Central European Time

Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

Tag: Childfree

When Your Therapist Thinks Being Childfree Is the Problem

Imagine booking an appointment because you’re starting to feel like shit after almost every conversation with your partner. They make jokes at your expense and accuse you of being oversensitive when you object; lately, you’ve caught yourself rehearsing perfectly ordinary sentences before saying them. Somewhere in the first session, your therapist asks about children, and when you explain that you’re childfree, and a new possibility suddenly interests them: perhaps your relationship has lacked the shared purpose that a family would provide. By the end of the hour, you’re defending your decision against parenthood while your partner’s behavior has disappeared from the discussion. Quite a result for someone who didn’t even attend.

You might entertain this suggestion for longer than you otherwise would. The person offering it has qualifications, presumably knows something you don’t, and has met you at a moment when your confidence in your own judgment is hardly magnificent. Perhaps there really is something you’ve overlooked. Asking about children is ordinary enough, after all, although the route from “I don’t want any” to “that explains why your relationship is miserable” deserves a few questions of its own. The fact that you need help doesn’t make every theory offered about you worth considering.

When an assumption becomes an interpretation

The assumption underneath the leap is that a complete adult life eventually includes parenthood, and anyone who declines must have misunderstood the assignment. You’ve probably met the person who assures you that you’ll understand real love once you have children, apparently writing off every attachment you’ve managed so far. The term for this is pronatalism and can enter the consulting room through theories that treat parenthood as a developmental achievement. As psychotherapist Emma Palmer discusses, some older accounts of women’s development gave motherhood a central place in psychological maturity. A therapist working from those assumptions may start wondering what went wrong before asking what went right.

You can see how judgments about a proper life become judgments about happiness in an experiment by psychologist Leslie Ashburn-Nardo. In the study, 197 university students evaluated a fictional married adult who had chosen to have either no children or two. The childfree adults were judged less psychologically fulfilled and elicited greater moral outrage. Nobody had measured these fictional people’s happiness, obviously; what the experiment captured was how observers imagined it. When someone confidently predicts that you’re unfulfilled, then, it’s worth asking how much they know about your experience and how much they’re supplying from their expectations.

What happens when you ask childfree people?

Researchers who ask childfree people about their lives have rather more relevant information. In a 2021 study of 981 Michigan adults, Jennifer Watling Neal and Zachary Neal found no statistically significant differences in life satisfaction between childfree adults and the other parental-status groups after accounting for demographic differences. Their study also did something that sounds elementary but matters enormously: it distinguished people who didn’t want children from people who had wanted them but couldn’t have them. Counting everybody with zero children together obscures whether that situation represents a disappointment, a temporary arrangement, or exactly the life someone wants.

Of course, you’re entitled to be childfree and unhappy. You can make a reproductive decision that suits you beautifully and still have a dreadful relationship, which is why arriving at therapy shouldn’t require a preliminary demonstration that your life choices have produced uninterrupted contentment. If having no children feels like a loss, there’s something to explore; if it doesn’t, an assumption of reproductive grief supplies you with an imaginary disappointment while the actual difficulty waits. The therapist still needs to establish what is troubling you and why their proposed explanation fits. You shouldn’t have to bring a happiness study to get back to your partner’s habit of humiliating you over dinner.

Whose wishes is the treatment serving?

There is another distinction worth keeping clear: being unhappy about your life and being worn down by other people’s objections to it. Suppose your parent keeps calling you selfish for refusing to give them grandchildren. You love them, so their disapproval hurts, even though your decision is settled. You may dread visiting because you know the subject will return before you’ve finished your coffee. By the time you bring this to therapy, there’s plenty to discuss about the relationship and what happens to you in it. A suppressed wish for parenthood would need evidence beyond the fact that these encounters upset you.

