with until my 40s. And now I don’t know if we ever will be able to conceive. I think I could make peace with it but I also know he badly wants to be a father and would be a good one. Sometimes I think about how the timing around being emotionally ready to be a parent often doesn’t coincide with how our bodies are made. I’m grateful for the life I have. I choose to not look at life with regret. I do wonder how I will feel in 30 years from now. But also know that if we can’t have our own children we will find other children and younger people to help and support.
I know I am late to this game, but I feel like the biggest and most important decision you will make in life is who you marry. I think waiting until your brain is fully developed is not a bad idea. I married my high school sweetheart at age 21 and no regrets, but I felt too young. I waited to have kids until things felt right and it still cost my career. Because I had children my personal financial situation is so dependent on my spouse. And while it is working for me right now, I can look around to many of my girlfriends and see how they are trapped. I am encouraging my children to not rush in to marriage and children. I would rather regret not have a child than to regret the children I have, and it was heavily stressed to me growing up to never have more children than you can support alone. My grandmother told me spouses come and go, but hopefully children are with you the rest of your life. The whole topic is super personal and hard to make generalized statements about. And I think speaks to how some people can just wing it because they have a support system of family and friends to catch them and other don't , I wish that was acknowledged.
I got married at 22… and then divorced at 32 due to his infidelity. Married again at 37, divorced at 45, due to my changing political and religious beliefs. My two kids are 24 & 26 and I advise them to wait as long as they need to wait before getting married.
As for me, I'm happily partnered again, but have zero interest in officially being married again. If a legal reason to be married arises, we'll do it, but until then…. Why ruin a good thing?
The young people I know who do not plan to have kids point to the future predictions of the impact of climate change rather than economic reasons. With governments around the world (les by the US) not willing to do the heavy lifting to curb it, they see a doomsday future.
I am 33, married to an amazing man recently bought an house and really want children. We have not started a family yet because we want to give them what our parents were able to give us. In 2026 that is so much harder than it was when we were growing up. We both have stable loving homes where creativity and travel were priorities and possible. Not perfect homes but what we want to be able to give our children. Most of my friends who have kids are having a hard time financially and unable to buy a home or vacation or have enough time for their kids.
Listening late to this episode. This may have already been discussed but on this past Saturday, The Newsworthy posted an episode about mothers. They discussed statistics on how much more parenting involves now compared to the 80s. It was pretty interesting to see how much more is expected of mothers in particular including in the workforce. I think this aspect must factor in to people deciding to have children.
Always love when yall talk about this stuff!! I got married in 2006 and started having kids quickly after that and it kind of feels like that was the last era of being able to be young and dumb when you get married and have kids. Big proponent of marrying a high school or college sweetheart and growing up with them!
To Beth’s comment about gratitude to those who love her daughters & help make their family life function, I always have the village concept in my mind. I obviously have regularly thanked those people along the way if raising my son, but I took his imminent high school graduation to really put pen to paper & acknowledge how much a slew of people meant to me along the way of parenting my son thus far. Last summer I made a list of everyone from the day he was born to the day he graduated who contributed invaluably to our village. I love a long project with goals, so every week I had a certain number of letters I needed to write. I saved them & put them in my son’s graduation announcements. We sent a lot more announcements than we may have otherwise… I dug up addresses for people who are not part of our daily lives anymore, but we’re integral & vital at certain phases. It was a big project, but it meant a great deal to me to look back & recognized I really always was showing my son how to use & appreciate his resources & how to build a village. It’s not a project for everyone, but it’s been a delight & the outpouring of love & surprise (sometimes people really don’t fully know how vital they were to you) has been truly a highlight to his time in high school ending. It’s also provided my son & I a chance to discuss much of his little kid years that are hazy with time to him. Expressing gratitude is always rewarding & has filled my heart with the goodness of humanity.
I did something similar this year too and it has been so nice to hear back from some of those friends who were integral to our life then!!
I’ve read through all the comments and I’ve listened to the whole episode. I cannot believe no one has mentioned technology in relation to this phenomenon. The way that Sarah talks about feeling the Indiana Jones boulder rolling right behind her in terms of education? Yeah that’s how I feel in terms of dating. Which is what leads to everything else. We are so addicted to our phones/games/TVs and we are having this loneliness epidemic and it seems like the only way to actually meet people now is through dating apps which are cesspool. I’m tempted to say that the typical male in his mid twenties to mid thirties is actually the worst in terms of dating, but I know plenty of men who have horror stories about women too. Our access to technology and what “everybody else is doing” has made the pressure and also the desire to live a certain lifestyle enormous. Our access to technology also limits our interest in the real world. I have other thoughts but what I’m seeing most clearly is the link between technology and our inability to form relationships of any kind, including romantic ones.
