NPR: Happy One-Parent Day!
On Mother's Day, public media cheers parenting-as-self-actualization. It's all about you, adults!
A few weeks ago, NPR ran a 36-minute segment titled, “Many women don’t want kids. And for good reason,” examining questions like, “What do child-free adults — or especially child-free women — symbolize politically?” The segment decried the “panic” and “stigma” of a society pressuring women to have children, especially among “religious” and “socially conservative” groups who believe having children is “sort of a core part of being human,” something one just does, like “cooking” or “going to church.”
It’s true that Vice President J.D. Vance in 2021 made a crack about the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” a line that was much denounced both at the time and in the runup to the 2024 election (there were more laughs when Democratic consultant Rick Wilson described Donald Trump supporters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime”). The April NPR segment promoted the term “child-free” instead of Vance’s stigmatizing “childless,” theorized that “pronatalists” are really just worried about higher birth rates among non-white people, and took umbrage with those who “scaremonger you and say you’re going to sort of die a lonely death.”
NPR celebrated Mother’s Day with “Why more women are choosing to be single mothers.” Raised in part by a single mother, I’d never denigrate one, but the title of the holiday segment was at least a little funny weeks after celebrating “child-free by choice,” so I tuned in. Wow. Even by NPR standards, it’s a classic:
