Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For our last segment today, we'll have a call-in and some reporting on millennial motherhood. Why? Well, birth rates in the United States have declined over the past decade and a half across all racial and ethnic groups. According to the Centers for Disease Control, it fell nearly 23%. That is the overall birth rate between 2007 and 2023. The decreases are driven not only by people having fewer children, but also by those ambivalent about having any children at all. Many people of childbearing age, that's millennials and even Gen-Z now, are deeply torn about wanting to have kids at all.

A new article on Vox explores how younger women in particular are weighing the decision, and actually may even be dreading having to make it at all. Joining us now to break down her recent reporting and personal ambivalence about millennial motherhood, and to take your calls, is Rachel Cohen, senior reporter for Vox, covering social policy. Her recent article is titled How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.

Rachel, welcome back to WNYC. Hi.

Rachel Cohen: Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, the phones are open from the start here. Do we have any fence sitters tuning in right now? How do you think about motherhood, in particular, how have you been weighing the pros and cons? Are you leaning in one direction or another? What are you worried about most when it comes to having children or not having children if you are on the fence? Is this all causing you to dread even making the decision? 212-433-WNYC. Men can call too, ambivalence about millennial fatherhood, but the article is mostly about motherhood, for many reasons. 212-433-9692. You can also text us at that number. Texts started to come in, even before we started the segment with people knowing that it was coming.

Rachel, this isn't an abstract idea for you, we should say, right? You start your piece by getting personal. You want to tell everybody how you're experiencing what you call Millennial Mom Dread.

Rachel Cohen: Sure. I am 31 years old. I have spent the last decade or so in what is a pretty unique time because for most of history, for most of time, there was not a very public conversation around the challenges of pregnancy, of parenthood, of motherhood in particular, of women in the workplace. The pivotal Why Women Can't Have It All essay was published in 2012. I was a sophomore in college. There's been this big needed shift. I think it's like a pendulum shift where before did not have this public conversation, and a lot of parenthood and motherhood discussions was overly idealized and sanitized, but we've swung really, really far in the opposite direction over the last 10 years.

Today, it's like genuinely difficult to find, at least in secular mainstream culture, they're still religious depictions, but it is challenging to find positive, or bright, or optimistic takes on motherhood, mothers who are not losing their mind or increasingly resentful or stressed out. I report on social policy. I have been covering many of the aspects that are part of why this is for my whole career.

As I got further into this, I started to realize there was more information and stories that we don't really make space for anymore and I was curious about why. The essay looks at a lot of the reasons how we got here, and maybe how we might get to a place that's a little better, not because I'm fretting about the fertility rate, that's not something that I care so much about. What I care about is giving this idea of reproductive justice. I think people should be able to make the decisions that are right for them, but I think right now, people are not feeling great about a lot of the decisions they're making, and I also think they're not getting all the information that they need.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call right off the bat. Amanda in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hey, Amanda, thanks for calling in.

Amanda: Hi, how you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you.

Amanda: Yes, so I was just calling. I'm 32 years old, and I'm very much trying to decide about having kids or not. My pro is, getting older is a struggle, and I think having kids is what you do to make up for that struggle, and you can then live and have the joy through your children. My biggest con is that the world is ending, or might be ending, and there's already lots of kids who could be having better lives in it. It's really hard to know which one of those is more important, and then also, I don't want to have kids past 35. [unintelligible 00:05:38]

Brian Lehrer: When you say there are a lot of kids who already are in the world who aren't going to have what they should have, does it make you consider adopting?

Amanda: Yes, definitely considered adopting, for sure. I also see the value and see myself as a baby and having a partner who I love enough to want to have kids with. Yes, adoption is definitely a possibility.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, thank you for articulating some of the ambivalence that probably, Rachel, speaks for a lot of people on the particular points that she raised, right? Do we still have Rachel?

Rachel Cohen: Yes, sorry. I thought you're still talking with the guest. Definitely. I think there are a lot of reasons why-- That is not new. Climate change is one reason why certainly some people are thinking, feel conflicted by the decision, but to me, that wasn't the biggest factor that I see driving this kind of dread, but it is another factor that has added complexity and made some of these decisions feel fraught. You definitely do have some people in certain circles, especially, who can come with more judgment to make that decision.

I think in general, there's just a lot of fear about things like cost, and what this will mean, and whether you are going to have support from your networks, and employer, and the state, and all of these questions. We have sent a very loud message saying like, "You will get no support. Even if your partner says they're going to support you, they probably won't, and so on and so on." Just trying to figure out how to absorb all of this information, how to receive it in a way that makes people feel like they are not crippled and paralyzed.

Brian Lehrer: Eliana in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eliana.

