A 2013 Time magazine cover featured the headline, “The childfree life: When having it all means not having children” (Sandler and Witteman 2013). Indeed, data from the Centers for Disease Control document that the birthrate in the United States steadily declined between 2007 and 2013 (Martin et al. 2015), and a 2010 Pew Research Report estimates that 1 in 5 women in the United States will remain childfree (Livingston and Cohn 2010). The declining birthrate is not limited to the United States, but is also occurring in Europe, China, and Japan (CBS/AP 2014). This growing demographic of childfree adults provided the impetus for revisiting the literature regarding stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men.

In the present research, I used experimental methodology to investigate negative perceptions of people who choose not to have children. Specifically, my study examined whether targets who had chosen not to have children, compared with targets who had children, would be seen as less psychologically fulfilled. Unlike some previous studies that have examined such perceptions (e.g., Mueller and Yoder 1997), the present study also included target gender as a potential moderator of the relationship between target parenthood status and perceived fulfillment. Including target gender as a variable allowed for the possibility that penalties for disinterest in having children might be greater for women than for men. Most importantly, using the lens of backlash theory (Rudman and Fairchild 2004) and the model of retributive justice (Darley and Pittman 2003), my study identified an important mechanism responsible for the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree people: moral outrage.

Perceptions of People Without Children

Although by no means a voluminous literature, the study of perceptions of people who are without children of their own—whether by choice or by circumstance—is not new. Within the social psychological literature, the earliest studies appear to be from the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps a timely reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision on reproductive rights (Roe v. Wade 1973). These studies, as will be described later, were descriptive in nature and utilized both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Results—obtained with samples of male and female U.S. college students unless otherwise noted—consistently indicated less favorable perceptions of non-parents than of parents, with the least positive ratings often of voluntarily childfree people. Specifically, relative to those who had chosen to become parents, targets who had chosen not to have children were viewed as less fulfilled and more poorly adjusted psychologically (Jamison et al. 1979). Collectively, this literature demonstrates stigmatization of this childfree demographic. Perhaps the only targets stigmatized more than those who were voluntarily childfree were women who were pregnant and unhappy about it (Shields and Cooper 1983).

Researchers revisited these questions in subsequent years in samples of U.S. college students and working adults, and findings changed very little. Specifically, in the 1990s, Mueller and Yoder provided evidence that voluntarily childfree women not only were evaluated less favorably than mothers by both women and men (Mueller and Yoder 1997), but also reported experiencing more stigma and pressure about their parenthood decision than did mothers whose families were normative in size (Mueller and Yoder 1999). For example, in the latter study, voluntarily childfree women reported being frequently asked personally invasive questions such as “Why wouldn’t you want kids?” (Mueller and Yoder 1999, p. 912). Likewise, research published in the 2000s reported that voluntarily childfree people were more negatively evaluated by women and men than people who were infertile or for whom there was no explanation for their childlessness (Kopper and Smith 2001). Such penalties were attenuated in a later study of male and female college students when the childfree status was perceived as temporary rather than as permanent (Koropeckyj-Cox et al. 2007).

Taken together, the aforementioned studies demonstrate that across three decades and across various methods and measures, reactions to people who choose to be childfree, relative to those who choose to have children, have remained consistently negative. Voluntarily childfree people elicited less favorable evaluations and were perceived as psychologically unfulfilled or maladjusted. However, remarkably absent from this literature is much theorizing regarding why such stigmatization of voluntarily childfree people persists in the United States, even in the face of steadily declining birthrates.

Parenthood as a Social Prescription

Although choosing to become a parent may be becoming somewhat less typical in the United States, extant findings suggest that, in the eyes of most perceivers, choosing parenthood is still significantly more desirable than being voluntarily childfree (Kopper and Smith 2001; Koropeckyj-Cox et al. 2007). In the stereotyping literature, what is typical can be distinguished from what is desirable (Burgess and Borgida 1999). Whereas descriptive stereotypes include behaviors seen as typical of a social group, prescriptive and proscriptive stereotypes imply an expectation or obligation. In other words, prescribed behaviors are behaviors that people ought to do and proscribed behaviors are behaviors that people ought not to do.

