Millennials on motherhood

Good grief, I can tell you’re thinking. Is this it? All that education, sexual liberation and feminist emancipation, just so we can sit around talking about our biological clocks? Well, yes and no. While it might not be something we think about every day, our fertility is a hot topic.

Let’s make it clear that my friends and I do not want to have children now. That would be absurd. We are the “You only live once” generation: tindering commitment-phobes, leaving the majority of life’s big decisions until later, barely capable of covering our own rent and driven to anxiety over, well, everything. Imagine if, on top of that, we had to think about anyone other than ourselves!

But we know that we do want children. More than one, in fact, as well as all the things you’d expect women from my generation to want (the big career, financial independence, Dior’s £700 feminist slogan T-shirt). What has changed is when we want them, and how we talk about it. Because despite all the dating apps, our supposed prolonged adolescence and technology making everything faster, adaptable and more convenient, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed: our biology. And that is clearer to my generation than any before us.

Women my age straddle two camps of female role models. The first are our mothers, many of whom did not work, or worked part-time. They had us and our siblings at the age we are now and poured their time, energy and resources into raising us, instead of having a career. The second are the women we work with who, though now in the influential positions at work we one day want, woke up at 39 and realised they had forgotten to have children. Whoops.

Then there are the women we see on screen. Yes, we love Bridget Jones and the Sex and the City girls. But they didn’t speak to my generation. Which is probably why, when it comes to having children, we don’t identify with the characters as well. We’re not desperately single, as Bridget was, and we don’t want to wind up, at 43, pregnant by accident. We want the sexual freedom and refuse-to-settle attitude Carrie and her gang had, but not for that to mean we end up childless.

So: the women who chose children, or the women who chose a career. We do not want to be either. Instead, we we want to know how to be both.

Most of my friends want to have had all of their children by 35. Many would be comfortable having their first child at 30. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Millennials hate uncertainty. It dictates nearly every area of our lives. Because of that, we love to plan. Doing so – if only superficially – gives us some feeling of control over our futures, which are otherwise a very much grey area.

We’re also the most switched-on to our bodies that young women ever have been. Contraception has been a talking point since we were 11, with information about it shoved down our throats in PSHE lessons (personal, social, health and economic education) before most of us had even plucked up the courage to talk to the opposite sex. At my all-girls school, pregnancy was viewed as the ultimate scandal; methods in avoiding it were dictated liberally. When I went to boarding school for sixth form, you could even pop into matron for the morning-after pill, or to have an implant put in. Coy, we ain’t.

But all that access to contraception – which I am by no means suggesting is a bad thing, by the way – has had its repercussions. Many of us don’t feel that we were educated sufficiently on the impact of which contraceptive we chose. My friends have been blindly swallowing the Pill for ten years. It always felt like our only option – the best option – and yet there is so much conflicting information around whether that is true.

Writer Hannah Rogers, 24

DAN KENNEDY

I started taking the Pill at 13, in an effort to control irregular periods. Pills so often aren’t prescribed only as a contraceptive. One will treat acne, another help you lose weight, others to keep mood swings at bay. The killer is that what usually prevents one thing will cause another. As someone who suffered with a touch of all of those symptoms, I was having to change my Pill – and thus my hormone intake – every few months.

I’m not alone, and it’s no wonder now that the majority of my friends and I have moved on to the coil. After years of never quite knowing down which rabbit hole of adolescent symptoms a new Pill would take you, and thousands spent on dermatologists, therapy and laser hair removal, we’ve called it quits on them all together.

Still, this doesn’t change how that rollercoaster onslaught of hormones might have affected our fertility. It’s definitely a reason we think so much about it, especially, when many of us later learnt that those side effects – the acne, the needs-waxing-twice-a-month body hair, the mood swings and difficulty losing weight – were actually the result of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

PCOS is caused by an imbalance in a woman’s “male” and female hormones. It makes ovulation difficult, but not impossible, and no one really knows why one woman will have it and another won’t. But it’s become a near constant talking point for my generation. Nearly all my friends have it, and those who don’t have sisters or friends who do. In the UK, it affects one in five women.

I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was 18, after talking about the symptoms with a friend. That’s another point: we’re also the sharing generation. We thrive on talking about our problems, with our friends, therapists, strangers in the smoking area. I can’t swipe through my Instagram without updates on Girls actress Lena Dunham’s latest endometriosis drama, or comedian Amy Schumer laughing about her periods. The female body, embarrassing or otherwise, is no longer an off-limits subject.

Which is probably why PCOS feels so rife in my generation. Much like the anxiety epidemic, we’re aware of it because we’re able to talk about its symptoms more openly. In the same way, we talk about the fact that many of our doctors recommend we get on with having kids from as early as 27. If that doesn’t kick-start you into life planning, I don’t know what will. Far more so than generations before ours, we’re having to stare it in the face.

