Millennial Offers Her Theory on Today's Parenthood Fears

The way things are trending, millennials might end up with the highest rate of childlessness of any generation in US history, writes Michal Liebowitz in a New York Times essay. As a member of that generation herself, Liebowitz susses out the usual reasons offered for the stat, everything from the expenses involved, to climate change doom, to a preferred emphasis on careers. All might play a role, but "I want to suggest that there's another reason my generation dreads parenthood," writes Leibowitz:

• "We've held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet."

Liebowitz's essay explores this in detail, noting how working moms today devote as much time to child care as stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s. "And yet we adult children seem increasingly likely to find fault with our parents and perhaps to manifest this fault finding by cutting them out of our lives," she writes. Read the full essay, in which Liebowitz says she and her husband considered all of the above but decided to "put aside our doubts" and a have a child of their own. (More millennials stories.)