In an effort to identify descriptive, prescriptive, and proscriptive gender stereotypes, Prentice and Carranza (2002) examined the perceived typicality and desirability of various traits and characteristics for women and men among U.S. male and female college students. Findings revealed that women were prescribed to be warm and kind, and men were prescribed to have good business sense; women were proscribed from being rebellious and men from being emotional (Prentice and Carranza 2002). The findings of Prentice and Carranza also indicated that perceptions of what is typical for women and men differed very little from perceptions of what is desirable for women and men. This consistency likely underscores the power of gender socialization. That is, whether through direct experience or through observation, girls and boys learn to engage in behaviors that are socially rewarded and to avoid behaviors that are socially punished (Bandura 1977).

Most germane to the present research, Prentice and Carranza (2002) found that having an interest in children was prescribed as highly desirable for both women and men. This prescription was somewhat more relaxed for men than for women, but the mean desirability of “interest in children” was above the scale midpoint for both genders as well as for people in general. As with many of the other gender stereotypes in their research, Prentice and Carranza found that interest in children was both a descriptive and prescriptive stereotype; in other words, it was seen as both a typical interest as well as an obligatory one.

Aside from any biological motives to reproduce, U.S. children are indeed socialized by their parents to want to become parents. Classic tests of social learning theory demonstrate that children imitate the warm, nurturing behaviors of models with whom they identify (Bandura and Huston 1961). Thus, to the extent that children identify with their parents, they observe and learn parenting behavior. Consider, for example, the popularity of playing the imaginative game “house” with baby dolls. One qualitative study found that U.S. parents encouraged such nurturing play for children of both genders, even among boys “to prepare sons for fatherhood” (Kane 2006, p. 160). Indeed, national survey data indicate that parental socialization has a strong influence on children’s parenthood decisions (Starrels and Holm 2000).

Peers also play an important role in shaping parenthood decisions among U.S. adolescents. For example, one nationally representative longitudinal survey found that knowing peers who had a child significantly predicted teens’ own childbearing at least in the short term; over time, the influence of peer parenthood decreased (Balbo and Barban 2014). These findings suggest that peers’ having children established a norm of acceptability regarding parenthood.

Collectively, these studies help explain the process by which having an interest in children became both a descriptive and prescriptive stereotype for women and men. Through parents (Starrels and Holm 2000) and peers (Balbo and Barban 2014), people learn that parenthood is both typical and expected. Although these studies were conducted with U.S. samples, the gender stereotyping literature in general provides compelling evidence to suggest that these norms likely hold across cultures. Multi-nation studies demonstrate remarkable consistency in gender stereotypes and expectations across a variety of cultures (Williams and Best 1990). Indeed, studies conducted in Turkey (Çopur and Koropeckyj-Cox 2010) and India (Riessman 2000) demonstrate similar stigmatization of people without children as observed in the United States.

Backlash: Reactions to Norm Violators

What happens when people violate strongly held norms and expectations such as those regarding parenthood and interest in children? Backlash theory (Rudman and Fairchild 2004) suggests there are potentially serious consequences. Rudman and Fairchild (2004) proposed backlash theory to explain the maintenance of cultural stereotypes. They argued that people who violate social role expectations based on widely shared cultural stereotypes are subject to perceivers’ backlash, such as social and economic sanctions and sabotage. This backlash is justified in the minds of perceivers because the targets are thought to have brought it upon themselves by not fulfilling their expected roles. In short, backlash theory suggests that cultural stereotypes often serve as injunctive norms, specifying which behaviors most others will approve or disapprove (Cialdini et al. 1990) and justifying punishment of people who violate these norms.

Much of the extant empirical research in support of backlash theory has involved gender stereotypes of agency and communality and has been conducted with U.S. samples. The findings of Prentice and Carranza (2002) indicate that women are stereotypically associated with warmth and kindness (communality) and men with ambition and self-reliance (agency). Consistent with backlash theory, highly agentic—and therefore counter-stereotypic—female job applicants are penalized in terms of perceived warmth and social competence, which in turn results in decreased likelihood of being hired (Rudman and Glick 1999). Similarly, female leaders who exhibit dominance are rated less likable and less hireable than women who conform to gender prescriptions of kindness and warmth (Rudman et al. 2012).