Another reason our reproductive health is on our minds is because we are obsessed with our health generally. We are the clean/lean/green generation, fixated on fitness and avocado smoothies. What time isn’t spent in the office or down the pub is in a spin class. So, it’s not surprising that we think more about how our lifestyle choices might affect our fertility. A number of my friends have expressed concern about what their hard partying might be doing to their ovaries.

Being the Tinder generation has also opened up the channels to baby talk. How could an app that helps us to play the field, sleep around and avoid commitment, raise questions over having children? Well, by being exactly that. Generations before us had no trouble settling down. They found someone they liked, got married and had children. But we’re always looking for someone better; we’re finding life partners far later.

It’s why my friends talk about freezing eggs if they haven’t found someone by their mid-thirties. Having kids is more important to us than having a husband. We don’t feel the need to stay in one relationship, just because society dictates it. That’s not to say we want to be a single parent. It’s also not to say we’ll feel like that in ten years’ time. But having the option undoubtedly opens up the conversation.

For the girls, at least. It probably won’t surprise you that the boys haven’t thought twice about any of this. When probed, some said they had discussed having children from a financial perspective, thinking about how many kids they could afford. The only similarity between our male contemporaries and us is that they also ideally plan to have their kids young, and definitely by 35. Oh, and that they didn’t run a mile when broached on the subject? That’s new, too.

Still, why waste the energy worrying? It would be so easy for us to just leave it to fate; to wait and see. We’re the generation, after all, who refuse to grow up. We’ve so much more to see, experience and instagram.

But we’re also the generation who think we can have it all. Indeed, we have grown up being told that we can have it all – and not to, having had every opportunity put in front of you, would feel like failure.

But – and there is a big but – we know what our bodies are capable of, too. We’re definitely more accepting of that than generations before us, and that’s simply because it has been laid out in black and white from an earlier age. So no, we don’t want to have kids now. But we don’t want to wait to find out that we can’t later on, either.

All this fertility talk, really, is just smarter life planning. As I said, we do like to plan. And, yes, it might just be another woe of an already overly fraught generation. But if you really do want to have it all and the Dior T-shirt, it’s necessary.

Ruby, 24, marketing
The education we received on contraception and the effect it might have on our bodies was abysmal. We were just told to go on the Pill. No one ever suggested that other methods of contraception might be better.

I think a lot about whether my lifestyle – partying, drinking, stress, diet – is affecting my fertility. Maybe that’s a result of being part of the clean/green generation. But I would hate to be unable to get pregnant when I wanted to and find out that it could have been preventable.

I want to have children. It’s a “when” not “if” situation. But I want to have a big career. That’s the sticking point. The pressure on young women now to have both is suffocating. Society has changed, but our biology hasn’t. I think my generation feel more like ticking clocks than ever before.

Louise, 26, digital marketing
Advances in technology are on our side. I would definitely freeze my eggs if I hadn’t found the right partner by the time I reached the “ideal” reproductive age. I definitely want children, regardless of when/if that happens. We have so many more options outside the traditional boy-meets-girl format. I think that is probably why we think about our fertility despite being young. With so many choices available, you can’t help but do so.

Charlie, 24, food buyer
I know that we’re at our most fertile at this age. It does worry me that I should feel pressure to have children sooner rather than later. However, I am more focused on my career and social life at the moment. When it comes to thinking about children, I want it to be with absolutely the right person. But we now live in a world where we have so many options for potential partners (with the help of dating apps, etc). Finding the right person can seem impossible. We always wonder what or who else is out there.

There is still that traditionalist pressure from older family members and friends on us to settle down and think about marriage and children. But there is also pressure on us from society telling us that we should work hard to have the career we aspire to. I want both.

Julia, 28, journalist
A few summers ago, over lunch in Ibiza, a friend asked us all whether we’d freeze our eggs. For all of us, who had been handed packets of the Pill in our teens and chowed them down daily for years without really questioning anything (not the mood swings, or acne, or endless new prescriptions to try), it was the first of many chats we’d have about having children.

Some had never thought about it. But more of us were adamant that it was the just the kind of revolution needed for a generation of women who still have so much they want to tick off before they get round to having kids.

I’d love to have children. I’ve always thought they’ll figure in my life. Just not yet. The older I get and the closer I should be to wanting them, the less I want that to happen any time soon. I enjoy my independence, I like having a busy social life and I feel lucky to come to work not having had a sleepless night. Plus, plenty of women are popping them out later in life – most celebrities these days seem to give birth over 40.

But despite there seeming like we still have buckets of time, we still occasionally freak out that our ovaries might not actually work and we’ll discover this too late.

Millennials are often mocked for frittering away cash on brunches instead of saving for further down the line, but we do it because the future seems uncertain. We realise that simply working hard isn’t enough to get what you want from life.

The same applies to children. There’s always a fear you might not be able to have them. In the meantime we’ll just find our next boat party.

Shoot credits
Hair and make-up Lauren Alice at Mandy Coakley using using Nars and Bumble and Bumble, and Charlotte Lowes at Mandy Coakley using Estée Lauder and Bumble and Bumble