97: Challenging Pronatalism's Effect on Purpose and Fulfillment

I'm doing a solo episode today and pulling back the curtain on pronatalism even further.  In this episode, I will peel away the layers of this pervasive belief system, examining how it shapes the sense of purpose and self-worth in those of us without children.  By uncovering historical and contemporary pressures from society, government, and religion, we pave the way for acceptance and a redefined sense of meaning and purpose beyond traditional expectations.

Tune in to find out: 

• what pronatalism is and how it affects our subconscious beliefs about purpose
• how my own sense of purpose and fulfillment unfolded over a number of years
• how your own sense of purpose might be affected by pronatalism and what to do about it

Where to find Sheri:
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Website: sherijohnson.ca

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Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Chapters

• 0:00 Unveiling the Impact of Pronatalist Ideology
• 8:04 What is pronatalist ideology
• 8:44 Here is what it feels like to be stuck in pronatalist ideology:
• 13:31 Mistakes you might be making to fix this
• 22:14 What you need to do to create purpose

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you are a childless woman and you're still feeling a bit blab about your life it doesn't feel fulfilling or meaningful, or maybe you have this nagging feeling that there's just got to be more to life than where you're at Then this episode is for you. We're going to go deep on one thing, one specific thing that is actually a really big thing and it's probably holding you back from finding meaning and purpose. So stick with me if you want to know if you're falling into this trap. Hi, I'm Sherry 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 This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms.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, and thank you for putting me in your ear for a half hour. I don't take that lately that you're willing to spend more than a three-second Instagram reel with me, so thank you. I'm very grateful that you're here.

Speaker 1: 1:48

So if you are a childless woman you probably are if you're listening to this and you're feeling a lack of purpose, or maybe it's creativity or meaning, because you thought that you were going to get all those things from raising children, you might be stuck in this ideology that is so very prevalent in our society and yet it's kind of invisible. It's pronatalism. You might have heard me talk about this before. I've definitely talked about it on this podcast, with my guests, on some of my own, and I've also talked about it on other people's podcasts. But in case you're new here and haven't heard much about this, here's what pronatalism is. It's any kind of policy, whether it's government, religious or other that promotes having children. It's really been going on for centuries and it's so deeply programmed in us to believe that a woman's purpose is to have and raise children. So it comes from this and this is controversial, by the way, there are lots of mothers who will not admit to this and this might feel. If you're a mother, you might be listening to this, thinking what the heck like this is. These are all good things that I'm about to say.

Speaker 1: 3:11

So the first is government. Government has a lot of policies that promote having kids and also deter people from making a decision not to have kids. So these are things like policies around maternity leaves, long maternity leaves, which is becoming more of a trend, baby bonuses, offering just money to people who have kids, free childcare anything that makes it easier for people to have kids. And here's the controversy. The mothers will chime in here and maybe even some of the non-mothers will chime in here and say, yeah, but that's our government taking care of us. It's our government trying to make it. It's so expensive to have kids, so they're trying to make it easy. No, the government is not thinking of the individual person and making their life better. They're either thinking of getting elected again or, in some other countries and this is the way that it used to be centuries ago it was about promoting people to have more kids because it boosts the economy, or, in centuries ago it increased the number of people that could join the armies, that could then go out and fight battles. So government promotes having kids generally. Most governments do. Even China has changed their tune. They were trying to deter population growth and had a one kid policy in place that they have now reversed and they're still the largest, most populist country in the world. So also government policy, any policy that actually makes it harder to avoid having children. So the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US that is a huge one. The banning of birth control that is still the case in many countries out there. Banning elective sterilization surgeries like vasectomies or having your tubes tied, banning all of those ways that people use to stop having kids that is that's government pronatalist policy.

Speaker 1: 5:27

You will also see it show up in religious context. So an example here is the Catholic Church not allowing a marriage to take place in their church without a commitment from that couple to have children. And now I am not Catholic and I'm not up on their doctrines and mandates, so that may have changed by now. I don't know. Or maybe there are some churches within the Catholic realm that are able to do their own thing and have allowed that. I don't know how much leeway there is within the individual parishes to do their own thing, but that is prevalent in many religions.