Women not only are penalized for being what they are proscribed not to be (e.g., agentic), but also face backlash when they fail to meet prescribed expectations. For example, given that women are expected to be communal, they are similarly expected to engage in organizational citizenship behavior—altruistic workplace behavior that is not part of one’s job description. Women who fail to engage in such behavior are disliked (Heilman and Chen 2005) and have lower salaries and fewer promotions (Allen 2006). Furthermore, backlash is not limited to women who violate gender-role expectations. Men who exhibit modesty about their accomplishments, thereby purposely downplaying prescribed leadership ability, are penalized in terms of likability and hireability (Moss-Racusin et al. 2010). In short, women and men are subject to social and economic backlash for violating expectations based on culturally shared prescriptive gender stereotypes.

In the present research, violating the prescribed interest-in-children stereotype by being voluntarily childfree is expected to evoke similar backlash. Specifically, voluntarily childfree targets should be perceived as less psychologically fulfilled than are targets who have chosen to be parents, thereby fulfilling their prescribed roles (Jamison et al. 1979; Shields and Cooper 1983).

Beyond Backlash: Moral Outrage

Outside the gender stereotyping literature, research on moral transgressions suggests especially harsh penalties for people who intentionally commit a wrongdoing. In their model of retributive justice, Darley and Pittman (2003) propose that perpetrators who are perceived as intentionally (rather than accidentally or negligently) committing a wrong or inflicting harm evoke moral outrage in perceivers and, in turn, motivate retribution or punishment. Moral outrage includes feelings of anger, contempt, and disgust (Rozin et al. 1999). Darley and Pittman reviewed evidence across a variety of studies supporting its role in retributive justice.

Intentional wrongdoings need not involve a specific victim, but can be harms to the “fabric of society,” that is, threats to cultural worldviews and violations of societal norms (Darley and Pittman 2003, p. 330). Consistent with that reasoning, Okimoto and Brescoll (2010) found among online respondents in the United States that female politicians who actively sought power—something women, according to gender role prescriptions, ought not to do—elicited moral outrage, which in turn predicted their lower likelihood of receiving votes. In other words, these women were viewed as more than atypical or unfavorable; perceivers were actually outraged, angered, and even disgusted by them. Furthermore, these emotional reactions mediated the relationship between the communality violation and perceivers’ penalization of the women via their voting behavior. These findings suggest that the women’s power-seeking behavior was seen as morally wrong; the women had disturbed the natural order of things by violating their prescribed role. Okimoto and Brescoll provided the first extension of backlash theory to include moral emotions in response to behavior that countered culturally accepted gender stereotypes.

Given that Okimoto and Brescoll (2010) obtained evidence of moral outrage in response to an intentional violation of a prescriptive stereotype, it is reasonable to expect that people might also experience moral outrage in response to voluntarily childfree women and men because having an interest in children is a social prescription. Indeed, Thompson (1974) reviewed not only the psychological literature, but also the sociological and demographic literatures, and she concluded that, in the United States, if not around the world, having children is a moral imperative. If, as Thompson suggested, parenthood is a moral imperative, then voluntarily choosing not to accept this responsibility should evoke moral outrage among perceivers. Furthermore, according to the model of retributive justice (Darley and Pittman 2003), as well as findings by Okimoto and Brescoll (2010), this moral outrage should help account for any unfavorable evaluations of voluntarily childfree targets. Such findings would perhaps explain why perceptions of voluntarily childfree women and men have changed so little over time and despite the increasing typicality of their parenthood decision in the United States. The present investigation uniquely attempts to provide empirical support of Thompson’s parenthood-as-moral-imperative hypothesis.

The Present Study

In the present research, participants were randomly assigned to evaluate a male or female married target who had chosen to have two children or no children. Participants then provided their perceptions of the target’s psychological fulfillment and adjustment using items adapted from previous studies of childfree individuals. Participants also reported any feelings of moral outrage they had in reaction to the target.

