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You got the degree. Built a career. Worked on yourself. So why does starting a family feel further away than ever?
In the first episode of Kaleidoscope Lives, I talk to journalist Anna Louie Sussman, author of Who Gets to Have Kids?, about the widening gap between the families people want and the conditions that make them possible. We unpack the forces behind falling birth rates and explore how the things that gave women choice (education, careers, financial independence) are closing the window on our imagined lives.
We get into:
Adulthood used to run on one shared timetable. Kaleidoscope Lives is about what happens now that it doesn’t.
📖 Who Gets to Have Kids? by Anna Louie Sussman: [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/who-gets-to-have-kids-creating-a-family-in-an-age-of-uncertainty-anna-louie-sussman
📬 Chloe’s newsletter: https://kaleidoscopelives.substack.com/
Discover more at: https://kaleidoscopelives.com/
📸 @chloealanawilliams
From the publisher's feed
For a long time, adulthood was imagined as a fairly standard sequence: grow up, get a job, pair up, have kids, the same life reflected back, over and over.
Now the mirrors have turned…
Every week, Chloe Alana speaks to experts, authors and people living at the intersections of these turns to understand the choices, circumstances and cultural changes that are creating those different patterns — and what happens when our institutions, language and expectations are still built around the old one.
What happens to family, work and relationships when there's no default left to mirror?
Each week we'll be exploring a different piece of the kaleidoscope.