hey guys. I'm just dropping in to give a little bit of context before this video. Um, in light of everything that's happened this week. Um, so for context, I recorded this video. Uh, several weeks ago, aka before the election and therefore the new administration that we have coming in. Uh, in January. So obviously for a lot of us watching, we understand that. Uh, reproductive rights, women's even ability to decide whether or not they want to have children. Uh, is very much going to be more in question than it was a week ago. This video about the choice of whether or not to have children, my own personal views on the matter, the child-free community, mothers, etc. Uh, was made in a slightly different context. But I think it's become all the more relevant now that the decision of whether or not to be a parent, not just a mother but a parent, is something incredibly personal and something that needs to be protected at all costs because it is certainly not something that anyone should ever be forced into doing. I hope you guys watch this video.

and get something out of it. I'm personally a little devastated that it's happening in the context that it currently is. But that being said, it is all the more important that we celebrate the increasingly limited abilities that we do have to even make choices like this. Bye guys. Hello everyone and welcome back to the latest episode of my 30-some series here on TFD. For those who don't know, I am ending this year, which is also my 35th year on this planet, by doing a six-part miniseries all about ways to sort of level up your 30s financially, personally, health-wise, relationship-wise, just sort of live a better, more intentional life. I think for a lot of us, especially when it comes to building our financial futures, our 30s are a crucial decade, and at least to me, they feel like the first decade of adulthood for me personally, because the 20s for me were very much question mark, question mark, question mark on a lot of fronts. I also

want to start off this video by saying that we are making this entire series in partnership with advisor.com. Now, I have personally been working with a financial adviser for years, and I can genuinely say it has changed my life and my finances for the better. But historically, financial advising was only really something that was available to people who already had a lot of money. But advisor.com has an amazing model where not only is it a flat annual fee, meaning that their advisers are working for you, not for commissions, they're also at a much more accessible price point than your average financial advisory. Plus, they are offering an exclusive $500 discount on the first year of advisory services to the TFD community, which you can get by clicking the link in our description. A good financial advisor doesn't just help guide you on where to do things like invest your money, although they do help you with that as well. They actually understand your goals and your lifestyle and all of the things that are important to you and help you craft a financial

strategy on both a day-to-day and long-term level that helps you get to the place you want to be and allows you to balance and prioritize all of your different goals while keeping your day-to-day happiness front of mind. But anyway, that being said, thank you, advisor.com. This is going to be our most personal episode of the series. It's going to be a lot more Loosey Goosey in terms of format. I'm not giving you guys a list here, and I'm also speaking from the heart. That was really my shoulder more, but I don't want to hit my mic. For those who don't know now, it's funny because when I'm saying this to camera, and I'm so used to talking to my community, like I feel like everyone who watches TFD knows that I don't want kids. But the thing about YouTube is a lot of people who watch it aren't actually even that familiar with you or are only a little bit familiar. So for anyone who doesn't know, I'm 35 years old. I've been

with my husband for over 13 years. We don't have children. We don't want them. And that is something that has become more and more a certainty for me with each passing year. And it's also something that I get asked about a lot, especially on my Tik Tok, where I tend to just like talk a little bit more candidly than I do like our video essays, which we do once a month. Like, they're wonderful, but they're also like pretty structured in how we produce them because they're a big undertaking, and we're usually tackling bigger topics, so it's not as easy to be really personal in them. Although, especially in the video that we did about people not being able to afford children anymore, I do also talk about this subject, and we'll link that in the description. But people do ask me a lot about my decision because I think it's becoming more common now, but I don't think it's that common still to see especially women who are super secure and outspoken in that decision. I think at least an toally now to be fair.

