84: Prontalism Explained And How it's Impacting You

If you are a childless woman who feels triggered by how mom-focused and kid-centric our society seems to be, you might be stuck in the pronatalist ideology.  If you're stuck here, you often feel like you are somehow worth less than mothers, you get irritated when someone asks if you have children, you feel  as though you're treated differently at work, at church or even in your social circles. 

Breaking free of the societal norms and expectations that stem from pronatalism is a key piece to feeling worthy in the world.  This is why I do what I do.  Ultimately, when we are able to shift our mindset as childless women, the world we see begins to change. 

On this solo episode, I am going to unpack pronatalism and its influence on how we feel about ourselves as childless women.  You'll discover:

• what pronatalism is
• my own story about how it affected my decisions on the childless path
• the mistakes I was making while trying to navigate pronatalism
• how pronatalism negatively affects mothers as well
• what do to about it all

My journey is not just about sharing experiences but also about extending an invitation to you. Together, we can challenge these outdated ideologies and empower ourselves to define our worth.  If you want me to show you how, DM me "episode 84" on Instagram.

Where to find Sheri:

Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

References from this episode:
Episode 55: My So-Called Selfish Life with Therese Shechter
Episode 67: Patriarchy and Pronatalism and Their Impact on Childless Women, with Jody Day
Episode 75: Who Will Take Care of Me When I Get Old? With Jody Day

If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide.  You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way. 
Click here for your free guide

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you are a childless woman who feels triggered by how mom focused and kid-centric our society seems to be, you might be stuck in the peronatalist ideology and if you're stuck here, you probably feel like you are somehow worth less than mothers, maybe get irritated when someone asks you if you have children and you feel as though you're treated differently at work or at church, or even in your social circles. Breaking free of this is a key piece to feeling worthy in the world and, for me, helping other women break free of this will change our world. So if you want to know how peronatalism might be affecting you and also to break free of it, stay tuned. Hi, I'm Sherri Johnson and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman about yourself, about your any power to change yourself, your future and maybe even the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I have to give some credit to Therese Schechter, who I interviewed on episode number 55. She introduced me to this whole concept of pronatalism. I didn't even know that word prior to that and once she did introduce me to this, it was like opening up Pandora's box. Therese created this documentary called my So-Called Selfish Life and it was really fascinating and opened me up to this whole box that we live inside of called pronatalism. It's a part of patriarchy and it affects everything. It affects women, it affects how we see ourselves in the world. I'm going to tell you about it. Therese chose not to have children, by the way, but it turns out that women who make that choice, or maybe even women who are ambivalent about having kids, are still very much affected by pronatalism and can be quite triggered by it. So someone who makes a choice not to have kids might not grieve in the same way that a woman who wanted kids grieves when she doesn't get to have them, but the worthiness part, the feelings of not being as good as the mothers that can be very much the same.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Let me take a few steps back to about six years ago when I was at the tail end of my fertility journey and I knew that I was nearing the end of the road for having kids and I was really triggered by people who gave me advice. There seem to be many people giving me advice, telling me about how they know someone who got pregnant at 45. There was this unspoken pressure to keep going, keep trying, try this thing that I'm telling you about, try this other thing that maybe you haven't heard of this, and also sometimes it was spoken, it was right out in the open. I talked to many women who would say things like never give up or you don't want to regret anything, meaning you don't want to regret deciding not to do IVF or not to try everything possible. People tell you what to do when they think they know what's best for you and most people are conditioned to believe that motherhood is better than not and maybe, if they're on the other side of it of that, if they are already a mother and they absolutely love it, then they do think that it's better. But it's that judgment that comes with it, or this feared judgment, that's what I felt. I thought if I stop before I go to every possible length, then maybe they're going to judge me for giving up, for not trying hard enough, or something like that. I really feared that, without actually really knowing that. I feared that and that really impacted my decision, our decision.

Speaker 1: 5:16

My husband and I had to decide at some point how much is enough, and for us that was before IVF. We didn't make it to IVF. We had already had a journey of three miscarriages, of many IUIs and some that never even made it to the full completion of the IUI cycle, and so by the time we got to IVF, the doctors were telling us we needed to use a donor egg, and there's all kinds of nuances and complexities and money and all kinds of things involved with that, and so we decided not to move forward. But that was not a black and white decision. It was not an easy decision.

Speaker 1: 6:02

I could not untangle what I wanted versus what everybody seemed to want for me. How badly did I want a child versus how much was I influenced by all of this conditioning and this societal pressure. I also had this fear of missing out. I already didn't belong in the mom club. I felt like I didn't belong in that club and I didn't know how to fit in with many of my friends and social circles where, where everybody was a mother and I felt excluded from all of the kid centric activities and I wasn't always invited to them. I wasn't always given a choice whether to come or not. I think maybe there was a lot of assumptions being made by my my mother friends who just thought well, I'll be bored or maybe I don't want to come because this is going to be a kid focused vacation and maybe I would have made that choice not to not to attend because of that. But I would have liked to have had the choice. So I did feel excluded and I also felt some very specific triggers. Mother's Day was a big one. I'm sure that you're feeling that one as well if you're listening to this podcast.