Eliana: Hi. I'm a full-time working mom with my own business and a five-year-old. I wanted to say, I didn't necessarily know what aspects of parenting and motherhood would be meaningful or not, but I found that what makes motherhood so challenging isn't the motherhood part, it's the lack of support part, which I think your guests was just speaking to. The nuclear family alone can't exist as a self-contained unit, and the lack of affordable good quality childcare, the high cost of living. These are the things that I think induce mom rage more than what can be a really meaningful experience of motherhood.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Thank you, Eliana. Does that ring true to you, Rachel?

Rachel Cohen: Oh, absolutely. I think one of the main points that I tried to get across in my piece is that we absolutely need to continue pushing and organizing, advocating for these policies that we know will make parenting easier, but we can do that, and also make space for the true experiences that are optimistic. I think there's just a real fear that if we lower the temperature at all, if we talk about what's good, what's fun, what's even manageable or improving, then we will miss the opportunity to push for the policies that we know we need in this country. I just don't think that's true.

I've been reporting on these organizing campaigns myself for years. We don't have to be in perpetual crisis mode all the time to be organizing for a better world. I think there are costs and consequences to being perpetually in that state that we haven't really been talking about as much. I don't know, that's where I come from.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about the demographics, the class demographics here, because on the one hand, we know that this country does not have the policies in place like some other industrialized countries do to help families. There's no universal childcare or maternity leave.

On the other hand, the women most likely to be on the fence you report earn higher incomes and work at places that might have those policies. How much of millennial mom dread can be chalked up to economics or something that's more psychosocial?

Rachel Cohen: No, it's not they're more likely to be on the fence, that wasn't what the studies were citing. What those studies were looking at, and this was just something that I was curious about as I was doing the research, is we do see differences around class in terms of how people report certain feelings of stress with parenting. That was interesting to me because sometimes some surveys can show that some people who may report the most stress and unhappiness may also have more resources, which lends the question of like, okay, so is it resources or what's going on? I think some people were drawing the wrong conclusion, that then the answer is we don't need social supports, which is definitely not the takeaway.

The findings are more suggestive that there are certain pressures on women in higher SES classes that are cultural. This is a policy and a cultural question. Of course, low-income parents have stress because low-income people have stress, and that exists. We're trying to disentangle what is the effect of kids on wellbeing, and life satisfaction, and mood, and happiness, and all these things which all are measured a little differently, all mean a little different things. I think I just want to stress, the answer is not, oh, we don't need affordable childcare and family supports, but it is saying like, okay, what should we think about with the fact that there are these reported higher feelings of stress and exhaustion from women who have more resources. What is going on in their lives, and how might we help them also and be thinking about that. I do think that some of it comes from this cultural expectations piece that I tried to get out in the essay.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Amanda.

Amanda: Hi. I think that for me, the anxiety that I feel about having kids and that mom dread comes from a couple real and perceived stresses. I think the real thing and what's at the forefront for me is that for me, I was 31 when the pandemic started, and I'm 35 now. I work in the film industry, and so I work in a really volatile career environment. There's that feeling that I've just lost these four years of a pretty fertile window. I did really get to figure things out and whether or not you're ever ready or figure things out by the time you have kids is up for debate. I'm just so much older now in a fertility standpoint that I have a lot of fear that I feel like I lost all this time.

Then the idea that I'm a woman and it's my first job as a mother when I get to that point to be the one to take care of the kids or at least contribute enough to be able to afford childcare. I just think that the idea that I haven't really gotten there in my career and that the pandemic, I feel like stole a lot of that time. Feels very real, but the perceived issue is, I feel, I'm sure this isn't true, but I feel like by the time I have kids I need to have sorted all my affairs out because my turn is over and now everything's about the kids and it's their turn. That's the perceived, but the pandemic is what feels very real.

Brian Lehrer: Deep ambivalence and the pandemic gap in the rest of her life adding so much more to it, Rachel. Let me get one more text message in here from a listener who writes, "There is ambivalence about motherhood and also separately and ambivalence about pregnancy and giving birth. More recent honesty about the challenges of both pregnancy and birth does make them seem much less appealing."

I don't know. If information is power, more information about what the experience is really like is dissuading. We have 30 seconds left for a last word on those last two comments.

Rachel Cohen: Yes, I think that one thing that I have found helpful is working, and they're not so easily accessible all the time, which is a reflection of our media. I think reading and talking more with women who are not so financially secure about their experiences with motherhood and how they do it. This idea that we have to have all of our ducks in a row and we have to be so financially insecure in order to take this step. I do think that's really risky because we live in a really-- It's not going to be right for everyone, but I think we have set this barrier of you need to be at this level of financial stability to do it.

Brian Lehrer: We have to leave it, I'm sorry to say, with Rachel Cohen, senior reporter for Vox covering social policy. Her article, How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.

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