The problems faced by childfree women are dismissed as trivial

I’ve always felt grateful as a 31-year-old woman in 2026 to be living in a time with unprecedented honesty surrounding the question of children. There’s been a major shift in how we talk about motherhood over the past few years: women speak openly about the difficult, sometimes grim reality of taking care of young kids. A concurrent spike has pulsed, with women talking about the joy of forgoing motherhood altogether, as well as the pressure and judgment they’ve faced for opting out. This has come alongside brave, devastating stories of women for whom becoming a mother didn’t get to be a choice.

On the face of it, this all looks symbiotic and productive: women speaking freely about impossible standards, about pain, about their freedom, so other women faced with the same decision can make educated choices, while also pushing towards change which would make all of our lives much better. But lately, online, mothers and childfree women are being framed in opposition, that as we focus on the hardships of motherhood, mothers are neglecting the needs of their childfree friends – impulses that are validated by a conservative culture that says the right way to be a woman is to be a mother. The problems faced by childfree women are ultimately downplayed as easy and trivial compared to the demands on mothers raising children.

Childless women, especially those currently millennial-aged, may glimpse their reality in the above. Like most women my age, I found it hard not to roll my eyes as I noticed motherhood expectations start so suddenly at 30 – questions about when and how many, and the loaded silence when I said “probably not”. I was caught off guard just last week, when my four-year-old niece innocently asked me, “Are you someone’s mummy?”

Beyond the idea that my childlessness is somehow less than, I’ve also chafed at the way the details of my life have, at times, felt secondary, even tertiary, to the discussion of toddler sleep schedules and diets. Many women my age who don’t want children are bracing themselves for the point when the invites thin out, when the interest in their careers, their relationships and their hobbies begin to wane. And yet women on the “other side” have similar worries, who talk with heartbreak of friends who dismissed their children from the off. One close friend who had two under two – a career-driven household breadwinner – has spoken often about hating the way her identity has been pigeonholed solely into “mum”.

We can blame this feeling of being hard done by each other on the rise of individualism or an epidemic of selfishness. But to do so means falling into a seductive trap. The enemy is not our friends. All of this perceived antagonism is a direct result of a culture that prizes women with no agency at all. It feels almost trite to point out the obscene lack of infrastructure to support young families in the UK and US, where this discussion is most prominent, leaving them strapped for cash, time and energy. We are also at a disorienting inflection point where being childfree isn’t taboo, exactly, and yet still comes with hostility and shame, and a similar one for mothers, where childcare has become much more egalitarian, but still typically falls more often on women, who are the ones usually forced to sacrifice larger parts of their social lives in heterosexual partnerships. All this masquerades as a feminist debate about competing interests, when really we are all suffering the same problem: a landscape for women that, no matter which you choose, leads to needless hardships and sometimes brutal consequences, exacerbated by a growing far-right social culture that seeks to make reality for all women even more brutal. This dichotomy of sexist caricatures – the harried, distracted mother, unable to hold a conversation, only ever staring adoringly at her baby, versus the needy, childless woman, adrift, whose personal problems are inconsequential, who’s “left behind” – should offend us all.

There’s no doubt we could make changes to be more caring towards each other – showing empathy for the exhaustion of motherhood; working to focus on the things that matter to our friends. But this debate distracts from the fact that, instead, aiming our efforts on these structural problems would incidentally make caring for each other a lot easier. We are not on opposing sides of an impossible issue, but together experiencing the consequences of a society that is not built to help women thrive and actively benefits when they don’t. No one wins by blurring their gaze and making an enemy out of who should be their ally.

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