Speaker 1: 6:08

There is still a focus on children be fruitful and multiply. There's this sense. You know, when you have children you create more of us, more Christians, more Hindus, more whatever, more people in our religion. And then there's also societal programming, societal beliefs. We buy into this Media advertising. This is also changing. But you still see, you know in, you still see lots of ads that show sort of the ideal family as having kids. It is never. It's never. You know, when you don't see the insurance, the life insurance company showing an elderly couple that doesn't have kids or showing a young couple that doesn't have babies, there the ads are still directed in large part towards maybe it's not so much a nuclear family or this perfect white family of a man and his wife and a boy and a girl. There might be interracial couples, there might be LGBTQ couples represented in the media now, but there's still a lot of kids, so that societal pressure to have kids is still there.

Speaker 1: 7:40

And then you also have, like just capitalist leaders doing their fear mongering, telling us that the world economy is going to collapse if we don't start having more kids, all of the horrible things that are going to happen to our world if we don't start having more than our two and a half, I think, is our average here. That might have changed. Actually, I think it might be lower now. So that is what pro-natalist ideology is. It is a subset of patriarchy. It's hard to see the medium that we are living in. So this might be a new concept for you if you're new to the podcast, and so I just encourage you to keep an open mind and kind of look at these things in maybe a slightly different way. Look at it from the perspective of childless women. Consider that our government may not have our individual best interests at heart or that there may be an alternative motive. So that is pro-natalist ideology.

Speaker 1: 8:45

Here's what it feels like to be stuck in that ideology, and I think of it as a sort of box or a fishbowl where you are in the water and it's very hard to step out of that and see what it looks like in there when you're swimming in it. So here's what it feels like, as it relates to purpose, which is what this episode is really kind of focused on. So there might be so pro-natalism. It teaches us all kinds of things, it conditions us in so many different ways, and we're just gonna hone in for today on how it affects our ideas of purpose and meaning. So this is what it feels like to be stuck in this ideology as it relates to that.

Speaker 1: 9:39

There might be a feeling of hopelessness because now that you no longer see children in your future well, now what you know? What is there to look forward to? What kind of hope do I have for a purposeful future? There might be a feeling of emptiness or a craving for something that you thought would be fulfilled by motherhood, and now you don't know what is going to fill that gap. You might even have a feeling that you will never measure up to the mother's, whatever you do, whatever vocation you choose, whatever cause you support, because it will never be as good or important as that of having children. And maybe you even believe that you are not as good as a mother, not just your potential for purpose. Now, some of the things that you might be doing to try to fix this. Let's talk about that.

Speaker 1: 13:36

First of all, trying to get through the grief and hoping for your purpose or meaning to sort of just reveal itself, to unfold as you come out of the fog, is the first mistake. I made that for a long time that mistake, and unfortunately it doesn't happen. You actually need to take some action. The second mistake you might be making is is making purpose a destination, something that you're going to discover sometime in the future, and you just need to keep looking for it. Purpose isn't a destination and it isn't necessarily one thing. It may be a series of small steps that lead to a feeling of meaning, but taking the first step actually creates meaning, it creates purpose. So it's not just, it's not this destination that somewhere out there that you need to find, it's something, it's a journey. Let's put it that way. It's the journey, it's not the destination. And then the third mistake that you might be making is putting pressure on yourself to come up with something. Come up with something big, something that's going to make up for what you haven't contributed to in the world, or what you haven't contributed to the world, something that's going to compensate for the purpose that you feel that you will not realize.

Speaker 1: 15:01

As a non-parent, now, I made all those mistakes, as I said, but I also think that maybe I was a little bit different in that I, from the moment I started working, I felt unfulfilled. I felt like there was supposed to be some job that would feel meaningful for me. I always felt that way, and when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was working in a job that did not bring me any kind of meeting. I was working in human resources for very large companies that had a department working just on number crunching and compensation and determining compensation strategy for these companies on a broad level, and that's what I was doing. It sounds really boring and there were parts of it that were interesting. I kept doing it for 20 years. I still do it here and there, confession, but it's not meaningful work to me. Even the companies that I was working for didn't hold, you know, their, their missions did not hold a lot of meaning for me.

Speaker 1: 16:21

So I you know, by the time I was about 39, I finally started following my intuition. Before that, I kept buying into well societal advice. My dad's advice was just to get a job that pays the bills and do your passions on the weekend. That was what he always said. So I was 39 in the workforce for 25 years because I started working very young and that was when I finally started to follow that intuition and finally follow the nudges that I was feeling, and I don't know that I would have done this if I, if I had kids I don't know that I would have I would have felt much more tied to my job. I would have felt like I had to keep going in the job that I had. I was successful, I was making good money and if I had kids, I would have felt a real responsibility towards maintaining that sort of standard. I don't know that I would have actually started following my intuition, but I did feel this pull to find more meaning, and so what I did was one thing that changed the entire trajectory of my life.

