They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
How many times had I read a version of these lines or heard them recited? The opening stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” is a favorite of fictional shrinks and wise folk. I can say them by heart. But it was only last year, my stomach already stretching with new life, that I reread the poem and found myself focusing on the third stanza, which offers the logical conclusion of the earlier two:
Man hands misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
There are few decisions more fraught for members of my generations — the cusp of millennial and Gen Z — than whether or not to become a parent. In 2023 the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low. Some of the decline can be explained by a delay in having children or a decrease in the number of children, rather than people forgoing child rearing entirely. But it still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.
There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child onto this broken planet is too depressing. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can.
I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.
This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.
So I want to suggest that there’s another reason my generation dreads parenthood: We’ve held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet.
I: They Mess You Up
I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate.
My teenage and young adult years were not bad, exactly, but they were tumultuous. I had been an emotional, moody child, and I became an emotional, moody teenager and then an emotional, moody young adult. I kept a handle on things, mostly, but there were intermittent crises: An eating disorder when I was 14, abetted by the angsty anorexics of Tumblr. A period of depression in my early 20s.
There was nothing special about my suffering. Nine percent of Americans, at one point in their lives, suffer from an eating disorder. Nearly 30 percent of American adults experience a period of depression. And there was also nothing special about the way I came to understand that suffering. I was one of the untold many who — with the help of counseling and the internet and therapy culture more broadly — came to see the story of my struggles as intimately tied up with the story of my parents’ failures, a lack of love, of acceptance, of foresight and help.
I was 14 when I saw my first therapist, a middle-aged woman who worked out of her suburban home office. My parents liked her because she specialized in adolescent eating disorders and accepted our insurance. I liked her because she had a cat.
Also, she was sympathetic to me. In our first session together, she suggested that my feelings, my pain, my not eating, were reasonable and rational reactions to my family’s religious beliefs and high expectations. “That sounds very controlling,” she told me, after I’d described the rules we lived by — the fights I’d have with my father over too-tight jeans, chores, daily prayers.
And maybe my parents were overly strict — that was certainly the interpretation favored by every therapist I’d go on to see during that period — though that was not the only reasonable interpretation of my situation. “If you have problems, you assume that it has to do with your parents — and sure, sometimes it does,” says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and expert on familial estrangement. “But it’s also random good luck, random bad luck, genetics, cohort, siblings and other important relationships.”
The belief that adult struggles, especially our psychological struggles, are rooted in the events of our childhoods is a longstanding tenet of psychology. Sigmund Freud, for example, posited that obsessive-compulsive tendencies could be traced back to overly harsh toilet training. A popular psychological theory in the mid-20th century suggested that autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth (refrigerator mothers). Over the past half-century, as the genetic and biological elements of mental disorders have increasingly taken center stage in the field, parents have taken less heat for serious psychiatric conditions and developmental disorders.
But Ashley Frawley, a sociologist, points out that parents continue to be blamed for their children’s hardships: “A voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or ‘baby-led weaning’) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.”
Not all millennials or Gen Z-ers are in therapy, of course — though they seek out mental health counseling far more than members of other generations. But therapeutic and psychoanalytic ideas have invaded popular culture, forming the backbone of how we understand our own lives to such an extent that we may no longer even recognize them as therapeutic.
In her book “Saving the Modern Soul,” the French Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz critiques the therapeutic narrative, writing: “What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation.” It is as if every current difficulty — rather than being addressed on its own terms — is seen as an ‘X’ on a treasure map, a clue to dig for childhood trauma that has been long buried.
Certainly that is how trauma is presented in videos on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, with hashtags like #innerchildhealing and #childhoodwounds. Many of these videos — including some by licensed therapists — suggest that viewers might have undergone childhood trauma without even realizing it. “Childhood trauma isn’t just being in an abusive household, being in a car accident or having a parent pass,” says one content creator, explaining that “feeling unseen, unheard” also counts.