If the therapist responds by encouraging you to reconsider having children, your parent’s campaign has acquired a professional ally. You came looking for help with a painful demand and find yourself discussing whether you should satisfy it, perhaps because the therapist finds your parent’s wish so understandable that your refusal begins to seem like the problem. Understanding another person’s expectations doesn’t require fulfilling them, and being upset by criticism doesn’t mean the criticism has uncovered a truth you were avoiding. Producing another person is a fairly substantial concession to make for a calmerThanksgiving.

The interpretation you’re not allowed to disagree with

The conversation becomes especially difficult when every attempt to clarify your position confirms the therapist’s interpretation. You explain that you’ve considered parenthood carefully and don’t want it, which is described as rigidity; when you object, the objection becomes resistance. You could spend the hour examining yourself with almost indecent thoroughness and still fail to qualify as reflective, because the only acceptable discovery is that the therapist was right. Under those conditions, you have very little room and even the possibility that you know something about yourself becomes suspicious.

I’m a psychoanalyst, so I’m interested in the possibility that people misunderstand their own motives. That includes the person offering the interpretation. A claim about your unconscious needs support. Sometimes an interpretation hurts because you recognize something you’ve been avoiding. But other times it hurts because a person you hoped would understand you is insisting on an account that feels alien. The discomfort itself settles nothing. You should be able to ask how the therapist reached their conclusion and receive an explanation grounded in what you’ve said or done, with room to consider what might make that explanation mistaken.

Eventually, you may begin editing what you say. You don’t mention that lonely evening because you can already imagine where that will lead, and you become careful about admitting doubts in your relationship lest they reappear as evidence of your inability to commit. You may even catch yourself presenting a suspiciously cheerful account of being childfree, despite having booked the appointment precisely because you wanted somewhere to speak honestly. Now you’re managing the therapist’s impression of you as well as whatever brought you into treatment. It’s exhausting enough doing this with relatives; paying someone for the opportunity adds a particular insult.

A basic requirement of the job

A therapist’s understanding of a healthy adult life should accommodate parenthood and childfreedom on equal terms, without awarding extra points for reproduction. They can ask whether you want children, since having none doesn’t tell them whether that is a choice; once you’ve explained that you’re childfree, however, they have their answer. You owe no explanation of how you arrived at that decision, and you shouldn’t have to request that it stop being treated as unfinished business. Unless you choose to discuss it, the subject is closed. You have already supplied the information; persuading your therapist to accept it should never become part of your treatment.

If a therapist makes a pronatalist assumption, the mistake has already happened; you don’t have to object repeatedly before it qualifies as one. They should acknowledge it and correct it immediately. Examining the bias that produced it is their professional responsibility, and you have no obligation to spend your sessions helping them develop a less provincial understanding of adulthood, or to give them further chances to get this right. You came for help with a relationship in which you’re being belittled. That already provides plenty to discuss, and your therapist should be able to get on with the work without adding a baby to the mess.

September 4, 2026
Why I Work With Childfree Freethinkers

You’ve probably noticed how an ordinary conversation can acquire a surprising number of participants when you mention that you don’t have children. Some want your reasons, others predict your future, and someone who met you eleven minutes ago has already established that you would make a wonderful parent. Mention that you’re also an atheist, with zero interest in astrology or messages from the universe, and you’ll find yourself defending a second ordinary aspect of your life. You’ll end up spending the evening explaining yourself, all because of something you mentioned in passing between ordering dinner and asking for the wine. But over dinner, you can roll your eyes and eventually change the subject. In a consulting room, the same bullshit can become your treatment plan.

You might reasonably expect never to have that conversation with a psychotherapist at all. But people before you have been advised to trust the universe or Jesus. Worse, your decision to remain childfree may get that solemn nod, complete with a tilted head and widened eyes, and get promoted to your most urgent symptom. Now you’re defending the parts of your life you were perfectly happy with, while the problem you came to discuss is put on hold.