Speaker 1: 17:40

I just asked myself what do I really like to do? What lights me up? And the answer to that was fitness and health magazines. I loved, I loved to read health magazines. Anything I could get my hands on that told me you know what nutritious food looked like, how to move my body in a way that was gonna make it feel good and and look good. I admit, in those days I still wanted to. That was still important to me and, of course, in some ways it still is. I'm not totally over that, but I just I wondered what is there that I could do that would allow me to do more of this, somehow get into the health industry to do more of that and so I started researching and I found a. At the time, it was 2011, and so there weren't a ton of these like online sorts of programs, so this was a correspondence program that I was able to do from home, and it was a nutrition program Holistic.

Speaker 1: 18:50

I became a registered holistic nutritionist eventually, and I didn't know where that was gonna lead me. I was still working my full-time job. I didn't know if I was ever going to actually practice being a nutritionist. I just wanted to do something that was interesting, something that was inspiring, something that would maybe make some changes in my life. And then the universe gave me a bit of a nudge and I got laid off from Blackberry, where I was working at the time along with thousands of other people, and so I went and finished that diploma and I started practicing as a registered holistic nutritionist. I served everybody and anybody. I didn't have a focus until I started my journey.

Speaker 1: 19:36

I had a miscarriage and then I struggled. I had three miscarriages, actually, and I struggled with infertility, and so I wanted to get my hormones in balance, and so I started working with women who wanted that. And then I started working with women who'd had miscarriages and helping them to recover, and I started using essential oils. And I realized that there were essential oils that could help emotional healing, and so I started using those with the women that I was helping to get through miscarriage. And then I was helping women to get through infertility, and then, as my own journey changed and progressed, I realized that I was going to remain a childless woman and realized that there was a lot of space there to help women get through that. And so, while I still use essential oils and I still use nutrition, there's such a link between our physical and emotional healing.

Speaker 1: 20:37

But I really hone in on obviously you know this already if you've been listening to the podcast for a while that it's really about mindset. It's about uncovering the things that we believe that keep us from living our best lives, and it's about breaking down the pronatalism, the patriarchy, the things that have caused us to feel like we are not worthy. We're not as worthy as women who have kids, and this has become very I mean, there was meaning all along the way. I was feeling more purpose as I progressed along that path, and it was not a destination. I'm still not at the destination, even though I feel very good about the work that I'm doing. Now. I feel a lot of meaning and fulfillment and I love what I do. I do it on the weekends and just for fun. This is how much I like what I do and how much purpose and meaning I feel in it, but it's still. I'm still not at the destination. There is no destination. I will probably keep evolving and this path for me I don't know, maybe I'll be doing something different in 10 years, five years, one year. So I just keep following the nudges, I keep following my intuition, and when I do that, it guides me to what makes me feel the way I want to feel.

Speaker 1: 22:14

So here's what I did and what I recommend you do if you want to break free of this pronatalist ideology that tells us that purpose can only be found in motherhood. There's a couple things. Number one, letting go of the belief that children are a purpose. And though mothers may not be willing to admit this, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the women who are mothers still feel unfulfilled. They still feel like there's this niggling feeling that they're not in the right job or that there's something else, that they're supposed to be doing, something additional. And I believe that the mothers who are not doing anything other than raising kids and telling themselves that their kids are their purpose, they're lying to themselves. Sure, there are women out there who serve children and feel a lot of purpose by doing that, but it's not just having a family in and of itself that brings purpose. And those women who are telling themselves that they're just afraid to take the courageous steps toward the niggling feeling, towards what's actually going to give them purpose. The next thing that I want you to know.