Among the signs that you might be the victim of childhood trauma, according to these videos? You’re a people pleaser. You’ve been called an old soul from a young age. You procrastinate a lot. Having a hard time asking for help. Feeling awkward when people genuinely check in with you about your feelings. One video, with close to a million likes, cites introversion as a symptom that can be explained by flawed parenting: “Growing up is realizing that ‘strict parents’ are just abusive parents who robbed us of our childhood and turned us into introverts.” It’s one of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, on similar themes.
It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of cultural artifacts, particularly those that suggest leg jiggling is a symptom of buried trauma. But to do so is a mistake. Because when you are young and suffering and unsure of the cause of your pain and when you are presented over and over with a reason for it, it is actually very easy to believe that poor parenting is the taproot from which your romantic, social, psychological or professional issues grew. Especially since, in many cases, there’s an element of truth in it: Our parents hurt us, even when they love us.
II: Man Hands Misery to Man
The irony is that over the past several decades, American parents have been putting in more time and effort into being good parents. “They have given up hobbies, sleep and time with their friends in the hope of slingshotting their offspring into successful adulthood,” writes Dr. Coleman.
The relentlessness of modern parenting has been well documented: Working mothers in the year 2000 spent as much time focused on child care as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Since the last decades of the 20th century, upper-middle-class mothers, in particular, have embraced an intensive style of child rearing, devouring parenting books and advice, loading children down with toys to stimulate their development, choosing only organic foods and enriching extracurriculars and, today, PFAS-free diaper subscriptions.
And yet we adult children seem increasingly likely to find fault with our parents and perhaps to manifest this fault finding by cutting them out of our lives. In 2019, Karl Pillemer, a Cornell sociologist, found that 27 percent of adult Americans reported being estranged from a family member. (The true number is probably even higher.) The most commonly severed relationships were parent/adult child, and in most of those cases, it was the adult child who initiated the estrangement. Although data on this subject is limited (Dr. Pillemer’s was the first large-scale national survey on the topic), many psychologists and sociologists believe that this is becoming more common.
Some of today’s parent-child estrangements are the welcome result of a society that is increasingly aware of physical and sexual abuse and unwilling to demand that people maintain relationships with those who have deeply harmed them.
But it is also true that many of today’s adult children often cut parents off for what a generation ago would have been viewed as venial sins. Anna Russell, who interviewed estranged families for The New Yorker, found that reasons for estrangement included that people “felt ignored or misunderstood by their parents or believed that a sibling had always been the family’s favorite. Several described a family member as a ‘classic narcissist’ or as ‘toxic.’”
Dr. Coleman, who counsels families experiencing estrangement, has seen children cut parents out of their lives because of financial conflicts, political differences or negative comments about the child’s partner. “There’s a lot of estrangements that actually happen to decent parents,” he told me.
A result of these changes is that parenthood appears to be an increasingly bad deal. For much of history, parent-child relationships were characterized by mutual duties, says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Parental duties might include things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills they would need in adulthood. Children, in turn, had duties to their parents: to honor and defer to them, to help provide for the family or household, to provide grandchildren.
Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional. “With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, ‘If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent’ — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—‘then I owe you nothing as an adult child,’” says Dr. Coleman.
Which means that it now often seems like having a child entails an enormous amount of financial, emotional and spiritual investment, with a hovering possibility that your children will cut contact with you after they reach young adulthood and the increasing likelihood that they will hold you responsible — not only for their suffering and struggles but even for your decision to bring them into the misery-inducing world in the first place.
III: Get Out Early as You Can / And Don’t Have Any Kids Yourself
When I was 14, still in thrall to self-starvation, I spent several months at home with my mother, who had taken a leave of absence from her job to nurse or coerce me back to health. We spent our days sitting at the laminate kitchen table, me bargaining with her. “A plum is a fruit,” I would tell her, knowing that the tiny thing — barely bigger than a golf ball — contained far fewer calories than a banana or an apple.