Being childfree and nonbelieving is a particularly inconvenient combination for anyone convinced that a proper life requires children and a higher power. Parenthood and religion supply comforting answers to questions about life and death. When neither applies to you, people can become remarkably concerned about where you’re supposed to find meaning, how you’ll be dying, and how you’ll live. The problem becomes especially unsettling when someone else’s inability to imagine your life becomes a professional opinion about your mental health. Being childfree and atheist can come with a peculiar requirement to remain relentlessly delighted or these choices become the universal suspects for every one of your difficulties. I’ve chosen to specialize in psychoanalysis for childfree freethinkers because you should be able to get help with what troubles you without being gaslit toward parenthood or a spiritual awakening.

When childfreedom explains everything

The underlying problem is the assumption that parenthood is the standard against which an adult life should be judged. Psychoanalysis has some history to answer for here. Some of our traditions treated motherhood as the destination of healthy female development, which meant that a woman who didn’t want children presented an awkward problem for the theory. Conveniently, the theory could be preserved by deciding that the problem was with her. Once you accept that explanation, any difficulty she brings can become further evidence of what she is missing, while the possibility that her childfreedom has nothing to do with it unnoticeably disappears.

In a 2006 study, Debra Mollen documented experiences of women having their normality questioned, including by therapists. Her recommendations included accepting childfree women as normal; apparently, that needed putting in print. You can see why it matters when wanting children is allowed to stand as a preference while not wanting them requires supporting documentation. An unhappy childhood becomes an explanation, and a reasonably happy one can be searched until a sufficiently unfortunate memory turns up. Your past influences your preferences, just as it influences a parent’s. Having a history doesn’t turn a preference into a disease.

The same assumption distorts how the rest of your life is understood. Being childfree can matter to a difficulty without being the difficulty itself: it may affect the expectations placed on you or the relationships through which you receive support. If a friendship changes after your friend has children, for example, you may miss the ease of being available to each other. Having a baby yourself would be a remarkably elaborate solution to wanting dinner with someone you love. The useful question concerns the loss you are describing and what it means in your circumstances, rather than whether parenthood would bring you back into line.

That distinction applies just as much when childfreedom has no apparent bearing on what brings you to therapy. A period of depression doesn’t prove that you need children, any more than a parent’s depression proves they should never have had them. You can have made choices that suit you and still be struggling. Nor do you owe anyone an extraordinary life as compensation: there is no requirement to leave a masterpiece where a family tree might otherwise have been, or to become impressive enough that the relatives finally shut up. Your difficulties deserve attention, and the pleasures of your life deserve to count without first proving that you were right not to become a parent.

The assumption that you need spirituality

Secular clients have their own reasons to wonder what assumptions they’ll encounter. A 2025 U.S. study of 120 nonreligious therapy clients found that 45 percent reported at least one instance of what the researchers classified as a microaggression against nonreligious people, including assumptions that they held religious beliefs. I personally share this experience. It weakens the therapeutic relationship at least. It is difficult to speak candidly when you’re busy calculating what your therapist might make of your nonbelief, or whether mentioning it will send the conversation somewhere you’d rather not go. Wanting to know where your therapist stands is a reasonable response to that uncertainty.

I’m an atheist, and I have no wish to smuggle the supernatural back into the room under a more fashionable name. Replacing god with the universe doesn’t make a supernatural explanation any more convincing. If someone tells you that your suffering was sent to teach you a lesson, you are entitled to wonder who approved the curriculum, and whether you can withdraw. You can want explanations grounded in biological laws of life without having your skepticism interpreted as a failure to be open. An approach can take your feelings seriously while remaining entirely uninterested in what the cosmos or e deity might be trying to tell you.

When someone dies, the same need for wishful thinking becomes even less amusing. You may find the finality unbearable while remaining quite certain that an afterlife is a fantasy. Telling you that you’ll meet again asks you to accept a claim you don’t believe in order to receive the comfort being offered. You are entitled to someone who can acknowledge the loss on the terms in which you experience it, including the unfinished conversation for which you don’t expect another chance. Having to explain that position becomes an absolutely excessive burden at a time when life already requires considerable effort.