Based on the logic of backlash theory (Rudman and Fairchild 2004), Hypothesis 1 predicts that voluntarily childfree targets will be perceived as significantly less psychologically fulfilled than targets who have two children; that is, they will experience backlash for having violated a cultural prescription. Hypothesis 2 is based on the logic of the model of retributive justice (Darley and Pittman 2003) and indicates a predicted main effect of target parenthood status on moral outrage; that is, participants should report significantly greater moral outrage in response to voluntarily childfree targets than in response to targets with children. Finally, consistent with Okimoto and Brescoll (2010), moral outrage should serve as a mechanism through which childfree targets are penalized. Thus, Hypothesis 3 predicts that moral outrage will mediate the relationship between targets’ parenthood status and perceptions of psychological fulfillment.

Given that interest in children is somewhat more intensely prescribed for women than for men (Prentice and Carranza 2002), it is possible that moral outrage and penalization will be greater for voluntarily childfree women than for voluntarily childfree men. However, recall that Prentice and Carranza (2002) found that interest in children was rated as highly desirable for both genders and for people in general, with average ratings well above the scale midpoint. Thus, targets’ gender was included for exploratory purposes as a potential moderator of the predicted main effects of targets’ parenthood status on both psychological fulfillment and moral outrage. Despite its exploratory nature, the inclusion of targets’ gender as a variable in the present research was especially important given that some of the previous studies of the stigmatization of childfree people (Mueller and Yoder 1997) focused exclusively on female targets, thereby leaving a significant gap in our knowledge of gender-role expectations regarding parenthood.

Method

Participants and Design

Participants were 204 introductory psychology students at a large U.S. Midwestern university. They were recruited via the departmental online participant management system for a study advertised as examining people’s ability to make accurate predictions of the future. Participants were compensated with credit toward their course research requirement. Data from seven participants were excluded because those participants incorrectly responded to a manipulation check regarding targets’ parenthood status. The remaining participants included 147 women, 49 men, and one participant who did not report his or her gender. Upon examination by cell, there were too few men to provide sufficient power to analyze participant gender as a predictor variable. However, excluding men from the analyses did not change the results. Participants’ average age was 20.61 years (SD = 4.10 years). Most of the participants self-identified as White (n = 133), 20 as Black, 13 as Asian, 9 as Hispanic or Latino, 7 as Middle Eastern, 11 as other or multiracial, and 4 did not report their race or ethnicity. The experiment involved a 2 (target gender: male vs. female) × 2 (target parenthood status: 0 vs. 2 children) between-subjects design. Thus, participants were randomly assigned to read about one of four targets who varied only in terms of their gender and parenthood status.

Procedure and Measures

Participants completed the experiment individually in a laboratory. After obtaining their informed consent, an experimenter led participants to believe that they were taking part in a study about people’s sense of intuition and how accurately they can predict the future. Participants first completed a filler task in which the experimenter recorded their guesses regarding ten coin tosses. The next task (the task of interest to my study) involved making predictions about the life of a graduate of the participants’ own university. The experimenter led participants to believe that the target had been part of a longitudinal alumni survey since his/her graduation over 10 years ago, providing data on several occasions to the school’s alumni office. Thus, the experimenter ostensibly could compare participants’ predictions with actual data from the (in reality, fictitious) student. The purpose of this cover story was to enhance participants’ engagement in the study, given that the task involved evaluating a person whom participants would not meet. Moreover, leading participants to believe that data were collected from their fictitious peer across multiple time points reinforced the perception that the childfree target’s parenthood status was not temporary. This point is important given some previous findings suggesting reduced backlash when the target’s childfree status was assumed to be short-term (Koropeckyj-Cox et al. 2007), as well as previous qualitative reports of expectations that voluntarily childfree targets will later change their minds (Mueller and Yoder 1999).

Participants next read a paragraph about the alleged former student. The paragraph included the experimental manipulations of target gender (male vs. female) and target parenthood status (0 vs. 2 children). Participants were randomly assigned to read one of four versions of this description of the target:

James (Jennifer) lives in Columbus, Ohio. He (She) graduated from [name of university] with a degree in biology in December 2002. After graduating, he (she) worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep to pay back some student loans, but after a couple of years he (she) decided that career wasn’t a good fit and investigated other options. In summer 2003, James (Jennifer) married his (her) college girlfriend (boyfriend). They decided to have no (two) children and when surveyed in 2005 they had stuck with this decision.