Like most suffering people, I was self-absorbed. Wrapped up in my own pain and dramas, I didn’t notice much about my mother. My main memory of her in those days is of her squinting over the paper she’d been given upon my discharge from inpatient treatment, which had a list of how many portions in each food group I was supposed to be eating. Five fruits. Eleven grains. She recorded what I ate each day in a little notebook, which she brought to all of the doctor’s appointments.
It had been years since I’d thought much about this period in my life. But the winter I became pregnant with my son, I found myself dwelling on it. I revisited it over and over, compulsively, pressing on the memories the way you might a bruise.
The truth was that I had never before spent much time considering that period from my parents’ perspective. Partly, this is because they did their best to hide their concern from child me, conducting most of their conversations in whispers or behind their bedroom door. But even later, when I was an adult and sought out therapy, the focus had always been on my thoughts and feelings, my hurts and distress.
But now it was like peering under the tabs of one of those lift-a-flap picture books. There is my mother sitting at the kitchen table, recording my plum in her notebook. The cup of minestrone soup. And then under the flap, is her own lunch, only half-eaten, her appetite shrunken by chronic worry and fear. (She will force herself to finish it, to set a good example.) There is my mother spending her days driving me to and from the doctor and the therapist and the hospital while I sit like a rock in the back seat. And then, under the flap, is her nearly falling asleep from tiredness, from the nights she lay awake in bed, reading and researching and praying.
I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.
Before I became pregnant, a friend said, “Nothing changes your relationship with your mom like having a child.” It’s true. And it is also true that nothing changes your relationship with life itself, and your story around it, quite like choosing it for another person.
And there’s something perverse about the fact that one barrier to having children for members of my generation is a fear that we’ll fail them in the same ways — or perhaps different ways — that our parents failed us. Yet having a child is what can help you look at the narratives you’ve been wearing all these years, bundled around you like an old winter coat, and realize that it no longer fits. That this story you’ve been telling yourself about the childhood hurts that made you who you are — well, that story may be true, but it is not the only story you could tell.
Perhaps in the past this shift in perspective came about as a matter of course. There was, in a sense, a fail-safe in place to manage the eternal conflict between children and parents: Adult children had children of their own.
I’ve made much here of the fact that my life traces the experiences of a certain generation. I was a child of the 2000s and the 2010s, the Tumblr generation, a generation that enthusiastically imbibed and disseminated the doctrine that our personal sufferings could be made legible by looking back at our parents, our childhoods, our early relationships. But my life was different from that of many of my peers because I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community and internalized a competing set of beliefs and narrative frames and norms. One of which was that my life would include children.
This was a religious teaching in a way, but more so it was just an assumption. Though my family was fairly modern, nearly everyone I knew growing up had a sibling or two or five. My maternal grandmother has more than two dozen great-grandchildren (keinehora, she would say). From a young age, children were one of the landmarks that defined and guided my vision of adult life. You could call this social pressure, a phrase that deeply individualist Americans tend to view as derogatory, but really it was just a norm (and there is always a norm, whether for children or against).
I had plenty of misgivings about having a child — uncertain if I would be an adequate mother; uncertain how I would be myself and a mother; uncertain how having a child would affect my career goals, my writing, my marriage; uncertain whether I had the capacity to give and give and give to any other person, and my husband had some of his own. But ultimately, we did what I think a lot of people in the past must have done: We put aside our doubts and tried to trust that we were not the first to have these worries and that, most probably, we would be able to handle the struggles as they came.
I rarely thought of growing up with this norm as a privilege or a stroke of luck. But now I wonder if it was.
Because increasingly, outside of subcultures like mine, having a child in America is becoming a life-cycle stage you have to opt in to, rather than the default you must opt out of. Child rearing is something you consider doing when you have extensive savings and a good career and a perfect partner and are at peace with yourself and your choices and are sure that you can guarantee your kid a life of success and happiness. Except, of course, you can never guarantee that for your child, just as your parents — much as they wanted to — could not guarantee it for you.
Michal Leibowitz is a staff editor for Times Opinion.
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