I’m childfree by choice, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told I was unnatural, or weird, or that I would change my mind as I got older.
I haven’t.
So, am I missing the childloving gene? Am I a freak of nature? Or am I resistant to cultural brainwashing that attempts to tell me I must have children to be whole/normal/fulfilled? Or is there a third option?
My personal belief is that the desire for sex is instinctual but the desire for children is learned and, well, I didn’t learn it.
I don’t think the desire for children is learned. I think it’s instinctual - but some of us don’t have much of that instinct.
A lot of people in the mind-study world like to look at attraction to novelty. Obviously, there’s some evolutionary advantage to this – just as there’s an advantage to being cautious. There’s no reason for all us all to have the exact same base animal instincts.
Additionally, there are some women who seem to use a lot of learning to build on that instinct and go baby crazy. In my experience, these women like babies – not children - and make awful mothers.
There is a third option - it’s called being a bad influence on other people’s children.
Some of the desire for children is probably cultural. In my experience, most Mexican women are wild about babies. In Tucson there are lots and lots of Mexicans and every one that I know goes crazy when there is a baby around.
But I think in most times a desire for sex was enough. You didn’t have to desire babies, because if sex was happening, babies probably were too.
But in all times some women were just cut out to be mothers more than others. The difference is that now if a woman doesn’t have that maternal instinct, she doesn’t have to have a baby. In 99.9 percent of the time that humans were alive, women didn’t have that choice.
Evolutionarily, I guess most of the time it didn’t matter much. Whether a woman wanted children or not, she probably had them. The only difference from a survival-of-the-fittest standpoint is that maybe the children of those women were less well cared for than the children of women who greatly desired them. And being well cared for increases the chances of survival. That’s the only selective pressure I can imagine to favor the ‘love babies’ desire.
I think it’s genetic. Probably another one of those things where 90% of the population is one way and then there’s 10% that form a distinct minority.
I’m in the 10% with you, BTW. I also seem to be missing the “I’ve Been Planning My Wedding Since I Was Three” gene.
I wondered about this also, and I think that as the world becomes more overcrowded, more people (especially women) will not be interested in having babies. I think it may be a biological condition, similar to the way rabbits or bears spontaneously abort their fetuses if they subconsciously feel that conditions are not optimal for birthing young.
A friend once told me that when she held a baby, her uterus actually cramped, she wanted a baby so badly. I have never in my 36 years felt even a small yearning to have a baby, not even for a few minutes, so she and I are obviously not completely alike.
I don’t think the desire for children is learned, and I don’t think not wanting children is a reaction to any societal pressures. I think it truly is a tendency you are born with or without, and then the circumstances of your life cement the tendency you were born with.
I think that perhaps an apt comparison would be right-handedness vs left-handedness. Most of the population is right-handed, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with or missing in the left-handed person. For many years, left-handedness was seen as unnatural and undesirable, and many left-handed children were forced to use their right hands. So it is with the mothering instinct. Most women have it, but that doesn’t mean that the ones who don’t aren’t just as womanly. For most of time (up to present), as autz pointed out, women had babies whether they wanted them or not. Now we have choices.
Unfortunately, just as it took years for people to accept that there was nothing wrong with being left-handed, I suspect we’re still some years away from some people accepting the “child-free by choice” position.
FWIW, I’m right-handed. And I have three kids because I wanted them. But I’m sympathetic to women who don’t want them and are constantly being criticized for that decision. I think everyone should just mind their own damn business on the issue.
Missing the “grandparent gene” here. Small children, even my own grandchildren, usually just annoy the crap out of me. I tolerate small female hominids better than boy creatures, but until they’re 18 or so, the less exposure the better. Yeah, I raised my own kids, but I was gone a lot.
Oh, man, not me!! I don’t have any grandchildren yet, and seeing as my oldest is only 16, I’m in no hurry. But I’m definitely looking forward to grandparenthood. I don’t want to be one of those grandmas who babysits full time while Mom works; I wanna be a weekend grandma. A spoil-'em-rotten-and-give-'em-back grandma! I know it’s still 10 years or so in the future, but I am so looking forward to it!!
I think j.c. has a fairly good handle on the question. If someone offered you the opportunity to spend the next two decades caring for a 67-year-old stroke victim, who was incapable of doing anything for himself at the moment and would need to be fed, have his Depends changed regularly because he is incontinent, with the promise that he will get better within a couple of years but will need constant supervision, and as he gets to the point where he can take care of himself 15 years or so down the road, he will develop Alzheimer’s and make unwise decisions from which you will have to rescue him, would you jump at the chance? Yet those characteristics accurately describe the negative side of parenting (and of course do not address the rewards, by intent).
In 1940 Robert A. Heinlein wrote a novel, Beyond This Horizon, which addressed the idea of a scientific exploration of metaphysical ideas. But the frame story provoking the concept was founded in the resistance of the protagonist character to begetting children – he being the result of voluntary eugenic selection, which the leadership wished to preserve and continue on through future generations. Heinlein posited a “gene for philoprogenitiveness” – the desire to have children – which the protagonist lacked, for story purposes.
The desire for children is selected for evolutionarily by a very obvious mechanism – those who do not have such desire will not ordinarily have children, and hence are unlikely to pass on their genes – and if they should engender children through satisfying their sexual desires, those children will often be at a social disadvantage through not having adequate parenting.
