SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Women today are having far fewer children than just a couple of generations ago. One reason - women now have many more opportunities than their grandmothers did.
CAROLINE BROWN: I don't really feel like I got strong messages about what my life should look like beyond college graduation (laughter). I was very much under the impression that the world was kind of my oyster.
MCCAMMON: That's Caroline Brown of Charlotte, North Carolina. She's 33 and married, and like a growing number of younger women, she's unsure if she wants children. She's not unusual. The birth rate now is about half of what it was in the 1960s. I wanted to understand how the choices available to women are shaping the choices that they make. So I recently met up with Caroline in Atlanta where she was visiting her mother and grandmother.
BROWN: I don't know if we had a formal introduction. Sarah, this is my grandmother, Barbara Briscoe.
BARBARA BRISCOE: Yeah, your mother just did that (ph).
BROWN: Oh, perfect (ph) - that's fine (laughter).
MCCAMMON: Wonderful to meet you (ph).
BRISCOE: Thank you.
MCCAMMON: Barbara Briscoe, her daughter Cynthia Briscoe Brown, and Cynthia's daughter Caroline Brown make up three generations of women in the same family. They all had very different expectations around motherhood. Barbara is 93, and she told me that during her childbearing years, there wasn't a big question about what she was going to do with her life.
BRISCOE: But I think it was just accepted at that time that girls were going to grow up and be mothers. I mean, careers were not even discussed. So I don't think I ever thought anything except that I would be a mother.
MCCAMMON: She says there was a traditional model for what men and women did, and most people, including her, followed that script.
BRISCOE: I was happy with it 'cause it was all I knew.
MCCAMMON: Barbara had her children in the 1960s, a time when things were rapidly shifting for American women. Her daughter Cynthia, who's 65, remembers how she saw those messages changing as she was growing up.
CYNTHIA BRISCOE BROWN: I was part of a very transitional generation. In the early years, I think we were programmed to have very similar adult lives to our mothers. But as we got a little older, we began being told that we could have it all and that we should expect to have it all.
MCCAMMON: After college, Cynthia enrolled in law school, where she says roughly a fourth of her class was female.
BRISCOE BROWN: And so the running joke was you had to be twice as good to get in if you were a woman.
MCCAMMON: And that pressure wasn't confined to school.
BRISCOE BROWN: That's the story of my adult life, of being told that I could have everything, but then having to be twice as good just to stay even.
MCCAMMON: But even with more professional opportunities than her mother had, the idea of marriage and family life still appealed to Cynthia.
BRISCOE BROWN: I don't know that I thought, you know, I'll have a girl and a boy, or I'll have four kids. But yes, I think I always hoped that that would happen for me.
MCCAMMON: Cynthia met her husband, Jim, in college, and they did have a girl and a boy. Caroline, who we heard from earlier, was born just before her parents' first anniversary. Cynthia says being part of that transitional generation where women's lives were changing meant both she and her husband had to figure out how to be a team without a clear roadmap.
BRISCOE BROWN: Just as I was working out my place as a woman in the world and in society, men in my generation were having to do the same thing.
MCCAMMON: Even with Jim's support, Cynthia says balancing a demanding legal career with motherhood was difficult. She remembers trying an important case when Caroline was just a newborn.
BRISCOE BROWN: I was not willing to tell local counsel that I had had a baby six weeks earlier because I was afraid that he would think less of me as an attorney. And I remember thinking about that and saying, I can't admit that I can't do this.
MCCAMMON: She remembers secretly pumping breast milk during breaks in the trial. On one particular day, she frantically rushed to pick Caroline up after a long day in court.
BRISCOE BROWN: And I walked in the door, and you were screaming because you were hungry. I was two hours late, three hours late getting back. And I remember in that moment thinking, is this really worth it?
MCCAMMON: For Caroline herself, having children has never felt like a high priority. She followed her parents' footsteps and went to Davidson College, where she now lives and works as a project manager in the food service industry. Caroline says her focus has been less on family life and more on getting an education and establishing a career.
BROWN: I think, as a millennial, the, like, follow your passion kind of messaging was really strong. I don't know that I really thought much about having a family later on. You know, I know some little girls dream of that, but I don't really remember thinking about it that much.
MCCAMMON: When she met the man who's now her husband, Caroline says she wasn't necessarily looking for anything serious, and she felt it was important to be upfront about what she did and didn't want from a long-term relationship.
BROWN: I made it a practice that by the third date, I found a way to work into casual conversation that I did not know if I wanted kids.
MCCAMMON: They were both on the same page, and they're both still uncertain.
BROWN: I think it really comes down to neither of us have ever felt a strong pull to be parents. I think, from our perspective, it doesn't really feel achievable to have it all like my parents did in today's world.
MCCAMMON: Caroline and her husband worry about the costs that come with raising a child, especially the cost of housing, and about the state of the world.
BROWN: He is really concerned about where we're headed from a climate perspective and then also a societal perspective.
MCCAMMON: Her mom Cynthia says she hears that, but she says the world has always had its challenges in every generation.
BRISCOE BROWN: We had Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis and Watergate. 9/11 happened for them when she was the same age that my mother was at Pearl Harbor. So I think the idea that there's an ideal time to have a child and there's a perfect world to bring a child into is a fantasy and maybe a fallacy.
MCCAMMON: So much has changed since Barbara was born during the Great Depression. But she says when she looks at the choices her daughter and granddaughter have made, she's amazed.
BRISCOE: Oh, I'm very proud of both of them. I mean, I don't think it would be what I would have expected in a way. And I think they both have done what they wanted to do pretty much. Today, women have so many opportunities to decide whether they want children, don't want children, what they want to do.
MCCAMMON: Cynthia says she wants Caroline to make her own choices about having children but that having Caroline in her life has been one of her greatest joys.
BRISCOE BROWN: I would regret today not having had children. My relationship with them as adults has been a completely unanticipated delight and gift. And I can't imagine living without that richness.
MCCAMMON: Caroline is still thinking it all through. And she knows it's a big decision.
BROWN: I expect that there's probably not a right or wrong answer to this question for us. I think it's just different lives. And I think in both versions, there will be moments where we regret the other possibility, and there'll be moments we're really glad we made the decision we did.
MCCAMMON: That was Caroline Brown, talking with her mother, Cynthia Briscoe Brown, and her grandmother, Barbara Briscoe, at Cynthia's home in Atlanta. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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