I go out of my way to curate a child-free Queen full experience in life online everywhere. Like, I love connecting with other child-free women. Um, so I do see it a lot more, but even still, I would say it's definitely not the norm in my personal life, amongst my family, amongst my good friends. I'm like the only one who doesn't want kids, with some maybe exceptions in there. But what I have noticed a sharp increase of is like people who aren't sure, or people who are taking longer and longer with the decision, who are really weighing this decision. I think in a way that was, first of all, never really even available to women until very recently, but also can be, I think, extremely stressful and anxiety-inducing. And honestly, like when I look around at the people in my life or on my social feeds who aren't sure if they want kids, or aren't sure if they want bio kids, or aren't sure if they want more than one kid, like I really have a lot of empathy for them because to be certain is to have such a weight.

off of your shoulders philosophically, practically, financially, and even being certain about not wanting kids is unburdened in a way that being certain about wanting them isn't. Because just because you're certain that you want kids doesn't mean you're certain to have them, or at least that you're certain to have them on a certain timeline, or biologically, or whatever your ideal scenario might be. And because of this increased delay for people making these decisions, they're also getting married later, they're building their financial stability later in life. That means for more and more people who do choose to have children, it is not the easy, seamless process that it often is for much younger people. So I really wanted to make this video kind of speaking as someone who is very certain they don't want children, because I think that's an important perspective, but also as someone who is, through being in this space online and talking about it a lot, I feel like has been exposed to just a lot of the conversations happening, and I feel like I can really kind of at least

from my particular point of view, respond adequately to a lot of the questions that you know women are asking when they're really de this choice from the childre perspective. Now I want to say first and foremost that I was not always certain I did want kids. I actually, funnily enough, do remember from a young age thinking that I would adopt kids if I ever had them, which I think is like kind of funny. And I think I can see easily how that feeds into eventually deciding, No, I don't want children of my own altogether, because I think it's already starting you on a path of thinking, Well, I don't necessarily need to physically give birth to a child in order to have a very strong special relationship with them. But I started to know pretty early on. I think my husband was also pretty clear about not wanting kids, so we kind of like reinforced that in each other. Um, and we have been together since I'm 22 years old, so that has given us a long window of kind

of evolving in that conversation simultaneously. My sister, who is um six years younger than me, almost seven years younger than me, she has three children. She's had three children in four years, which is, you know, girl, that factory is on. Like, it's like the scene where like Lucy and Ethel are like making the chocolates and they're coming too fast out of the out of the machine. Like, she is having kids, and that's like very much her lifestyle. She lives on a large parcel of land in the South. She is like a homesteader. She makes, you know, she, we are very much classic City Mouse, country mouse, which is nice. And, you know, is um, I wish we lived closer together, uh, physically, geographically, but uh, but other than that, like having a sibling who like went so far in the opposite direction of having kids, I think also really reinforced that in that choice in my own life, in part because it really took the pressure off, which is one of the things that I wanted to address in this video. One of the questions that I

get a lot is how do you deal with other people's expectations, disappointments, comments, things like that. Now, I want to say, first of all, that it's not just child-free women, and I would say child-free people, but women, I think, really do get the brunt of it. Um, and it's not just, but it's not just child-free women who get those kinds of comments and judgments. So, interesting studies have shown that women will receive as much judgment for choosing to have only one child as they do for choosing to have none. Um, because people have this position of like, Well, that's so unfair to the kid. Why would you only have one child? And living in New York City, um, most of my friends are also urban dwelling, um, a lot here in New York and in other urban areas where it is both financially and logistically difficult to have more than one child. In fact, I know plenty of people who are choosing to only have one child because having more than one would force them to leave the city, uh, which they don't want.

to do or they just can't afford to living in the city. I do think that's something that it's important to remind ourselves is that just because you are having children does not mean you are going to be spared all of this judgment and criticism and Inquisition. It's like women get it no matter what our decisions are around having children and no matter how we are raising them, no matter whether we're living in the city or the country, whether we're you know working moms or stay-at-home moms, whether we're childfree or have multiple kids, like there is always going to be an axis on which people are judging you, people are criticizing you, and people think that you're somehow disappointing them. Now that being said, when you are specifically not wanting children and you are at that prime age where it would be time to get to get stepp in basically and you've been in a relationship for a long time because I think that can make it even more difficult is like when you've been with someone for a long time.