The point of specializing

My reason for specializing is to make this understanding part of the starting point. It lets me approach your difficulties in the context of the life you’re actually living, with some familiarity with the pressures you may face and no expectation that becoming a parent or acquiring a faith would put things right. Those difficulties may be closely connected to your childfreedom and nonbelief, or have nothing to do with them. Either way, you should be able to seek help without having to demonstrate that your entire life is justified before we can take its particular problems seriously.

In regular online psychoanalytic sessions, we work on the concerns that bring you and the patterns that keep them going. We pay attention to what you say and what becomes difficult to say, including reactions you may not yet understand, and consider how your experiences have shaped the way you respond now. Questions and interpretations help us examine what keeps happening, with the aim of making changes possible. Your childfreedom and nonbelief provide some of the context; the work concerns the difficulties you want help with and the life you want to lead.

August 16, 2026
Childfree, Apparently a Cause for Concern

Tell someone you don’t want children and you may accidentally have requested a psychological assessment. Perhaps you’re afraid of responsibility. Perhaps your childhood needs investigating. Perhaps you haven’t met the right person, whose reproductive enthusiasm will apparently overwrite your personality. Somewhere in this conversation, someone who has known you for eleven minutes becomes very confident about what will make you happy at sixty. You were discussing your plans for the weekend and suddenly they are supervising your life.

Underneath these exchanges sits the persistent assumption that wanting children is self-explanatory and not wanting them requires an explanation, preferably one that reveals something wrong with you. You might even get gaslit into wanting to know what research on childfree adults has to say about it. Do people who don’t want children differ psychologically from people who do? Are we looking at a distinctive personality, a different set of priorities, or a collection of perfectly ordinary people whose reproductive decisions have upset the seating plan? The findings give considerably less reason for concern than the unsolicited advice would suggest.

First, Are We Even Studying the Same People?

Before getting into them, though, we need to distinguish people who don’t want children from people who wanted them and couldn’t have them. Both may appear under “no children” on a questionnaire, but that shared answer tells us very little about their experience. Someone grieving a hoped-for family and someone delighted never to attend a school parents’ evening are not describing the same life. Research that combines them can blur precisely the difference we need to understand: whether someone’s circumstances correspond to what they wanted. The literature repeatedly identifies this distinction as essential to interpreting findings about well-being [1,2].

Once we make that distinction, the fantastic story of the secretly miserable childfree adult becomes harder to sustain. Studies find no meaningful differences in life satisfaction between childfree adults and parents, or other groups of nonparents [3]. Treating eventual misery as the predictable consequence of declining parenthood is far of, just like establishing that childfree people are happier, wiser, or better at being alive. You can be thoroughly pleased about not having children and thoroughly displeased with your job, your relationship, or your own behavior last Monday. A reproductive decision cannot organize the rest of your psychology for you. Equally, a miserable week doesn’t expose your childfree life as a terrible mistake. Parents are generally allowed to have a bad days without someone suggesting that the existence of their children explains it. The same courtesy would be lovely.

A Personality Type? Hold the Matching Jackets

Personality findings are more mixed than a neat “childfree personality” profile would suggest. Research shows that childfree respondents score higher on independence and lower on agreeableness and extraversion than parents or people who wanted children [4]. That is interesting, although it leaves the direction of the relationship unresolved: these results don’t show that choosing a childfree life makes you independent, or that independence necessarily leads you away from parenthood. After demographic adjustments, no significant personality differences between childfree adults and parents remain, though; the only difference persisting is the slightly lower agreeableness among childfree adults compared with people planning to become parents. So sadly, however convenient that would be for writing a punchy article, sharing a decision about parenthood does not give us a shared personality. We could nevertheless commission matching jackets for the fiercely independent, gloriously disagreeable childfree population [3].

