Whenever I write a piece on motherhood, I brace myself for the inevitable backlash: “That’s great for you, but some women just don’t want babies” or “Now write one where men have to do all the work” or one that really stings: “Sacrifice everything for a kid who will end up hating me? Sounds like a great plan.”
These women aren’t stupid, and they aren’t necessarily wrong either. These are predictable and even rational reactions from women raised in 21st-century America.
Due to the development of birth control, changes in the economy, and increased freedoms, modern American women have something previous generations didn’t: a decision to make.
And increasingly, women are saying “no” to having a family. Our birth rate is now 1.6, well below replacement level. And a shocking 47% of women are now childless.
For those who do become moms, the news isn’t great. A recent study showed that mothers’ self-reported mental health is in sharp decline. As young women are planning out their lives, increasingly, babies are not in their plans.
Should we be trying to talk women into having babies when they don’t want them? Probably not. While babies do have a certain power of convincing even the most reluctant woman to love them, we don’t want women to be hesitant mothers.
While certainly not all women need to be mothers, a society with fewer mothers in it suffers, not just economically but spiritually.
Each new baby brings hope and renewal. Mothers are the builders of nations, the developers of morality and potential.
Mothers bring warmth and humanity to communities and the culture, and fewer mothers means a society that feels increasingly cold and inhumane.
So while I don’t think we should talk women who don’t want babies into having them, it would be nice if we could convince more women to start wanting them, and love life with them.
But first, we have to ask, how did we get here? Why am I receiving these sorts of responses from American young women, when it is doubtful any woman in 1880 would respond thus?
For the past 70 years, our culture has served young women a steady diet of messages potent enough to make some women question — or outright reject — motherhood. And for those who do become mothers, these same messages can turn the experience bitter.
What follows is the recipe our broader American culture seems intent on perfecting — one of the few meals that modern women aren’t told is demeaning to make.
Even just a few of these steps are enough to sour anyone on motherhood. So, I don’t recommend sharing this at your next recipe swap.
Recipe for convincing women to reject motherhood:
Step 1: Start with a dash of disillusionment
Feed them a steady diet of stories where husbands cheat, kids are medicated monsters, spouses hate each other, and parents get less respect than referees.
Family divorce helps add robust flavor. Season heavily with social media and sitcom reinforcement. Recommended background music while cooking: Taylor Swift’s breakup songs.
Step 2: Mix in a spoonful of self-doubt
Whisper that any desire to be protected is weakness, that connection will lead to misery, that nurturing others is just a form of people-pleasing, and that traditional feminine interests are unsophisticated. Stir until skepticism replaces instinct and femininity feels inferior to masculinity.
Step 3: Add a splash of cynicism
Introduce porn early so they learn that intimacy is violent, men are monsters and romance is manipulation. Throw in some bad experiences with irresponsible, vice-ridden men.
Done right, by adulthood, love, trust and tenderness should feel like malevolent deceptions.
Step 4: Chop family and religious ties
Encourage women to label any person or religion that questions their choices as “toxic” and unloving.
Help them see parents, siblings and grandparents all as potential saboteurs of self-actualization. Independence must taste like isolation to be complete.
Step 5: Fold in a generous helping of self-importance
Never burden girls with duties. Applaud every minor triumph as genius. Let praise become their birthright, and reinforce vanity with Instagram likes.
Confidence without competence makes the perfect batter.
Step 6: Add a heaping scoop of judgment
Show them complaining mothers online, frazzled and full of self-doubt and regrets, ruminating on how mothering has ruined their physique.
Then present career-focused women bathed in good lighting, laughing over cocktails, captioned with “living my best life.”
Voilà — motherhood looks like martyrdom.
Step 7: Let simmer in an especially pungent stew of modern parenting
Serve generous helpings of helicopter parenting, a fixation on mental health diagnosis, screen addicted kids, overscheduling and permissive chaos.
Highlight resentful mothers juggling full-time jobs, housework and ungrateful kids, all the while feeling unappreciated by lazy husbands.
Step 8: Season with disdain for domesticity
Remind them often that anything involving cleaning, cooking or caretaking is beneath them. Equate home life with handcuffs and motherhood with servitude.
Step 9: Stir in an excessively therapeutic mindset
Teach them that feelings are the compass of truth. Happiness is owed; disappointment is someone’s fault; any sense of guilt is a problem to be overcome; and self-fulfillment is life’s ultimate goal.
Still feeling empty and depressed? Find someone who validates their sense of victimhood — laying blame on their own mother for an extra kick.
Step 10: Substitute babies with anything else women can mother
Puppies? Perfect. Activism? Even better. Reroute every nurturing urge into rescuing anything other than babies. If possible, make children seem like a hindrance to the higher calls of their nurturing instinct.
Keep them away from real babies at all costs — no younger siblings, no babysitting — sealing the deal by making them take care of sacks of flour or screaming dolls in high school as a warning against the awful reality of child rearing.
Step 11: Bake mockery into the mix
Whenever “true love” or “happily ever after” appears, laugh loudly and call it childish. Mourn for our female ancestors as victims of oppression, weak-willed and ignorant. Glory instead in consumerism, modern freedom, solo travel and selfies.
Step 12: Glaze with a thick layer of ideology
Convince them that men are problematic: their strength is domination, their stoicism means they have repressed emotions and any success means they have victimized someone along the way.
Promise instead that a career can be their soulmate — powerful, glamorous and endlessly fulfilling (never let them suspect they may actually hate their jobs).
Step 13: Finish with a garnish of distraction
When doubt or longing bubbles up, drown it in screens, scrolling and influencers preaching “self-love.” If necessary, decorate with a guilt-trip — alternating between “it would be selfish to bring a child into this wicked world” and “children increase greenhouse gases.”
And there you have it: The perfect modern meal to sour women for motherhood— filling, but never nourishing.
Thank you for indulging my bit of satire. Of course, it goes without saying that some of the things listed above may be true, needed, or even helpful. For example, puppies are usually a good idea, some people do need therapeutic intervention, praise can be a useful parenting tool, careers can be extremely meaningful, some men are domineering, and some relationships are better “chopped” — but there is a societal tendency to overseason with the above that contributes to the declining birthrate.
But if we want girls and women to set a new trend — to start valuing family life again — we need to throw out this recipe, even if everyone else on the block keeps cooking this slop.
So what’s the alternative? That’s the million-dollar question.
It’s up to each family to start experimenting with a new recipe. A love for family isn’t hard to cook up. Having a family is natural and meaningful; millions have chosen to get married and have children before us, and millions more will make that decision after us. But we need to recognize which ingredients no longer serve us and where our modern recipe has gone wrong.
One thing I’ve learned in my 18-year, family-imposed cooking apprenticeship is that the best recipes are often found in those dusty old cookbooks passed down from Grandma — the ones that have stood the test of time. They may not be fancy or complex, but they always turn out. They were developed in the kitchen of an intuitive, confident woman who knew her family and cooked with love. Look around for what works and emulate it.
The real secret for encouraging women to be mothers is not a recipe at all, but a worldview. Through our lives and actions, we demonstrate an ancient and eternal truth that’s somehow fallen out of favor: that a family is something to be valued above all else, that children are a blessing and that our family relationships bring unparalleled joy. A loving family, as reviving as chicken noodle soup and as heavenly as Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies.
And who knows?
Once your neighbors see your daughters rejecting the standard modern fare and begin looking forward to motherhood and finding joy in it, they might just ask you for a copy of your recipe.