you're happy, you're financially stable, you have means, like you have love to give. It becomes this thing of like, well, what, what, why not? Like, you have everything. And in fact, that was like a common refrain from people in our life, and I'm going to protect identities and not say who we're talking about, but like from very close people was like, well, you have everything to have a kid. And it's like, well, except the desire, which is, I would argue, the most crucial ingredient. But there is a real time where the pressure is very intense and very unpleasant, and you feel this constant need to defend and explain your decision, which I think for a lot of people is just something you're never really, we don't give people good tools to navigate that. So for a long time, like, it caused me a lot of stress and anxiety. It made me, it damaged relationships in my life because I felt in some ways like it would make me feel, for example, like ashamed of my career achievements or my creative achievements because I knew that on some level they

represented a disappointment for certain people because they were sort of in opposition to having a child or at the cost of having a child. And people, I mean especially like let's be real Boomers, can be insanely blunt with that stuff. And like a lot of people, and I think this is something that not everyone wants to unpack because you know most Boomers will like they'll throw themselves in front of a car before they throw themselves in front of a therapist like to unpack some of these beliefs that they have. But like I think for a lot of older generations who never had the choice as to whether or not they would get married and have kids, that's just like what they did, especially for the women. I think there's not only a real resentment for the idea that younger generations of women do have that choice, I think there's often, and this is I think in many cases made explicit, an expectation of like well I had children so they would have children, like this isn't fair, where are my grandkids, like

I'm owed grandchildren, or I'm owed nieces and nephews, or I'm owed. I'm owed. I'm owed, and this, I think, applies to so many aspects of life and cannot be underestimated. The power that this has is like, and I said it before on videos, I will say it again. There needs to be a Venn diagram, a Venn diagram of what you have to care about. It's, Do I value this person's opinion? on one side. Do I value their opinion on this subject? on the other. And only the things that are in the very center of that should get your emotional resource. Everything else, it's got to be, you know, as I say, the monkey clanging cymbals in your head, like you just in one ear and out the other. You can, it doesn't even matter to you what they're saying. It doesn't have an impact. And that is assuming that you are, you know, in contact with these people, that you're spending time with them. Like, you have to become very comfortable with the idea of, like, I don't owe you an

explanation on this. I'm not comfortable giving you an explanation. I find this conversation really unpleasant. I think it's really damaging to our relationship. Like, I have had to have those conversations in so many words, and they were tough in the moment, but now there is a real established precedent of like, if you're barking up this tree, like, it's not going to, like, you're never going to force me to have kids, but you are going to seriously damage this relationship and this closeness. And I think that that muscle, whether it's being flexed on the decision not to have children or to have only one child or to, you know, your career or your life, any aspect of your lifestyle, you need to flex it on these things because flexing it on the big important things, this muscle of boundaries and this muscle of I will not allow you to weigh on me about this, your opinion on this subject is not valued, is not necessary, is not appreciated. Like, to flex that muscle on big important things makes it so much easier to flex it on

other aspects of your life, and I have found that becoming very grounded in that aspect of my lifestyle and that choice has paid dividends on other aspects of certain social, certain relational dynamics that have been very difficult historically because no one, I think, has a perfect situation with all of the people in their life, especially when it comes to family. And I think that learning how to separate yourself and what is right for you from other people's expectations and learning what expectations are and aren't reasonable or are and aren't valid, there are so many ways that it comes in handy, big and small. Another question that I get very frequently is, did you weigh pros and cons? Like, how did you come to this decision? Now, I really do think that in life there are certain things that if it ain't a hell yes, it's a no. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one more essential to that than having children. It is really scary to me when I think of all of the people, and like we were raised by Boomers in a lot of cases.