Consistent with the cover story, participants then answered questions supposedly designed to determine how accurately they could predict the target’s responses from their most recent alumni survey. These questions pertained to perceptions of the target’s psychological fulfillment or adjustment. Specifically, participants responded to seven items, using 7-point Likert-type scales from 1 (extremely unlikely) to 7 (extremely likely), to indicate the likelihood that the target has the potential to be a good parent, is satisfied in their marital relationship, has a partner who is satisfied in their relationship, is satisfied with their decision regarding children, has a partner who is satisfied with their decision regarding children, has a relationship likely to end in divorce (reverse-scored), and is satisfied with their life overall. These items were adapted from previous research examining perceptions of targets as a function of their parenthood status (Jamison et al. 1979; Shields and Cooper 1983). Items were scored such that higher scores indicated greater perceived psychological fulfillment; given their internal consistency (α = .82) as well as factor analytic evidence indicating they formed a unitary construct, the items were averaged to create a perceived psychological fulfillment scale (M = 5.29, SD = .89).

Participants next completed five items (embedded among filler positive affect items to disguise the study purpose) assessing their moral outrage toward the target; items were randomized for each participant. Specifically, participants indicated to what extent the target made them feel disapproval, angry, outraged, annoyed, and disgusted using 5-point scales from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). These items were adapted from research examining moral outrage toward power-seeking women (Okimoto and Brescoll 2010). Given their acceptable reliability (α = .76) and results of a principal components analysis, these items were averaged to create a moral outrage scale (M = 1.27, SD = .49).

Finally, participants completed demographic items and manipulation checks to ensure they attended to the target’s gender and the target’s parenthood status. Upon participants’ completion of all experimental tasks, the experimenter awarded their research credit and debriefed participants using a funnel procedure with increasingly targeted probes to check for suspicion. No participant independently expressed doubt about the credibility of the alumni survey cover story or could fully articulate the true purpose of the research.

Results

Recall that Hypothesis 1 predicted that women would view adults who have chosen not to become parents as less psychologically fulfilled or more poorly adjusted than those who have chosen to be parents. Participants’ perceived target fulfillment scores were submitted to a two-way between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results revealed a main effect of targets’ parenthood status, such that childfree targets (M = 5.00, SD = .84) were perceived to be significantly less psychologically fulfilled than targets with two children (M = 5.62, SD = .83), F(1, 193) = 27.00, p < .001 , d = .74. No other results approached significance (Fs < 1). Thus, findings support Hypothesis 1.

If having children is a moral imperative, as Thompson (1974) suggested, then people who choose not to have children should elicit greater moral outrage than people who accept this moral responsibility (Hypothesis 2). Analyses indeed revealed the expected main effect of target parenthood status, thereby supporting this hypothesis. Participants reported significantly greater moral outrage toward targets who had chosen to have no children (M = 1.37, SD = .57) than toward targets who had chosen to have two children (M = 1.16, SD = .33), F(1, 193) = 10.11, p < .01, d = .45. No other effects approached significance (Fs < 1).

Although findings thus far are consistent with the notion of parenthood as a moral imperative, a stronger test of the importance of moral outrage as an explanatory mechanism for the less favorable evaluation of voluntarily childfree people would be to determine whether it helps account for the observed direct effect of target parenthood status on perceived fulfillment. Thus, data were submitted to Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS mediation analysis, using a bootstrapping procedure to estimate 95% confidence intervals based on 10,000 samples to determine whether indirect effects likely differ from zero in the overall population. Confidence intervals that contain zero indicate that the indirect effect does not significantly differ from zero and therefore does not mediate the relationship.

As shown in Fig. 1, moral outrage was implicated as a significant mediator. The indirect effect of parenthood status through moral outrage was .16 (SE boot  = .06, 95% CI [.06, .31]), thereby providing support for Hypothesis 3. Together, targets’ parenthood status and participants’ moral outrage accounted for approximately 28.81% of the variance in targets’ perceived fulfillment. In short, the previously observed finding that people who choose not to have children are perceived as psychologically unfulfilled is partially explained by perceivers’ moral outrage in reaction to them.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Mediation model illustrating direct and indirect effects of target parenthood status on perceived psychological fulfillment. All relationships are statistically significant at p < .01

Full size image

Discussion

Relative to targets who had chosen to have two children, voluntarily childfree women and men were penalized by perceivers in the present research. Specifically, they were perceived as leading less fulfilling lives than do people who had chosen to have children. Moreover, their decision to forgo parenthood, arguably individuals’ most personal choice, evoked moral outrage—anger, disgust, and disapproval. Moral outrage in turn served as a mechanism by which targets’ parenthood status affected their perceived psychological fulfillment.