And finally just for the sake of demographics, I’m a 1993 baby. I got married at 30 and feel like it was a miracle I even met my husband, let alone that we met at a time that we were both ready for a real relationship. I hear about other peoples relationships and how poorly their husbands participate in the household ecosystem and feel like I won the lottery. And I’m having our first baby sometime in the next 2.5 weeks. I’m 33 and we’d like to have 3 kids, so we’re definitely feeling a little time pressure. But, to Sarah’s point about luxury, we are both ministers in a denomination that provides us BOTH with 12 weeks paid leave. My church has a preschool and the tuition coverage is part of my compensation. We are not worried about health insurance. Our parents are financially well off enough that we expect a decent inheritance and we know that in an emergency we would be absolutely fine. We also each have a sibling who is married but not having kids, so we have a lot of family support but are also mourning that our kids won’t have cousins and we won’t ever be aunts or uncles. AND I STILL WORRY ABOUT MONEY. Like we have so many things working in our favor but I am still stressed that we won’t have enough to give our kids good lives.
My second thought is that my husband and I have been really considering the ways that the pandemic lowered our threshold for discomfort. It shows up differently in us bc we are different people, but the change is there and obvious and sometimes a little sad. We’re trying to work on building that muscle up but it takes intentional work and I don’t think a lot of folks are thinking about their own thresholds and how they’ve changed let alone working to build back. And boy what’s more uncomfortable than having kids 🤣
This was such an interesting discussion. I don't have kids and have never wanted kids, but I think the majority of people do, and the idea that people aren't having kids for economic reasons is kind of sad to me. I know things are expensive, but also, I think we've set extremely high expectations for what we "should" be able to afford for our kids. You can grow up without a lot and live a full and happy life (and probably be more resilient that someone who had a lot more.)
I do question this notion that everyone needs to keep increasing the population. Both Sarah and Beth dismissed (even scoffed at) the idea of overpopulation, but...do we think that land and resources are infinite? They are not. The earth can only hold so much.
Oh, I also wanted to speak to what Sarah said about not waiting so long for marriage and kids. As other people have said, had I married someone I dated in high school or college, I would definitely be divorced now. I did not know what I wanted or needed when I was a teenager. But also - I'm the youngest of five kids and my parents were 40 when they had me. I never knew either of my grandfathers, my father died when I was a teenager, and both of my parents were gone by the time I turned 40. So there are some advantages to having kids while you're still young (and have the energy to chase toddlers!) But ultimately, I think we generally just all figure it out as we go along.
Religion. The rising number of Nones is a big part of the falling birth and marriage rate. Europe fits that trend. I also think that so many men just aren't marriage material, they're lacking economically or their mental health is terrible or they're jerks (which probably goes along with mental health) or they're addicts. So women just choose to go alone.
Regarding Mother's day, I think I nailed it this year. I got cards for my mom and aunt in March the second Walmart put them out. I made a reservation at a brunch place, and my spouse agreed to skip the kindergartener's flag football game. Then at the end of brunch, I ordered an expresso martini while dad and kids went for a walk, then they picked me up at the door and I went home and took a nap on the back patio. I also planned a mom's day pregame the night before with a group of friends to go see Devil Wears Prada 2. (not to brag or anything...)
Loved the marriage and babies talk. Lots I agree with, some I don’t and of course a lot to ponder.
I’ll echo what some have said here- if I married my high school sweetheart, it would have been abysmal when he came out as gay and if I married my college sweetheart my marriage would have been at best miserable and at worst abusive. Worked out that I married the guy I ended up marrying- we have two kids. The “it works out” argument goes like that though- although I do think it’s a good one, that people “plan-crastinate” a lot in life, and that typically things do work out, they might not. And you only have your own life experience to speak from. I would discourage people marrying young but obviously it works for people too.
The “wish I had more” kids discussion always interests me- because I feel that’s a rose-tinted glasses view as well, but also one that could be made with the wisdom of time. For me, on one hand I would love to have a third kid but I know that my spouse and I are “tapped out” mentally and emotionally at two. We wouldn’t be the parents we want to be to our two who are already here if we had more. I wonder if I will regret this when I am older, or if I will remember and still respect my very solid reason.
Anecdotally, although I have never heard someone say they don’t want to have children because they cannot afford them, I know many people who have limited themselves to only one or maybe two children because of financial cost. Sarah touched on this with the middle children going extinct statistic. Does anyone else have this experience?