Right, like you don't have to look very hard to find people who had parents who were clearly not really interested in or good at being parents. Like, that is an incredibly common dynamic, and I would argue that a lot of it stems from people having children without truly weighing that decision or truly asking themselves, Am I ready? Am I excited? Am I prepared? Am I even in a mentally good place myself to be able to emotionally and mentally raise another person? First and foremost, the question is, Am I experiencing a hell yes towards this idea? And if no, the most important thing I think to remind yourself of, and I remind myself of this all the time, because listen, if you ask Chelsea today, 35 years old, Are you going to have kids? My answer is absolutely not. You can never predict the future. Like, I can't. It would be disingenuous to say that at some later date in life, I might not say, Oh, like, let's say I've been working with a child for a very long time. Maybe

I want to become a guardian of that child. Maybe I want to foster a child. Maybe something, God forbid, happens to a loved one in my life, and I have to take on a child. Life is long, right? Famously, and these things can happen. But it is so important to remind yourself that the consequences, like having children as a mistake, the consequences are infinitely worse than not having children being a mistake. Not only is, in the case of having a child that you regret or aren't prepared for or can't take care of, not only is that now bearing down on another human life, which will have all kinds of repercussions, but on top of it, if you at a later point in life decide, Actually, I do want children in my life, there are so many ways to create that situation in your life that do not require you to physically birth a child. They do not even require you to legally adopt a child. And that is, I think, a really big misconception that I want to see cleared up more and more, I think.

we've had now a more and more nuanced conversation about adoption that is really, I think, important because for so long, especially in the western world, there's been this narrative of like essentially it boils down to like a nice white couple like generously and selflessly saves a child, you know, which I think is really unfair and untrue. In the case of a lot of especially private adoption, like these are very complicated situations where we should perhaps be giving resources to the biological parents. We should be asking ourselves where are these children coming from. Like it is not, I think, to not view it as a binary is very healthy. That being said, it is also not a binary that in order to play a very significant role in a child's life that you need to be a legal adopter. Like you can be a guardian, you can be, you can participate in all kinds of programs like CASA, like Big Brother Big Sister, you can foster, you can work with the biological, like you can also even amongst adoption, there are open adoptions versus closed.

adoptions. Like, there are a huge array of paths to being a presence in children's lives. And take New York City, for example. There's almost 10,000 children in the New York City system at any given time. At any given time. And these are children who even a small amount of involvement in their life, even, you know, whether again you are Big Brother, Big Sister, your casa, your fostering, your guardianship, whatever your involvement is. These programs, even just having a little bit of someone caring in their life, often has enormous impacts on these children's lives. And these are programs that are always available if you are willing and ready to train and dedicate the time for them. So, I say that to say, like, if you at a certain point in your life decide, and this is, by the way, not even counting your nieces and nephews, your friends' children, your neighbors' children, children, like, there is no shortage of children who need people in their lives. Like, that is never, ever going to be in short supply. And on top of that, there are so many other children.

who are not only ready for, but in many cases in need of more substantial Guardian-like roles in their lives or more substantial adult relationships in their life. So there's always a way to work yourself back to being involved in a child's life at that really high level. And to be fair, like, I think one thing that has always really bothered me, especially about the discourse about being a parent, I think there's such a premium often placed on having biological children because it's like, Well, then it's my child. Then there's that unique and special bond that can't be replaced, that can't be changed, whatever the case may be. And I think that can be true, and other types of relationships can be more different. But as someone, like a lot of people in the child-free community are child-free, and this is not my case. I feel lucky that this is not my case, but a lot of people in the child-free community came to the decision of being child-free because they had horrific experiences.

with their biological parents because their biological parents were not good parents, because they did not have a good childhood, because in many cases they're lower no contact with their parents, they have very strained parental relationships. And I think that often having that biological relationship can lead to a sense of entitlement on the part of the parent, that feeling that you are entitled to a certain level of relationship with that child, all the more so if it's a child that you really struggled to have, that you are entitled to that level of relationship or that you're guaranteed that. And I do want to just stress that ultimately in life, whether it's with friends, family, children, whoever the case may be, we get the relationships that we create, we get out of it what we put into it, and in no way is a great parent-child relationship guaranteed to anyone. That is entirely a result of work, and you can have horrible biological parents, and you can have great non-biological parents, great non-traditional parental figures in someone's life. People can have stronger