Findings from this research provide the first empirical support for the hypothesis of parenthood as a moral imperative. As Thompson (1974, p. 96) argued, there exists within the United States a cultural expectation that is held so strongly and so widely that it is an imperative: “One should—or must—have children.” She further suggested that the imperative is so well internalized that there are almost certainly social sanctions for those who violate the norm. In other words, not having children is seen not only as atypical but also as wrong.

Backlash theory (Rudman and Fairchild 2004) provides a theoretical framework with which social sanctions for voluntarily childfree people can be better understood. Specifically, given cultural stereotypes that prescribe an interest in children for both women and (to a somewhat lesser extent) men (Prentice and Carranza 2002), perceivers feel justified in negatively evaluating those who violate their expected parental roles by choosing not to have children. Moreover, the model of retributive justice suggests that when someone intentionally commits a wrongdoing, the resulting response is moral outrage and a motive is to punish (Darley and Pittman 2003). The fact that voluntarily childfree targets in the present research evoked moral outrage and figurative punishment in the form of a predicted unhappy life is consistent with research on retributive justice as well as the hypothesis of parenthood as a moral imperative.

It is noteworthy that voluntarily childfree male and female targets were stigmatized equally in the present research. Although much of the extant literature on this subject has focused on women (e.g., Mueller and Yoder 1997, 1999), studies that have included male targets have not yielded dramatic differences in how they are perceived. For example, Jamison et al. (1979) found that participants ascribed similar traits (e.g., selfish, poorly adjusted) to voluntarily childfree men and women and that, if anything, men were evaluated somewhat more negatively than were women. Indeed, investigations of stereotypic gender prescriptions suggest that both women and men are prescribed to be interested in children, although this prescription is somewhat more relaxed for men (Prentice and Carranza 2002). Again, these findings point toward parenthood as an imperative rather than as typical choice and speak to the common socialization of boys and girls in the United States to aspire to become parents.

My findings extend previous research on the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree people by identifying an important mechanism through which stigmatization occurs. Although previous studies (e.g., Kopper and Smith 2001) examined some negative affective reactions as a function of parenthood decisions, none focused specifically on moral outrage and none tested for its potential mediating role. The present research thus takes us beyond documenting and describing this form of social stigma and helps clarify why it occurs.

Limitations and Future Research Directions

The present study is, of course, not without limitations. Participants evaluated one individual who was presented only via a paragraph-long description. Despite obtaining moderately strong effect sizes in the present study, mean levels of moral outrage were small overall. One could therefore criticize this “paper person” approach, but it is noteworthy that findings corroborated those of previous studies that varied widely in their methods, and they are consistent with the self-reported experiences of actual individuals (Berdahl and Moon 2013; Mueller and Yoder 1999). Arguably, moral outrage in response to real and/or known targets may have been even stronger than those observed herein. The major advantage of the present study’s methodology is that participants could be randomly assigned to read identical descriptions of people that varied only in terms of the target’s gender and parenthood status (i.e., the variables of interest). Additionally, leading participants to believe they were predicting the life experiences of actual graduates of their university likely enhanced the study’s experimental realism. Nonetheless, future research should not be limited to experiments with fictitious targets.