Speaker 1: 7:33

But I also felt different at work. I wasn't treated the same, wasn't given the same liberties that the mothers were, and I didn't even really realize that until I started to recognize this pro natalism and where it was showing up in my life I had, I didn't know, and so I would take on extra work. I would. I wouldn't leave at five. I didn't feel like I had an excuse to leave at five, so I was the one staying late after the moms went to pick up their kids. So I was some of it was self inflicted, but with some of that was happening at work, where I was being treated differently.

Speaker 1: 9:24

Now here are some of the mistakes that I was making through that process. I had allowed society's expectations of women to get all tangled up with what I wanted for myself, to the point where I didn't know the difference and I couldn't even identify what it was that I wanted. I lost touch with my desires. I was so entrenched, especially on my fertility journey, and and even this can happen at any point along the way this could be. You know, if you're a single person, for example, you know when I was in that stage of my life, which was a lot of my adulthood, that was all consuming. You know, I was constantly having to look for new friends who actually wanted to go out to the bars, who wanted to do things that single people do, so that I could meet people, and that was all consuming. And then, once I did meet my husband, then the, the getting pregnant became all consuming, and there's so much societal pressure to do these things, to follow the rules, to get married and then have kids, and then you raise your kids and then they go off to university and then you have a midlife crisis and then and so on, and I was so. I was so entrenched in that that I just couldn't even identify what it was that I wanted once. That was no longer available to me.

Speaker 1: 11:00

I was entrenched in the society that celebrates mothers and, by the way, if you think we don't celebrate mothers, you're probably not a mother if you're here listening to this podcast, but just in case you are, I used to be involved and sold products from a company that had multiple conferences and events and things going on every year, and at every single one of those events, somebody along the way asked all the mothers to stand up and then they proceeded to spend a couple of minutes celebrating those mothers, thanking them for taking the time, talking about how they understood the sacrifices that those mothers had made to get there and to that event or to that you know the time that they gave up with their kids to attend the event and whenever that happened, the mothers were being celebrated and the women without kids were sitting there watching all of this, feeling like they were less than, and I believed that they must have it better. I made myself less than I made their lives. I put their lives on a pedestal. I thought it must be better, so I fell into this trap as much as everybody else did.

Speaker 1: 12:23

This is what I originally did to fix this problem. I avoided everything. I stayed off social media, especially on holidays, mother's Day, halloween, first day of school Anytime when I thought that my Facebook feed would be filled with other people's kids, I stayed off social media. I also avoided any kind of kid centric event so barbecues with my friends, camping trips, social events, anything that where I knew there would be adults with kids, because I didn't want to be put in a situation where, you know, somebody finally asks me how I'm doing and then they're immediately interrupted by the kids. The other thing I was doing was venting. I would vent to others who I thought would understand, and and I later learned that venting just made me angry and it made the other people angry if they related and at the end of the day I still felt angry. So those were the mistakes that I was making. And and then something happened, and this is what happened.

Speaker 1: 13:36

I started to uncover what was beneath those triggers, and this was even before I interviewed Therese Schecter. It's when I really started this podcast. What I figured out was beneath those triggers was this feeling of being less than, this feeling of being less worthy, this feeling of being less valued, inadequate, and that relates to self worth. Hence the awakening worth podcast. And I took that a step further. I started to explore where that feeling of being less than might originate from, and not just the surface reasons, which are like the okay, I don't have kids, mothers are celebrated. That's the surface, but the deeper reason. And then I started talking to people like Therese Jecter and Jody Day, who also interviewed on this podcast a couple of times, and I started to uncover that some of that feeling of being less than was actually due to my own childhood beliefs that stuck with me into adulthood. But a lot of it also stemmed from this pronatalist conditioning. And that really starts the moment somebody puts a doll in your hand and invites you to play house be the mother.

Speaker 1: 15:04

And it continued for me at least at church, where mothers were celebrated as well, not just on Mother's Day, which was a big deal in the church that I attended, but also whenever the pastor repeated verses from the Bible that said things like be fruitful and multiply, and the message that you need to get married first. And that was repeated at school, where sex education centered around abstaining until you get married, because having a childhood of wedlock is going to ruin your life. And the underlying meaning there was get married and then procreate and that's the natural order of things. So that became ingrained in my head that there's something wrong if you're not following the natural order of things. And this was also repeated at work when policies to encourage caring for children were implemented. So in my working days, I remember the days when there were just I think it was three months of mat leave, and then that changed to a year, and most of my career before I started my coaching business were spent in human resources.

Speaker 1: 16:29

So I was a part of those conversations, and the conversations weren't about how do we make women more comfortable on while they're in the first year of caring for their kids. It was how do we keep up with the Joneses, joneses, it was what are other companies doing? Are they topping up the government, the government employment insurance for women who go on a year long mat leave and, by the way, I'm in Canada, so we have a year. Here in Europe, a lot of the countries have a year. I know some of them even have more than that, so they're up to 18 months in some countries. So my experience as an HR person in these conversations these weren't altruistic. In some cases they were. I shouldn't say that there are some women who were mothers and really had this understanding of women who were just in their postpartum months and needed that support. But most of the conversation was what are these other companies doing and how do we stay on top of the employer's choice list and how do we remain an employer of choice? How do we attract people, how do we attract talent to our organization? So that's how that was showing up at work.

