“So, when are you having kids?” Ah, the dreaded question, the one I hear almost daily.  

It’s a social norm to get married and have kids, two generations ago it was just the way you lived your life, you got married and had children and just got on with it. My grandmother was seventeen when she got married and by the time she was my age (25) she had four kids, my mother was nineteen and married when she had me and here I am twenty-five married with four cats and two dogs – what went wrong?. 

Actually, nothing it seems I am perfectly normal, well at least according to the office of national statistics “The average age of first-time mothers was 28.8 years in 2017, unchanged since 2016 in the UK”. 

I was twenty-one when I met my now husband and honestly this question of “when are you having kids?” started almost immediately, six months into dating we were getting this question from concerned elderly relatives who obviously thought we were taking our time, after a year and a half when we got engaged we were congratulated along with “so when are you having kids?” but this time it was from more family members and friends and then two years later when we were married and bought our own house even strangers were asking us! It’s crazy how many people are concerned with my reproductive system. 

I know this question is well intended but it causes a lot of peer pressure and unnecessary strain on an individual and on their relationship – As a young married couple there is a huge social pressure to become parents. When people ask us this question, it genuinely makes us feel awkward we don’t know how to answer it most of the time, no matter my answer it either upsets people or they smile and shrug saying “You’ll change your mind”. We’re happy and don’t want anything more for our marriage but unfortunately society doesn’t agree with that and while we’re content with our decision, some people aren’t. 

Minard (1952) investigated how social norms influence prejudice, he did a study on white and black people working in the mines, underground eighty of the white men were friendly to the black men, above ground this went down to twenty. He was trying to explain that our prejudice attitude can sometimes depend where we are. As mentioned it used to be the social norm of getting married young and having children, if this was a different time like the 1960s-1980s they’d be a lot more prejudice against my decision which may explain why older people try to convince me to have kids. 

Taijfer & Turner’s (1979) social identity theory is made up of three stages, the first stage is categorization, we do this to better identify and understand people so we use words like black, Muslim and Christian etc, the second stage is social identification which means we adopt the identity of the group and the third stage is social comparison where we start to compare ourselves with the out group. If you’re in the “in group” you have a certain set of values that you agree with and defend and reject the “out groups” values etc. – which there is an element of that happening here I’m in my “in group” which includes the young married women who are childless and I reject the ideas of the “out group” who are young with children or are people who thinks everyone should have children and they’re trying to get me into their “in group” and encourage me to have children by pushing their values on me and trying to get me to see their side of the “argument”.  

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re reading my blog thinking “oh! what a monster, she doesn’t like children” that isn’t the case. I love children and can see the joy of them being around, I look after my 6 year old niece every other weekend and we bake, do various of activities and watch paw patrol on repeat (ok, the paw patrol on repeat does impact on my decision not to have children!) and although I enjoy my time with her, I don’t feel the need to have my own and there’s a few reasons for that. 

A personal reason to why I don’t want children is I feel that my marriage is happier without them, we go on many holidays together in the last 4 years we have been to Orlando ,Las Vegas, Miami, Hollywood, Spain, France,  and Tokyo and with children that would be almost impossible to do as children are expensive!, According to the money advice service the total for one year of having a baby is a whopping £11,498, which is a lot of holidays! We also both work full time (in one way, I work and attend university), the free time we have we spend together, and we like our sleep!  

Another reason is I feel the world is already overpopulated, according to the guardian you’d have to plant 1,073 trees to offset the Co2 caused by one child! I like to play my part in keeping the environment green, I do my recycling and take my childbirth control! Following on with world issues, I don’t think the world is a very nice place according to the guardian homicides are at a record high for the past decade and knife crime is on the rise, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for bringing a person into this and risk them being harmed and I know you can’t control other people’s motives and you can’t wrap children in cotton wool, and I appreciate they are nice wonderful things in the world, but why take the risk?  

The final reason is I think I’m too young to have children now, I’ve just started a psychology degree and I have at least 3 years before I finish that! It’s just not the right time for me, but I don’t know when it will be so please stop asking! 

1. Do you think it’s fair to try and pressure someone to conform to what we perceive to be social norms? 

1. If someone is in the out-group, does that make them inferior to our in- group or just different? is it possible for us to accept difference?  

