A lot of people take the path in life that leads to a marriage and then children. But there are people choosing some alternative ways of living; such as those who choose to be childfree.
Keep reading to know why this woman went viral for showing her lifestyle.
In recent years, a lot of people are choosing to be child-free by choice and becoming vocal about their choices. The reasons for their choices are many, but a lot of people agree that financial stability is a big part of it, as well as a desire to focus on other more important things such as personal interests and careers. Some people base their decision on the fact that the world’s growing population.
39-year-old Vancouver-based photographer and artist Jackie Dives is someone who advocates for a child-free life and shows the world what it can look like. Jackie uses social media to publicly talk about how choosing not to have children has impacted her life.
“I was surprised by how many people have commented that they experienced the same thing,” Jackie shared with a media outlet. “I think the root cause of this is that everyone tells women they will change their mind. You might have a strong conviction that you don’t want kids, but if everyone in your life is telling you that you will change your mind or that you will regret not having them, it can be very difficult to walk away from someone you love to stay true to your convictions.”
“People need to stop asking women when they will have kids,” Jackie said. “Women need to be encouraged to do whatever the hell they want with their lives. Like any stigma, the more we normalize it, the better it will get. People need to stop gaslighting women about what they want from their own lives.”
Pew Research Center survey from 2021 saw that 44% of non-parents ranging from ages 18 to 49 think it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday. This number increased by 7% from the same research in 2018. The gender of participants in the study is more or less equally divided.
Experts, however, are not surprised by the number. “This is a trend we have been seeing for years; the birth rate is declining. It was declining before the pandemic. We did not see a pandemic baby boom, [as] some people expected,” Christine Whelan, director of the Money, Relationships and Equality (MORE) center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison shared. “Instead, we saw a further decline during the pandemic, which makes sense because when you are concerned about your future — especially from a health perspective — then you don’t really want to bring children into the world.”
Maelen S., another TikToker made a video requesting women in their 40s to show up and talk about how they feel about their decision to not have children. She asked, “If you are [in your] 40s and up and a woman or even a woman with a partner who has gone their entire life childless (on purpose), please tell me what your life is like now.”
Jackie Dives came out and talked about her experience. She said, “I often get in s**t on TikTok for saying, like, this is how a childfree person does XYZ, or this is a day in the life of a childfree person. People are like, “Why do you need to put in there that you’re child-free? What difference does it make?” And the reason I do that is because I want women, like the person who I’m stitching, to see what a life without children can look like.”
“I’m 39, and I’m child-free. My experience of being childfree was that when my partner decided that he wanted to have children, we’d been together for five years, and he actually left our relationship. So I had to decide very sure that I was willing to let my partner go in exchange for living a child-free life,” Dives shared.
She shared how she was heartbroken at her breakup but it had been the right choice for her. She went on, “I really loved my partner a lot. And a lot of people were telling me that it was crazy to let him go and not just have a baby with him. I knew in my heart and in my gut that I didn’t want to be a parent. But after we separated, it was really hard for me to visualize what my life would look like.”
“I could see what my life would look like if he and I had stayed together, I would be with him, and we’d have a house and a baby and a family and like, great in-laws and a white picket fence, the whole thing. But because we are never shown examples in media or pop culture about what it looks like to be a woman who doesn’t have children, I had no idea what my life would look like if I didn’t go down the path that everyone expected me to go down.”
She makes content so other women can have an idea of what a child-free life looks like, she went on, “It felt really lonely and strange. And I had to go seek out other women who had also made that choice. So that’s why I always say in my videos, this is what a day in the life of a childfree artist looks like, because I want women who don’t want to have kids to have an example of what your life can look like.”
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