relationships with an aunt than they do with a mother or a grandparent than they do with their actual parent. I say all of that to say I think reframing the idea of what a parent and child happens to be is incredibly important, not just for the people who choose not to have children, but for our entire society, for all of the people who are involved in a child's life, for all of the people who do have strange relationships with their parents. Like, it's so important to remember and remind ourselves that children are people, relationships with them are earned, and you can have a profound special relationship with a child regardless of whether or not you were biologically involved in making them. Another thing that I wanted to just quickly touch on with regards to debating whether or not you have children, and I cannot stress this enough, I once read a tweet that I thought was so, so amazing that said men want children the way kids want puppies, which is to say they love the idea of it, they love what it will probably afford them.

socially and professionally because, as we've established before on this channel, men get paid more, the more kids they have, the more respect they get in society. Like, and also famously, except in very rare cases, they're not the ones carrying the kid, they're not the ones who are bearing the physical burden of having a child. They are also not the ones who are essentially punished by Society for having them in many ways, big and small, but especially financially. So, there is just automatically a much, much lower level of responsibility and accountability that needs to be taken on the part of the man in heterosexual relationships. So, to my girlies who are in a heterosexual relationship, I would just ask you, A, is your male partner already a 100% like 5050 domestic partner? Like, are they truly and genuinely, or in many cases, like, you're the primary person who's working, and they would be the stay-at-home Dad? Like, is he already, before children are in the mix, like, is he doing half of the household work? Is he contributing to

like half of the labor and logistics when it comes to like organizing with family, with friends, you know, with planning things, with schedules, like is he already showing up as a partner at that level. And on top of it, I would recommend doing things like playing the Fair Play board game or watching the documentary or reading the book. Like, start implementing some of these things very early because it cannot be stressed enough. All of the levers in society are being pulled so that women will end up getting the worst of both worlds, still having to work in many cases full-time, and still taking on the majority of child-rearing. And that's everything from doing the laundry to feeding the kid to knowing the names and phone numbers of their friends' parents, their doctors, their primary point of contact at school, like all of that. You have to be pretty sure that you have a partner that is either a going to completely overcompensate for that and be a 50/50 partner, or they're earning enough money that you can, that it's, that you don't.

even have to work like you need to make sure that you are in that setup because let me tell you, anyone who has a bunch of parents around them, young parents, knows this and has seen this. Heterosexual couples, I'm referring to primarily here, you see the difference between couples where it's a real 50/50 partnership and couples where the woman's getting the short end of the stick, as is often the case, night and day, night and day. And no man, sorry to say it, gentlemen, but no man is going to go into having a child announcing himself as someone who's going to end up doing roughly 20% of the domestic labor and roughly 20% of all of the sort of time management and relational labor. They're not going to. They're going to be like, No babe, I'm there for you. Let's, you know, it'll be so fun. Like, it'll be great. It'll be cute. No, no, no, no. You need to put in the right practices in place now.

and feel genuinely sure of yourself, as sure as you can be by their actions, by their pre-existing actions, not by their words, that they are going to be a 50-50 partner in this. Lastly, I would say this: if you are thinking about having a child, really try to diversify your social media experience here because it is so important as women that we get a wide variety of experiences. Because once you hit a certain age, like the algorithms are going to algorithm hard. And in my experience, but actually it's not even my experience, like there's tons of data on this, and we talk about it in our video about having children. Social media pushes content with children on women, period, end of story. They push content about pregnancy, about conception, about having children, like about being mothers. Like that is very much targeted to women, regardless of whether or not that is a decision they want to make. And it is not nearly targeted to men in the same way. Like once we get to a certain age, we are