References:- 

McLeod, S. A. (2019, Oct 24). Social identity theory. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-identity-theory.html 

McLeod, S. A. (2008). Prejudice and discrimination. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/prejudice.html 

“So, when are you having kids?” Ah, the dreaded question, the one I hear almost daily.

It’s a social norm to get married and have kids, two generations ago it was just the way you lived your life, you got married and had children and just got on with it. My grandmother was seventeen when she got married and by the time she was my age (25) she had four kids, my mother was nineteen and married when she had me and here I am twenty-five married with four cats and two dogs – what went wrong?

Actually, nothing it seems I am perfectly normal, well at least according to the office of national statistics “The average age of first-time mothers was 28.8 years in 2017, unchanged since 2016 in the UK”.

I was twenty-one when I met my now husband and honestly this question of “when are you having kids?” started almost immediately, six months into dating we were getting this question from concerned elderly relatives who obviously thought we were taking our time, after a year and a half when we got engaged we were congratulated along with “so when are you having kids?” but this time it was from more family members and friends and then two years later when we were married and bought our own house even strangers were asking us! It’s crazy how many people are concerned with my reproductive system.

I know this question is well intended but it causes a lot of peer pressure and unnecessary strain on an individual and on their relationship – As a young married couple there is a huge social pressure to become parents. When people ask us this question, it genuinely makes us feel awkward we don’t know how to answer it most of the time, no matter my answer it either upsets people or they smile and shrug saying “You’ll change your mind”. We’re happy and don’t want anything more for our marriage but unfortunately society doesn’t agree with that and while we’re content with our decision, some people aren’t.

Minard (1952) investigated how social norms influence prejudice, he did a study on white and black people working in the mines, underground eighty of the white men were friendly to the black men, above ground this went down to twenty. He was trying to explain that our prejudice attitude can sometimes depend where we are. As mentioned it used to be the social norm of getting married young and having children, if this was a different time like the 1960s-1980s they’d be a lot more prejudice against my decision which may explain why older people try to convince me to have kids. 

Taijfer & Turner’s (1979) social identity theory is made up of three stages, the first stage is categorization, we do this to better identify and understand people so we use words like black, Muslim and Christian etc, the second stage is social identification which means we adopt the identity of the group and the third stage is social comparison where we start to compare ourselves with the out group. If you’re in the “in group” you have a certain set of values that you agree with and defend and reject the “out groups” values etc. – which there is an element of that happening here I’m in my “in group” which includes the young married women who are childless and I reject the ideas of the “out group” who are young with children or are people who thinks everyone should have children and they’re trying to get me into their “in group” and encourage me to have children by pushing their values on me and trying to get me to see their side of the “argument”.  

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re reading my blog thinking “oh! what a monster, she doesn’t like children” that isn’t the case. I love children and can see the joy of them being around, I look after my 6 year old niece every other weekend and we bake, do various of activities and watch paw patrol on repeat (ok, the paw patrol on repeat does impact on my decision not to have children!) and although I enjoy my time with her, I don’t feel the need to have my own and there’s a few reasons for that.

A personal reason to why I don’t want children is I feel that my marriage is happier without them, we go on many holidays together in the last 4 years we have been to Orlando ,Las Vegas, Miami, Hollywood, Spain, France,  and Tokyo and with children that would be almost impossible to do as children are expensive!, According to the money advice service the total for one year of having a baby is a whopping £11,498, which is a lot of holidays! We also both work full time (in one way, I work and attend university), the free time we have we spend together, and we like our sleep!  

Another reason is I feel the world is already overpopulated, according to the guardian you’d have to plant 1,073 trees to offset the Co2 caused by one child! I like to play my part in keeping the environment green, I do my recycling and take my childbirth control! Following on with world issues, I don’t think the world is a very nice place according to the guardian homicides are at a record high for the past decade and knife crime is on the rise, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for bringing a person into this and risk them being harmed and I know you can’t control other people’s motives and you can’t wrap children in cotton wool, and I appreciate they are nice wonderful things in the world, but why take the risk?

The final reason is I think I’m too young to have children now, I’ve just started a psychology degree and I have at least 3 years before I finish that! It’s just not the right time for me, but I don’t know when it will be so please stop asking! 

1. Do you think it’s fair to try and pressure someone to conform to what we perceive to be social norms?

1. If someone is in the out-group, does that make them inferior to our in- group or just different? is it possible for us to accept difference?