How Davina McCall and her husband have got childfree women like me all wrong

As a self-conscious soul, I do frequently wonder what it must be like to frolic around the internet without overthinking, or pre-emptively checking how something you’ve said might be construed by someone else. One such blithe spring lamb must be the social media manager for Making the Cut podcast, the lovechild of loved-up reasonably-newlyweds Davina McCall and Michael Douglas (no, not him, Michael the hairdresser).

On Wednesday, they posted a clip, without context, of Michael and Davina with the banner headline: “Why having kids is so important”.

“There’s that funny thing people say: ‘I don’t want to bring children into this world,’” said Michael, Davina’s new(ish) hairstylist husband.

Pausing not a moment to wonder why people say “that funny thing”, he goes on: “The thing that will fix the world is people; the ingenuity of the human spirit. And without the humans to conjure up these ideas, we won’t fix it, so having kids is important. If you’ve had one recently, congratulations and well done.”

I mean, absolutely fair play to anyone who has had a kid recently, but expecting your bouncing baby to change the world feels like a pretty ambitious reason for having a child. Also, as many of the now-deleted comments pointed out – they have also closed comments on the episode’s YouTube video – wasn’t this just a bit insensitive to the thousands of people who desperately want children but can’t have one?

I am one of these people. I had blithely assumed my husband and I would trot into one, two, maybe three bambinos – it just seemed to be what you did when you got married and wanted a family. But two failed cycles of IVF later, and a dismal phone call with a second fertility clinic as the pandemic took hold, it became clear that this, and other routes to parenthood, were not going to be ours. So, trying to turn lemons into lemonade, I made a “support group in a book” for people who were not going to be parents for various reasons – including by choice – so that we could explore all the mixed feelings that come alongside loss, or absence, or even relief of not having children.

Because, quite aside from personal or financial difficulty or concerns about climate change, whether Davina or her husband like it or not, many see not having children as a positive choice, even when that is difficult in a world that still expects them to have children as a matter of course.

Imagine being so cocooned by the life that you have created that you have nothing harrowing you into thinking that, actually, it would be better not to bring kids into it. (Michael is a father of two, as is Davina.) I write this as a one-time devotee of this podcast. When it started in 2020, it was perfect lockdown listening: two lovesick people having a bit of a chat.

There was something inherently soothing about listening to Davina McCall’s random hairdresser boyfriend earnestly extolling the virtue of a particular crisp. What was so nice was their different worlds: Davina, the sharp-witted star, with a storied life of drug addiction, sobriety, illness and intense celebrity. Michael, the hair stylist, who helped all the stars to look fabulous and knew how the sausage was made, never got starstruck. The podcast became so successful that he was able to launch his own haircare brand in 2022.

Unfortunately, though, there are times when Michael can, sorry, come across as a downright simpleton, and this has been one of those times, as many had been quick to point out before their points were deleted. It was best summed up succinctly by the listener who wrote: “We don’t need more people, we need people to be better.”

There are far too many people – and let’s be real, it’s almost always women – who are made to feel that they are not quite enough before being told by a man with a podcast that they are letting the side down too. Shame on this pair for being so unthinkingly smug in how they discussed this matter.

As the 12-step saying goes, “You don’t go to the hardware store for milk.” This has since been popularised by the childless pioneer Jody Day to warn people against expecting empathy on Facebook, or from unhelpful family members. There’s no reason to expect Michael Douglas to be an expert on why people may choose not to have children – but, given that both he and Davina pride themselves on being in touch with what real people are thinking, there is every chance to hope that he will encounter another TV series soon that will help him understand why.