Avoidantly Attached, Actively Childfree: How Parental Bonding Shapes the Choice to Opt Out of Parenthood
Monday, may 12, 2025.
The decision not to have children used to be whispered. Now it’s algorithmic.
And increasingly? It’s not just about climate anxiety, career freedom, or rising egg prices. It’s also about attachment.
A new large-scale study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Glass & Fraley, 2025) has found that adults who report Avoidant Attachment toward their parents are significantly more likely to identify as childfree—not childless by circumstance, but by conscious choice.
Meanwhile, those who show Anxious Attachment to parents are somewhat less likely to opt out of parenting altogether.
This isn’t about blaming moms.
It’s about understanding how early emotional bonds quietly contour adult life—and why, for some, the idea of raising children doesn’t stir longing. It stirs alarm bells.
Not Just Personal—But Relational
The childfree identity has been studied through many lenses: feminism, economics, climate ethics, pronatalism, antinatalism, queer theory.
But this new study from Glass and Fraley brings it home—literally—to the earliest template for caregiving: your relationship with your own parents.
Drawing on data from more than 18,000 adults across several countries, the researchers measured attachment style to key figures—mother, father, romantic partners, close friends—alongside self-reported parental status and intentions.
Their findings were quietly seismic:
Avoidant Attachment to parents (especially mothers) was the strongest predictor of being childfree.
Anxious Attachment to parents predicted the opposite—slightly more likelihood of becoming a parent.
Attachment style to romantic partners? Not significantly related.
Attachment to friends had a minor effect—mostly for anxious individuals citing mental health concerns.
Let that sink in: How you related to your parents mattered more than how you relate to your partner in predicting whether you want to become a parent yourself.
Different Attachment Styles, Different Childfree Reasons
It’s not just about whether people opt out—it’s about why.
Childfree participants high in attachment avoidance were more likely to endorse lifestyle reasons: keeping personal freedom, avoiding loss of identity, or rejecting the time costs of childrearing.
The child, in this worldview, risks becoming an emotional annex—another source of unwanted dependency.
By contrast, those high in Anxious Attachment were more likely to cite fear-driven reasons: poor mental health, global instability, or fear of messing up a child the way they feel they were messed up.
“People who are more avoidant in their relationships were more likely to be childfree for lifestyle reasons. People who are more anxious were more likely to be childfree because of worries and fears,”
—Sara Glass, lead author
This distinction matters clinically. It reminds us that the childfree identity is not a monolith. One person may feel liberation. Another may feel fear disguised as autonomy.
Therapist Note: The Client Who Says, “I Just Don’t Like Kids”
Let’s be honest: we’ve all heard it. The flat declaration in session, sometimes proud, sometimes defensive:
“I just don’t like kids.”
This study invites a different follow-up than a therapist might typically ask.
Instead of:
“What bothers you about them?”
Try:
“How were you comforted when you were a kid?”
“When you were upset as a child, who came? And how?”
“What was it like to rely on someone emotionally?”
Because often, it’s not about kids per se.
It’s about vulnerability aversion, rehearsed early, worn smooth over time, and understandably extended to the idea of caregiving itself.
This isn’t pathology. It’s logic born from painful life experience.
Cultural Implications: Parenthood as a Litmus for Belonging
Childfree people are often asked to explain themselves—why they don’t want kids, as if this sort of decision requires footnotes.
This study suggests that their choice might be less of a reaction to society and more of an internalized relational map.
When early caregiving models felt intrusive or absent, caregiving might not symbolize joy or legacy. It might symbolize depletion.
This becomes especially relevant when considering that nonbinary folks in the study were three times more likely to identify as childfree in the study—a pattern worth further exploration. The overlap between gender nonconformity, family boundary violations, and resistance to reproductive scripts is likely not coincidental.
Don’t Pathologize the Childfree—But Understand Them
To be clear, being childfree isn’t a symptom of attachment insecurity.
Despite my bias toward pro-natalism, I’ve come to view it as a rational, ethical, and deeply personal decision.
But what I appreciate about this research is that it helps therapists ask better questions—especially when the childfree identity is fused with emotional avoidance or fear.
And for clients grappling with indecision?
Attachment histories may hold clues. A desire to parent can coexist with panic about repeating painful patterns. An avoidance of parenting can sometimes mask grief over having never been safely parented.
What we do with that awareness isn’t to push people toward children.
It’s to help them understand their own emotional blueprint—so that decisions about becoming a parent come from clarity, not unexamined history, and that children born are wanted.
Future Research and Lingering Questions
The authors are clear: this is correlational research.
We don’t yet know whether Avoidant Attachment causes childfree decisions, or whether choosing to be childfree strains parental relationships after the fact.
But we do know that attachment styles tend to be somewhat predictive—and persistent.
Future studies might track whether these patterns change over time, especially as attachment wounds are addressed in therapy, or as childfree individuals age into different seasons of life.
One particularly compelling angle?
The overrepresentation of nonbinary participants in the childfree community.
Is the decision not to parent intertwined with gendered resistance to caregiving roles?
With the trauma of being misgendered in familial systems? With seeking autonomy over a body that was too often surveilled?
Big questions. Worth asking.
Final Thought: A New Kind of Inheritance
There’s a line from therapist and author Terrence Real that comes to mind:
“We can’t choose the families we come from, but we can choose the legacies we leave behind.”
For some, that legacy is biological.
For others, it’s relational, creative, or communal.
What this study reminds us is that our own experience of being raised can shape whether we choose to raise anyone else—and that choice, either way, is rarely random.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Glass, S., & Fraley, R. C. (2025). Attachment orientations predict the likelihood of choosing to be childfree and the reasons for not wanting children. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167224123456