“What I don’t get about my childfree friends is…”
Let me help you with that
Some time ago, Ann Brenoff wrote a Huffington Post article titled, “Midlife ramblings: What I don’t get about my childless/childfree young friends.”
I’m addressing it now because the same things that confused Brenoff years ago continue, strangely, to confuse people today. Things like this:
I happen to agree that people who don’t want children should not have them. I’m delighted to wish you well on whatever road you take, but I do find myself stopping mid hand-wave and asking this question: Really?
How can you be so sure? I think having kids is one of those things you should probably never say never about.
But why?
Why “never say never,” and why does Ms. Brenoff doubt the childfree’s certainty more than she does anyone else’s?
Possibly because of this:
…based on nothing but my own experience and beliefs, parenting is a unique experience that stretches our capacity to show compassion toward others. It lowers our self-absorption level and requires us to put another’s needs ahead of our own. That’s a good thing, especially when carried out on a large scale.
I assume Brenoff is using the royal “we,” here, and that having a child stretched her capacity to show compassion, lowered her self-absorption, and taught her to put another’s needs before her own.
If she isn’t using the royal “we,” she’s implying childfree people in general are — ostensibly because we don’t have children to knock some humanity into us — tyrannous narcissists.
Which as a blanket statement is just as absurd as, “Everyone who has children is a paragon of selflessness and compassion” (*cough* child abuse statistics).
Though Brenoff’s article is, as I mentioned, a few years old, her mystification isn’t unique to her, and it’s still there among those who have been socialized to believe there is no other Way than the Way of Parenting. Even people who do seem to recognize parenthood is a choice will, now and then, give you the “give it to me straight” look and say, “You’re not afraid you’ll feel even a twinge of regret?”
I hope addressing curiosities (suspicions?) about the childfree will end the skepticism Ms. Brenoff expresses in her piece. And so, to begin:
How do you know you don’t want kids?
Exactly the same way you knew you wanted them, assuming you did know you wanted them and that they didn’t just “happen.”
The choice to not have children is a conscious one.
What if you change your mind?
This is where being childfree is a distinct advantage. It’s easier to change your mind and bring a child into your life than it is to change your mind after you’ve had one.
What are you contributing to the world?
Ourselves.
If parents have kids with the hope that they’re not only injecting something positive into the world but also giving their children an opportunity to be happy, we — by being as kind as we can be, or by being as productive as we can be in our unique ways, or by living our lives in a way that makes us happy — are being the contribution our parents hoped to make and living the happy lives they hoped we would live.
Did you decide not to have kids so you could never really grow up?
Setting aside the fact that reproduction is a biological performance the majority of the planet’s creatures are capable of doing, there’s plenty of evidence to show that having children is in no way synonymous with growing up.
Although being forced to take care of a helpless being can be a tool of maturity for those who needed it and who choose to take the responsibility seriously, even a teenager can be a grownup if she’s emotionally mature enough.
What do you do with all your free time?
The same thing anyone else does — whatever we want.
Many of us might have more of it because we don’t have children, and many of us might have less of it because we keep busy.
Don’t you feel bad/selfish about getting to be so “free” all the time?
Do you feel bad about enjoying the children you wanted and had?
Isn’t it selfish to not take care of a child?
A parent not taking care of his/her child is selfish; a person not having a child creates no child to care for and affects no child negatively in the pursuit of personal happiness and is therefore not selfish.
So, no.
What will your life count for if you don’t have children?
Reproducing doesn’t automatically make a life count.
What does make a life count?
I’m asking, really. What does it mean for a life to “count”?
I don’t know.
It’s probably different for everyone.
People who desperately want children might feel their life won’t count if they can’t have them or are unable to adopt (surely they’d try).
Those who want to leave a legacy might be scared that their death will be that much more final without offspring to carry their blood from generation to generation.
People who want to produce a meaningful work of art might feel their life hasn’t counted for much if they never produce that meaningful work of art.
And so on.
But maybe having a positive impact in the world can be enough to make a life count. In the case of the childfree, instead of having children who may or may not grow up to do certain things, we, the children of other people, do those things, ourselves.
Any parent who’s made a positive contribution to the world through their actions did it separate from having children or in addition to having children. They probably would have done the same things had they never had children. Would their lives “count” less for it?
Brenoff writes:
I … believe that the very reason I came into existence was to launch these two children into happy, fulfilled lives. From them, great things will flow. Which gets me back to not quite understanding why so many of the best and brightest seem to be shunning parenting.
It could simply be that we think we had other reasons for having come into existence (assuming a reason is required).
Consider this: we are also the “them” from whom great things will flow. We are, after all, someone’s children.
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Kristen Tsetsi is the author of the post-Roe v. Wade novel The Age of the Child: “Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. [Others] have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Rebecca Maye Holiday, author of The Beaches
