| “I love my kids, but…” What ends that sentence is always the biggest source of regret and heartbreak in most adults’ lives. For the past thirteen years, I’ve been told the truth of most parents’ lives so many times that it’s no longer surprising to me. The sadness in their eyes is always the same. They always have to look away to prevent the tears and the shame. The truth in it is always the same, and it’s the opposite of what our culture trains us to believe. The real truth is… Most adults don’t want to have children and never wanted to be parents. In fact, most adults knew before they ever had kids that they didn’t want to be parents. Most adults have kids not because they want them, but because they think they are “supposed to” and experience enormous and relentless amounts of social pressure to have children. It comes at them from every direction for their whole lives, and most people silently believe the are supposed to do it. And the even worse truth is that most adults fear if they ever tell the truth about any of this, they will be looked at as a “bad person,” that people will stop loving them and they will lose most of their relationships, the respect of the people they love and most of the things they value in their life. This fear is absolutely real for the majority of adults in our culture. It is the fear that drives 65% of adults to have children they don’t want. They truly believe they are supposed to have children because they are adults. In their actual experience, they have no freedom not to have children. These people live imprisoned in silence. They have no voice in our culture, and yet they are the majority. For most of them who have been brave enough to share their truth and their hearts with me, I am the only adult who has ever listened to their truth without judgement. For thirteen years, I have had the privilege of being trusted with their truth and the opportunity to witness them with compassion. For some of them, it was the first time in their lives that they ever told the full and raw truth of themselves and had the courage to put it all on the line. Most of them could not even tell their spouse or their ex that this was their truth. It has been my great honor to witness their risk and their humanity, to receive their heartbreak and know the courage it took for them to be real. In those thirteen years as both a healer and teacher, I have seen that truth from both sides. The children in these situations KNOW they are not wanted by their parents, and fully 65% of children in this country know their parents do not love them or want them. In deed, the largest single demographic group in our culture is “not loved or wanted by my parents.” These people, spanning all age ranges, backgrounds and socio-economic groups, are invisibly united by the unspoken knowledge that their parents did not want to be parents. Most of these people as adults go on to have children they don’t want, and those kids again know they are not loved and wanted by their parents. In our culture, it is so forbidden to talk about this issue that everyone lives silently imprisioned in the prescribed roles of it, each agreeing to maintain a silent front about the whole thing. I no longer keep that agreement. The truth is most adults do not want to have children or be parents. Most of them are afraid if they admit this, or actually live as an adult without children, they will be viewed as: 1. a bad person 2. someone who hates children 3. not trustable 4. deficient or deviant 5. physically incapable of reproducing, and not a “real man” or a “real woman” 6. less worthy of love, respect and social standing or acceptance by their community and their families if they don’t have children No one ever considers what all of this does to the children raised by parents who didn’t want them. I have. For thirteen years as a teacher, I saw day in, day out, one child at a time exactly what this does to children. For those thirteen years, I worked individually with over 1000 children. Every child who is not wanted, or is the product of a “supposed to” set of parents knows that they are not wanted. The kids know no matter how much the parents try to cover it up, fake it or make the best of it. “No Child Left Behind” has been one of the most destructive social programs ever unleashed on the populace, and in the next twelve years, we will see the disaster that has been wraught like a bad tidal wave across an entire generation of American kids as they reach adulthood. What every teacher in every school in America has been dying to scream from the rooftops is: No teacher can fix bad parenting, and bad parenting comes from people having kids they don’t truly want! I was lucky enough to have a few public school teachers as students and we would compare notes. We all saw the same thing, regardless of race, economic background, neighborhood or ages of the children or the parents: 1. Parents who did not want their children were uninvolved in their children’s lives. 2. These parents were unwilling to truly create relationships with those children and completely unwilling to meet the children’s emotional needs. 3. The kids whose parents would not meet their emotional needs were the kids who consistently had the most problems, no matter how much time and money was thrown at the problem. 4. The real problem was that the parents did not want the kids. “I love my kids but…..” is at the root of every depression, every social ill, every circumstance of economic disparity, every case of child abuse and every divorce I’ve ever seen. At least 90% of the social and cultural problems we face in America that seem so intractable are rooted in this one issue. In order to stop it in the kids, we’ve got to stop it in the adults. These adults who know they don’t want to have children or be parents have no voice in our society…. until now. The main purpose of this site is to give adults, both as “supposed to” parents and “adult children” who were not wanted a space to tell the truth, be heard and respected and know that your story matters. If there is one issue in my life that I am ready to fall on a sword for, it’s this one. (Please read the About page to see why.) I am committed to a major social revolution in America, and I am willing to do the work to make that happen. That social movement, simply put, is this: No more “supposed to” kids, and no more “supposed to” parents.
You have my commitment to be heard and read with compassion, no judgement and my utmost respect for your honor and courage in telling your truth. Every human being deserves to be heard and received with dignity. I offer my site up for that purpose. Everyone in America who is effected by this issue has this blog as a safe space to tell their story. I welcome yours with open arms and an open heart. I invite your comments. |