Everybody is crapping on the article because of the title but if you read it, it offers good insights. The author relays her conversations with a bunch of people who definitely shouldn’t be procreating. These are very messed up, unhappy people. Almost all are children of immigrants. Nobody talks about the trauma of the people dragged around in childhood and thrust into a society where they can’t begin to figure out who they are but this article puts it on full display. All of the stories in the article taken together show that equating “a better life” with “buying a better car” is a fallacy.
When a young person says, “I don’t want to have children”, it’s a way of saying “my parents hurt me badly.” Most of the people featured in the article will grow up and have children. We should all hope that their pain weakens by that time.
Clarissa's Blog 
Another common denominator here is they are all relatively poor people. None of them sound successful in life and chose careers in an area that leads to poverty or border line poverty. Of course they don’t want children, and they certainly shouldn’t be bringing children into this world to grow up in poverty.
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That last paragraph describes why I don’t want kids, I grew up with parents who barely interacted with each other and only got married to legitimize their children. Then they got divorced and my mother’s second marriage was such a disaster that I decided to never get married, dealing with the primary care of a brother with autism didn’t help. I knew I did not want to deal with other people’s crap or be responsible for any more people, parents of teenagers shouldn’t marry new people or have any more kids
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I thought a common thread was that their classes on climate change and environmentalism terrified them into thinking that having children was both selfishly dooming the planet and also dooming the kid to a horrible life. Many said they had wanted kids until they took those classes (which, given the author’s “lens,” may have been brought out through leading questions, but still).
You’re not wrong that most also sounded like they had pretty traumatic upbringings, but the climate-fear training seemed like a huge factor. Pretty awful when your college education doesn’t prepare you to use your youth and enthusiasm to do your thing in the world and then pass the torch, but to terrify you into paralysis and extinction.
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It seems to me that the young people all took some kind of environmentalism class which indoctrinated them and made them feel hopeless about the future. It’s a rather non- representative sample. And I suspect the interviewer subtly influenced their responses. Or else the brainwashing was very thorough and they regurgitated the same talking points.
I didn’t catch much reference to trauma by the young people though.
Amanda
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This seems like another example of competition to define new modes of victimhood which can then be used to claim compensation from society, providing a career for academics and activists, and so on. Here the concept is “psychological stress due to thoughts of climate change, experienced by people of color and/or women of color”.
Now yes, if you’re poor or a refugee, you will be more vulnerable. However, did I note correctly that most of those interviewed, have been educated to believe in the danger of climate change? Because I would think that is far more predictive of e.g. environmentalist antinatalism, than what race you are. Let’s see how many white middle-class climate activists share these sentiments!
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Parenting breaks a lot of eggs to bake that cake.
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