Speaker 1: 18:00

And then the last piece is government policy, and this is something that can be pretty controversial. I've had some people reach out with some very angry comments when I start talking about government policy and how much of it is pronatalist. In many countries around the world, the birth rate has fallen, meaning that countries are struggling to maintain their population without immigration, and Jodi Day and I actually talked about this on her most recent interview that he taking care of the elderly in any country is. It's a pyramid scheme. You need younger people to keep coming into the pyramid to pay for the older people who are no longer working. So it's imperative for the economy to bring more people into it. A capitalist economy is based on this as well, but that's not it. That's actually not even the main thing that really makes me. That really highlights the pronatalist policies.

Speaker 1: 19:09

You might notice that immigration policies have changed for many countries recently because our birth rate has fallen and countries need more people. It's an issue that's actually been placed on the European Council's strategic agenda, this issue that the birth rates are falling and what are we going to do about it? So what countries are doing about it is putting policies in place that encourage having children. Restricting access to abortion is one of them, and the US is not the only country that has seen this happen in recent months and years. Government paid maternity leave is another one. Baby bonuses is another one. By the way, I realized that it's expensive to raise children and it doesn't bother me that a huge portion of my taxes, pay for other people's kids, education and health care and baby bonuses and all of that. That is not what bothers me and, as I said before, I don't expect that there's mothers listening to this. But if you are and you were led to believe that these policies are altruistic, you're going to want to think again, because governments all over the world are talking about how they can increase what they call native births versus immigration, so births of citizens of that country.

Speaker 1: 20:34

Interestingly, this whole, these pro natalist policies, doesn't actually just negatively affect people who don't have children. Mothers will will fight me and and say that these policies are needed, that these and they are needed, they, they. But they will argue that these policies are altruistic. Our government cares for our children, our government cares that we are able to pay for our children, but it but actually mothers are very impacted by pro natalist policy and pro natalist ideology. It's what makes them feel like they'll never be good enough. It's what tells all of us that the most important job in the world is caring for children, and that means putting yourself last, after everybody else has been taken care of, and that's what makes a mother a martyr. It's also what what drives childless women to keep themselves as busy as mothers? Because we do. We keep ourselves just as busy. We find other ways to do it. We make ourselves martyrs as well. We volunteer, we contribute to society. We tell ourselves that, well, I don't have kids, so I have this time that I need to fill, and I need to do it in an unselfish way. It's what tells all of us that you're more worthy when you're a mother, and it's what tells mothers that their value depends on how good a mother they are, which they measure in myriad ways. So what do we do about this?

Speaker 1: 22:19

Can you imagine a world where women are worthy whether they have children or not? That would be a world where the first thing people ask isn't do you have kids? It's a world where women don't feel compelled to talk about their kids incessantly. Not all women do that, but we all know someone who is who does. It's a world where women are free to really tap into what they truly desire, instead of operating within all this societal pressure and expectation that they should go to extreme lengths to have a child. It would also be a world where women could put themselves first without feeling selfish. It'd be a world where women feel free to make choices about their lives without the influence of this ideology. Can you imagine what that kind of world would feel like? This is what I stand for, and it's going to be up to us Us, the women, meaning the women without kids we are going to have to change this.

Speaker 1: 23:35

This way of thinking isn't the norm, but a lot of childless women are becoming very awake to it because, being a woman without kids, it shines a light on the self-worth issues that pronatalism causes, and we have this opportunity to recognize it and do something about it. We can either go through the rest of our lives feeling triggered and annoyed by the questions that stem from this pronatalist ideology, like the first question is always do you have kids? Or we can heal ourselves. We can break free of this ideology, and that starts within, and that's why I do this. This is why I created my group immersion program. The first step is simply becoming aware of it, and that's what you're doing right now.

Speaker 1: 24:25

By listening to this podcast. You are becoming aware, and you may be skeptical right now of this. I know I was at first. It was quite eyeopening when I started to read about pronatalism and how it fits into patriarchy and suddenly my eyes were opened and I realized how I had been living inside of this box and I didn't even know it. So breaking free of that isn't expecting everybody else to stop asking the question. We have to first heal ourselves and get out of that box so that we can feel free and confident and worthy as childless women.

Speaker 1: 25:18

And if you are someone who wants to do that, if you want to break free of this pronatalist ideology, you want to get out of this box so that you can then begin to change the world with me, then send me a DM. Use the word Episode 84. That's what this is and I will show you what to do. I'm going to end on that note and I hope that you will send me that DM. And even if you aren't ready to break free, I would love to start a conversation about this. So just send me a DM and tell me what you think of this episode. I am really curious and excited to hear your thoughts. That's it for now. See you on the next episode.