Given the study comprised a single experiment, future research is needed to ensure findings are not limited to this sample or methodology. Indeed, reflective of the population from which it was obtained, the present sample comprised primarily White women in their early 20s. Although previous research (e.g., Jamison et al. 1979; Shields and Cooper 1983) has not yielded many participant gender differences in perceptions of voluntarily childfree targets, a more diverse sample would be informative, particularly of potential gender differences in the strength of perceived moral obligation to become a parent for male versus female targets. That said, Prentice and Carranza’s (2002) examination of gender stereotype prescriptions and proscriptions noted significant participant gender × target gender interactions for only 4 of the 100 traits they examined across two studies: anxious, extroverted, playful, and controlling. These traits do not seem to be particularly relevant for evaluating parents versus non-parents. Furthermore, participant gender effects are noticeably absent in U.S. studies of backlash toward targets who deviate from prescribed gender roles (Rudman and Fairchild 2004; Rudman and Glick 1999, 2001). Collectively, these studies point toward probable consistency in the ways women and men might view voluntarily childfree people. Perhaps a more fruitful path for discovering meaningful individual differences in perceptions of people who are voluntarily childfree would involve an examination of participants’ values. For example, might individual differences in endorsement of values such as tradition and self-direction (Schwartz et al. 2012) predict the degree of backlash and moral outrage toward voluntarily childfree people?

The present findings open the door for further research to specify additional antecedents and consequences of biases against those who are voluntarily childfree. For example, moral outrage is often associated with denial of humanity (Haslam and Loughnan 2014); perhaps having children is seen as so fundamentally part of human nature that those who opt out are thought to be somehow not quite human. Such a perception almost certainly would have implications not only for how childfree people are evaluated, but also for how they are treated. Indeed, much of the extant literature on the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men has focused on stereotypes and attitudes (e.g., Jamison et al. 1979; Shields and Cooper 1983); few studies have obtained evidence of outright discrimination toward those individuals. One exception is a study by Berdahl and Moon (2013), who found, in a sample of U.S. working adults, that women without children reported more workplace harassment than did women who were mothers. More research is needed to identify other forms of mistreatment as well as psychological consequences for those who violate parenthood norms. For example, does the societal pressure on childfree women and men have negative implications for health and well-being? There is much to learn about this relatively unexamined, but growing, demographic.

Given that parenthood is a social and moral prescription, not merely a typical choice, findings observed over the past three decades in the United States regarding the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree people seem unlikely to change. Any further downturn in the U.S. birthrate may affect the perceived typicality of voluntary childlessness but not likely the perceived moral obligation of parenthood. Future research might manipulate perceived threats, such as that of overpopulation, to determine the boundaries of this very robust bias.

Practice Implications

Practically speaking, the present findings have some troubling potential implications for how people transition to parenthood. For example, the present findings, obtained with college students in the Midwestern United States, suggest that many young people view children as a necessary ingredient for fulfilling lives. Thus, they may feel tremendous pressure to have children, not only from others as this literature suggests (Mueller and Yoder 1999), but also internally. Ironically, these perceptions have absolutely no basis in reality. Meta-analyses reveal that parents report significantly less marital satisfaction than do non-parents, and as their number of children increases, marital satisfaction decreases (Twenge et al. 2003). These findings are thought to result from the lack of freedom and independence that parenthood brings, as well as role conflicts and strain. In other words, the transition to parenthood is not the recipe for happiness it is thought to be, and the moral imperative to become parents might push women and men into making a choice that leads to relationship conflict.

The moral imperative to have children may also have practical implications for young people’s academic success. In one study, U.S. female college students who were primed with parenthood imagery (e.g., a crib) exhibited lower implicit identification with academics compared with those who were primed with college education imagery (e.g., cap and gown; Devos et al. 2007). Such findings suggest that parenthood and education are, at least implicitly, perceived to be a zero-sum game, with potentially serious implications for students’ likelihood of success.

Conclusions

The present research provides the first known empirical evidence that parenthood is viewed by some as a moral imperative, consistent with Thompson’s (1974) assertion. Despite the fact that women and men, with increasing frequency in the U.S., are delaying the parenthood decision or are opting out of parenthood entirely (Livingston and Cohn 2010; Martin et al. 2015), the cultural prescription to have children persists. As with any injunctive norm, violators are subjected to social backlash; in this case, moral outrage and expectations of poor psychological fulfillment and adjustment. The present research merely scratches the surface in terms of describing the continued stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men, who are, by many personal accounts, often ostracized and led to believe they are selfish and defective (Sandler and Witteman 2013). Indeed, some writers have blamed voluntarily childfree people for the destruction of the U.S. economy and culture (Last 2013). The present research helps shine a light on why such stigmatization of voluntarily childfree people occurs and just how serious its implications are.