What if you do not want to have children?
ALL WE HAVE GROWN THE MASS OF QUESTIONS TO THEMSELVES AND THE WORLDwith which there seems to be no time or need to go to a psychologist. But convincing answers are not born when you talk to yourself, or to your friends, or to your parents. Therefore, we asked a professional psychotherapist Olga Miloradova to answer pressing questions once a week. By the way, if you have them, send to [email protected].
Why do some of us don’t want children and do we need to do something about it?
Perhaps you are "short-lived", but there is still no desire to have a child. Perhaps many of your friends, rocking the sleepy baby in their arms, reproach you for selfishness and narcissism. Most likely your parents brought out your brain with pleas, alternating with threats and attempts to soften you, just to convince you to give birth to your grandson. Nevertheless, every time when a dialogue about potential motherhood reappears and you all strive to prove that you do not need it, somewhere in the depths of your soul you are plagued by doubts about your own adequacy, fears that suddenly you ever want to, but it will be too late, and other thoughts about how true your unwillingness is, what if it is some kind of fear in the subconscious that prevents the maternal instinct from cutting through?
Olga Miloradova psychotherapist
In spite of the fact that it seems to be about the denial of maternal function, I would like to turn to theorists of child psychoanalysis. Starting with Melanie Klein and further, if you try to roughly put together a diversity of opinions, almost everyone regardless of school and direction in one voice declares the existence of some kind of vicious circle in which the ability to adequately interact with the child and satisfy his needs depends on the mother’s own infant experience how much in her childhood these needs were well met.
At the same time, as there is no “child apart from the mother”, there is also no “mother outside the relationship with the father” - all these interactions of the infant with the parents or the parent largely determine what kind of parent the child himself later becomes or whether she wants to be at all. According to the research of parent-child relationships and their subsequent influence on parental experience, children of sensitive and responsive mothers subsequently have the best adaptive abilities, stable psyche and, if we talk about girls, subsequently become the same intuitively prosperous mothers.
In controversial, inconsistent mothers, children with the same ambivalent, controversial type of attachment subsequently grow up, the worse option is the rejecting attitude of the mother, which forms the same avoidant attachment in children. And the most recent option is deprivation, that is, the complete absence of contact between the child and the mother for various reasons. However, referring to the last point, according to Winnicott, even though dad is a bit worse than mom, but a fairly good father (or another devoted family member) could make up for this loss.
Perhaps it all sounds somewhat confusing, but in fact the idea that I am trying to convey is rather simple: if you fear that there is some kind of pathology in your unwillingness to be a mother, first look at your mother and your relationship with her. In fact, this is not such an easy task, because we are talking mainly about your very early relationships, and even if everything is fine between you now, you have to play Sherlock Holmes and collect a picture of fragments and phrases.
Maybe she once mentioned her unwillingness to have children, her difficulties in understanding what to do with the baby, her denial of motherhood, or that some of you fell ill, and had to part for some time - perhaps you already know or once heard about it, and perhaps you will be able to gather information from your grandmother, dad or other relatives. If there are really problems in your relationship or you managed to find out the problem with the adoption of your existence as a mother in infancy (this should still be a serious enough problem), then perhaps you should contact a specialist and try to figure out what is happening in your mind with the adoption of a potential child.
If you fear that there is some kind of pathology in your unwillingness to be a mother, first look at your mother
Another possible and rather obvious option is when looking at your parents, you understand that their whole life is a dark example for you, and you want anything, but not this. For example, you grew up in a tiny apartment with a bunch of children and annoyed parents or in a family with a single mother who put her life on the altar of your existence, perhaps something else that you would not want to repeat. In this case, there is a possibility that you are trying to live your life according to the so-called anti-scenario. It implies that everything is either black or white: either you have children, but you live a lousy life, or you don’t have it, and everything becomes good - but at the same time you can’t see any alternative options due to the established stereotype.
But let's say that you didn’t find anything like that, the relations with your parents are excellent, your brothers and sisters have successfully bred, your family is quite like you, but the problem remains the same. In this case, you have no choice but to breathe easy and just accept the fact that you do not want to have children. This also happens, and this is also normal. I'm not talking about those cases where girls are afraid of deformation of the figure, have not found the right guy, or are just not ready yet. If you want ice cream, you understand that you want it, even knowing about the calorie content and the danger of catching a cold - despite all the excuses, most likely you eat this ice cream or at least you will give an account of what you want.
Well and, in fact, the main sign that you want a child should be, no matter how trite it sounds, simply the desire to have it, because all the stories about "a glass of water in old age", "fighting loneliness", "I'm not did that, but my child will do "or" child to self-realize "- this is a fight against existential problems, neurotic attempts to at least somehow take place and narcissistic expansion, which at the output will lead to the very vicious circle of problem relations described .
And returning to people who want to impose the birth of children on you as a duty and obligation, you can only sympathize with them, because those who are truly satisfied with their parental function are unlikely to impose anything on anyone.