Speaker 1: 23:34

So the first is letting go of the belief that children are a purpose. The next thing is letting go of the pressure. There's so much pressure for purpose to be big and purpose. Can you know, some people find meaning in just helping one person, making one person's life better in some small way. That can feel very meaningful. And you know, I still find myself telling myself that what I'm doing now isn't enough, that there's something bigger, something more impactful. I'm not helping enough people. There's still that little voice in my mind that tells me that. But then there's another part of me that fully well, it doesn't fully, because I still have that little part of me that's telling me this isn't enough, this isn't big enough. But then there's another part of me that tells me to just trust that I am in the right place at the right time and everything else will begin to unfold as I continue to take the steps, as I continue to follow my intuition, as I take that, those actions. So, letting go of the pressure for your purpose to be big. You know me becoming a nutritionist, that was not a big, huge purpose, it was just something that made me feel more fulfilled. It was a niggling feeling that I followed.

Speaker 1: 25:05

The third thing that I want you to consider is tapping into your intuition, and this is actually a bigger ask than you might even realize, because, as women, we have been suppressing our intuitive guidance all of our lives. It starts the moment we stop listening to our bodies, which can begin very young. You know you're sitting at the table and your mother tells you to clean your plate You're not hungry anymore, but you've got to finish your plate and maybe she tries to manipulate or coerce you into eating what's on your plate by telling you there are little boys or little girls in Nigeria who are starving. You're not going to eat what's on your plate. And as soon as that little child begins to internalize, I have to clean my plate. It's not about how I feel inside, it's not about whether I'm hungry or not. It's I have to please my parent by cleaning my plate. That's the first.

Speaker 1: 26:18

It's it's those small moments when we stop listening to our body, we stop noticing the things that are telling us we're on the right path or we're not. You know, in adulthood we we walk down the street as as women. You're walking towards, it's dark, you're on the sidewalk, you're walking home or wherever you're walking to, and there's a man walking towards you and the hairs on the back of your neck rise up and you tell yourself I'm not going to cross the street because that's going to look rude. I'd be curious to know if you've done that. I certainly have, and I will not judge if you have as well. But that is you telling yourself that your intuition is wrong. It's your desire to be nice overtaking your intuition, which is what most little girls have been told to do. We're supposed to be nice. We're not supposed to be rude. We're supposed to be nice. So we need to start listening to our bodies. Our bodies tell us what our intuition is saying, and it's the intuition that's going to tell you what to do next.

Speaker 1: 27:29

You all have, you have felt that niggling feeling before, this feeling that you need to do something, or this feeling that you shouldn't do something, but you do it anyway because you're either afraid or you don't want to be. You know, you're afraid of what someone might think, you're afraid of what it might do to you. There's all kinds of fears that keep us from following our intuition. Mine told me that niggling feeling. It told me to just start thinking about what I enjoy, and it was the simplest thing. I like reading magazines. I like reading magazines about health specifically, and then I started asking are there things that I could do that would incorporate that joy into my life more often? Or how else can I incorporate that into my life? So that's number three is is tapping into your intuition, following the niggling feeling, this feeling that you need to do something. You felt it before. I know you have. So that is that's what I recommend you do. Those are three things.

Speaker 1: 28:34

There are lots of things that we get into in my program, in the women of worth there are. You know, these things have more. There's more to them. It's not just. Let's just all tap back into our intuition. It's not that easy. There's there's some, some deprogramming that needs to happen in order to tap into that again and to allow it and to actually believe it. And same with letting go of the pressure that your purpose doesn't have to be too big. Same with letting go of the belief that children are a purpose. There's some unwiring or rewiring in the brain that needs to happen. So we go through all of that inside the women of worth program and so if you want to know more about that, send me a DM on Instagram and with the word program In the meantime, I'm guessing that if you're listening to this, you are someone who knows that finding purpose, that creating purpose, creating joy, creating meaning all of those things are a possibility even without kids.

Speaker 1: 29:43

And if you're listening to this, you're probably already open and ready to take some action towards doing that, creating your best life, a life of meaning, of joy, of purpose.

Speaker 1: 29:54

And if you are, then I want you to download my free guide to creating your best year right now. We're already six weeks into February. That is nowhere near too late. So go and download that at sherryjohnsonca slash best year I have a link to that in the show notes and start taking these small steps towards creating your best life. Start now you're going to start to see the possibilities, the small incremental changes that are going to make a huge difference on your life, and even in just in 2024. Thank you so much for listening once again. I am so glad that you've decided to hit play and I would love it if you would also hit the follow button or the subscribe or whatever it says on the platform that you're listening to and come back next week. I have a really special episode. We're going to start getting really woo woo and my sister is going to my sister. My twin sister and I are going to do an episode together, so come back next week and listen to that. Bye for now.