pushed on that track like I am basically out here beating my social media algorithms with a stick, being like, Stop showing me this. Like, I don't want this content outside of like my friends. And even then, some of it's like, I don't, I get it, you know, like how many photos of your kid do I have to see? And I love those kids, I love those kids, but I'm also like, I often do feel with some women's content, it's like, what happened to you, babe? Like, I would also like to hear about you. I'd also like to see you. I don't necessarily always want to see you through the prism of your child, especially when your husband never is posting photos of your children. But I say that to say, it is so important to get a diverse perspective of what are women doing at all stages of life, whether or not they have children. I love some of the moms in my life. First of all, I have several mom friends, and I have to, this is just a huge shout out to these

ladies, if you didn't know them personally, you would not know they were moms because they never post anything to do with their children online. I think that is such a major slay, a because of child privacy, but also because their public platforms are still them. It's about them as a person, and if and when one day their child wants to have their own public platform, they'll be able to create it, but they are still wanting the focus to remain on who they are as an individual. And I'm not saying you can't have a balance, but it is important to go out of your way to find people, women especially, who are showing all diverse arrays of what it means to be a woman with or without children at various stages of life, making all different kinds of life choices. Because again, once you reach a certain age, if you don't go out of your way to combat it, your algorithm will push you in one very specific direction, and that is the image that you will get of motherhood. And on top of the fact that it is a pretty

Relentless advertisement for being a mom. It is also a pretty relentless advertisement for being a specific kind of mom. It is a very curated aesthetic in many cases. We have the gender reveals, we have the, you know, the little age updates, we have the parties, we have all of the things that really go into the presentation and especially the performance of motherhood, which is again a burden and an expectation that we do not put on men. We live in a society, we live in a society famously, but we live in a society that is always putting finger on the scale to have to make women have kids. That is just from the media we consume to the social media feeds we scroll to our social lives in general. Like, if you don't want children, that makes you abnormal still. It's more common now, but it's still abnormal. And I won't sit here and sell you a dream that you can just be on the fence forever and then easily have a biological kid one day if you so choose. That is clearly still, even despite the best efforts of

modern medicine. It's not as simple as that. I understand that, but I think the biggest thing that we need to do is expand our definition of what it means to be in a child's life, what it means to be in a mother's life. You know, I personally feel that I am able to be a much better friend to my moms in my life because I don't have my own kids. Like, I can adapt to their schedules. I can do things that work for them. Like, I can hang out with them in a way that's accessible, and I also have a level of flexibility that they don't have. If we were both working with such limited flexibility, it's likely that we would not be able to see each other as much or be in each other's lives in the same way unless our kids happened to play together or go to the same schools. So, I say that to say, like, there are many ways to be a part of the village. The concept of the village as a concept is dying in

American society, and we have been pushed further and further and further into the nuclear family model that we know and have covered heavily on this channel. It does not serve us. It does not serve us mentally. It does not serve us on a community level. It does not serve us emotionally. And in many ways, I don't even think it serves children because children need a diverse array of adult figures in their life. I really want to end the dichotomy of not having your own children versus not having children because you can have many children in your life. You can have many children who have strong, powerful relationships with you without necessarily being their biological parent. I know it's a serious decision. I don't take it lightly. I didn't take it lightly for myself. And I, like I said at the beginning of this interminable video, if you are on the fence, if you are struggling, if you think you want to be child-free but you're not sure, you're nervous, I have huge empathy for you. CU, that is a big and hard

decision and women. We don't have the same flexibility, unfortunately. We do have a stop clock on us to some extent, and anyone who says otherwise is not being totally honest. But we have more choices than we think, and the more we can expand our idea of what human relationships look like, I think the better for all of us. So those are my thoughts. Thank you, guys. And you know, if you're planning to have a kid maybe or planning to not have a kid and ball the hell out financially, a really good thing to do is get a good financial adviser. So I recommend you check out the partners of this video series, advis.c, which is linked in the description with an exclusive discount on advisory services for our community. A good financial adviser has changed my life, and I think it could very much change yours. But either way, I'll see you next week.

Watch This If You’re Not Sure About Having Kids

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Watch This If You’re Not Sure About Having Kids

Watch This If You’re Not Sure About Having Kids

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