Your Decision, Their Moral Outrage

Where the research does get more revealing is in how people respond to that decision. If you ask people to evaluate a married adult described as having chosen either no children or two children, the childfree adults elicits moral outrage and are judged less fulfilled. This applies to both male and female targets [5]. Notice what is being measured: other people’s judgments about someone’s fulfillment. Nobody needs to establish that these fictional childfree people are spending their evenings weeping into decorative cushions, it’s simply assumed that childfree adults are less fulfilled. The moral outrage is unfounded: disliking someone’s preference is one thing; responding as though they have failed an obligation is another. Research shows that parenthood can function as a moral expectation, making refusal look like a breach of duty. It offers an confirmation of the experience in which your explanation is heard and rejected because you are apparently not entitled to want that.

Apparently, Your Future Has Already Been Decided

Then comes the future: You’ll regret it. You’ll be lonely. Who will look after you? Research on regret makes an important distinction between people who chose not to have children and those who wanted them. Voluntarily childless women report greater well-being, more autonomy, and a stronger sense of being able to manage their lives than involuntarily childless women. They were also not likely to report child-related regret [1]. The social setting also matters. A study of 24,195 adults over forty across 24 European countries found that the association between childlessness and poorer psychological well-being varied between countries, particularly among women. The disadvantage was smaller in countries where attitudes toward childlessness were more accepting and social contact was more common [6]. This study examined childlessness broadly, however, so its findings cannot be attributed specifically to childfree people.

A Final Note: You also Don’t Owe Anyone an Extraordinary Life

The research gives us little reason to treat a childfree life as inherently less fulfilling. My additional note is that you also shouldn’t have to prove its value by becoming exceptionally accomplished, permanently available to your friends, or impressively useful to society. You can care for people without becoming a parent, but you shouldn’t have to submit a portfolio of alternative caring activities before your decision is accepted. The same goes for enjoyment. You do not owe anyone evidence of a sufficiently fabulous life. If you spend a Saturday doing laundry and watching something mediocre, you have not squandered your freedom. You are allowed an ordinary life, including its less photogenic uses of an afternoon.

That freedom from having to justify yourself matters in psychoanalysis, too. Your decision about children can be explored, but only with the same neutrality as other consequential choices and zero quiet appointments of parenthood as the correct outcome. You may have mixed feelings about having children, feel pressure from your family, or want to understand how you approach commitment and independence in other parts of your life. Or you may be perfectly fine about not wanting children and prefer to discuss something else. You don’t want children. It would be lovely if that could occasionally be the least interesting thing about you.

Sources

[1] Jeffries, S., & Konnert, C. (2002). Regret and psychological well-being among voluntarily and involuntarily childless women and mothers. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 54, 89–106. https://doi.org/10.2190/J08N-VBVG-6PXM-0TTN

[2] Stahnke, B., Cooley, M. E., & Blackstone, A. (2022). A systematic review of life satisfaction experiences among childfree adults. The Family Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/10664807221104795

[3] Watling Neal, J., & Neal, Z. P. (2021). Prevalence and characteristics of childfree adults in Michigan (USA). PLOS ONE, 16(6), e0252528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252528

[4] Avison, M., & Furnham, A. (2015). Personality and voluntary childlessness. Journal of Population Research, 32, 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-014-9140-6

[5] Ashburn-Nardo, L. (2017). Parenthood as a moral imperative? Moral outrage and the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men. Sex Roles, 76, 393–401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0606-1

[6] Huijts, T., Kraaykamp, G., & Subramanian, S. V. (2013). Childlessness and psychological well-being in context: A multilevel study on 24 European countries. European Sociological Review, 29, 32–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcr037

[7] Teerawichitchainan, B., Kim, D., & Ho, C. (2024). Childlessness, social network profiles in midlife and late adulthood, and their implications for subjective well-being. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 79. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbae055

May 23, 2026