Although some people have always opted out of parenthood, Blackstone said the child-free by choice movement, to which she and her husband belong, gained momentum in the 1970s — a confluence of second-wave feminism, the increased availability of birth control and a push among some environmentalists for the so-called zero-population growth movement.

There was another surge of public interest during the Great Recession of 2007-09, she said, when birthrates dropped, as they often do during economic downturns. The rates took another hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time, Blackstone said, that revealed massive cracks in our social safety net, especially for parents.

For Rachel Cargle, a writer and entrepreneur who lives in Ohio, getting an up-close view of just how overextended most parents are was one factor in her decision not to have children.

While working as a live-in nanny in Washington, D.C., and New York in her 20s, she studied the families for whom she worked. They were fairly wealthy, she said, and even still she could see the immense stress.

“They were on a hamster wheel,” she said.

Although she envies the youthful energy that courses through the homes of her friends with children, Cargle, now 35, said she has found deep peace in her decision to remain child-free. It has given her more time and ease to do things she loves, such as travel with her niece, swim laps and run a bookstore in her hometown of Akron.

She also created the popular child-free-by-choice Instagram account called Rich Auntie Supreme— part of a growing online community that stands as a counterweight of sorts to the wave of“traditional wife” influencers, tradwives, for short, who flood TikTok with videos of fresh-from-scratch recipes, advice about submitting to your husband and their children lined up by height.

“I wanted these things that often feel luxurious for women, like time, like rest, like money,” Cargle said. “It’s really about a celebration of a choice.”

Quinn and Coelho-Kostolny spent several years exploring that choice.

They had both assumed, earlier in life, that they would have children — not because the idea particularly excited them, but because society had all but meshed the identities of adulthood and parenthood.

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