I think that it’s the way I was born to not want kids. It’s not as if I ever sat down and made a decision that no, I don’t want kids, much the same as I never sat down and made a decision to be straight.
I don’t consider it a ‘glitch’ because the word ‘glitch’ implies that something went wrong. This is a born in part of who I am just as being right-handed and heterosexual is, so I refuse to term it in any way that implies it’s a mistake in the wiring. Most of the human beings in the world do desire to have kids at some point in their lives, and they are born that way. Those people I know who do want kids didn’t sit down and decide to want kids, the only decision making they underwent was in terms of when to have them.
I came from the factory with a natural aversion to children (even when I was a child, I much preferred the company of adults and carrying on a conversation with them.) although for much of my life such a thing was seen as so sad and awful and such a mistake in the programming that I did think something was wrong with me because I felt that way. Now I have one friend in ‘real life’ who is also childfree, who also has the same natural aversion to children that I do, and it has helped me to realize that this is not something that is wrong with me. It’s not a ‘glitch’; it simply is who I am, and how I was made.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who love babies and children and who want to have them, but I do have immense difficulty understanding why they do. I also know that those people who want kids and love kids have immense difficulty understanding people like me, and I have no problem explaining to them that I was born the way I am. I have an enormous problem with people who then tell me there’s something wrong with me, that my ‘clock will start to tick’, or tell me that childfree people contribute nothing to the world. I just want to be accepted for the whole, complete, unbroken person I am.
Me too. When I was kid, I always preferred being around adults. Actually, even as I got older and became an adult, I would look at most teenagers and 20 something’s and think to myself “Punks.” Actually, I sometimes still look at people who are around my age or younger and think that. Not all of them, not all the time, but I still do that.
Anyway though, I’m a guy, and although the desire to be a parent isn’t as strong in men as it is in women, all the other guys I know are fathers. No me though. I never had the desire to have kids, and I never will. I made that crystal clear to my wife before marrying her (and she agreed to marry me anyway, go figure :D). Actually though, my wife is too disabled to probably have a kid, and definitely too disabled to care for one. Although she probably wouldn’t mind being a mother.
Go ahead and call me selfish and lazy, but I just don’t want the responsibility. My wife thinks it’s terrible when I say things like, “You know, If I had a kid when I was 18, I’d only have 6 years left to go.” but that’s how I truly feel.
catsix Thank you so much for clearly expressing your views. I too am childless by choice and what you said could have come straight from my mind (only not nearly so eloquently phrased). I made the decision permanent about ten years ago and have felt nothing but relief since then, no ticking clocks, no regrets, just an instinctive knowledge that, for me, this is the right choice.
Now, if someone can just help me come up with a foolproof system to avoid having to conduct any sort of sustained interaction with anyone under 25…
On one childfree online community I’ve been a member of, we’ve discussed this several times.
It seems to me that some people choose to have or not have children, others drift into either decision through life circumstances. Then there’s a third group. Those who always knew they didn’t ever want, or definitely always wanted, children. For that group it is inborn and instinctual IMO. I’ve heard some women talk of the burning ache to hold their own baby, to raise and nurture a child, etc. I’ve heard women talk about their complete aversion to anything child-related. It’s like a continuum, with everyone slotted in somewhere, not only two extremes.
For myself, yep, I’m at one extreme. Never wanted them. I finally got myself spayed a few months ago, and I’ve felt more relaxed, more free and more “me” than I ever have before. And I don’t get as angry at people who assume they know me better than I do anymore, because I have closed that door permanently.
I know there’s nothing I could do to change what is. I was born childfree. For those who’ve made a choice it may be resistance, I don’t know, you’d have to ask a truly childfree by choice person. I’m not childfree by choice at all. I’m just childfree. No choice ever had to be made. Just like I’m heterosexual. I just know myself, I can’t explain it any other way.
As late as my early 20s, I was still leaving the door open to child-rearing by telling myself that if I found a suitable mate, I could see myself becoming a father, although I never had any illusions of being a particularly good one. By the time I hit 30, I had decided that I was too old to take on the task and, frankly, I had no real interest in kids. Heck, I barely tolerate the 15-19 year-olds I coach and we have something in common (a love of baseball) and they have to do what I say or they don’t play.
When I met my future wife, featherlou, we had a number of discussions on the matter of becoming parents and every time we agreed that we flat out were not interested. I think we become more convinced of the wisdom of our position with every passing day.
I understand the … desire for a phrase, but ‘child free’ falls into childish pejorativeness. Childless is fine.
Believe what you want, evolutionary history suggests that a strong disposition to having children and making sure they live and grow up to continue one’s genes onwards etc. is hard wired.
Of course, we need not be slaves to our evolutionary past, but let’s not engage in childish denial either.
As to the lifestyle choices, eh, you live in the wealthiest societies on the planet, you have nice choices. Big deal.
Lounsbury, childless and rather content, but not a self-duper either.
Joel, you’re honest with yourself, not selfish or lazy. Better not to be a parent at all than to be a reluctant one.
I do think that most people are hard wired to want children, to some degree. But, Goo, I really like your continuum idea. I like kids a lot, and I’d like to have children someday. But if that doesn’t happen, I won’t feel as though my life has a huge void in it. Guess I’m somewhere in the middle in your scale. And it seems as though humans are more programmed to take care of and protect children than to want to bear them, if that makes sense.
No, ‘childless’ is not fine. If I tell someone I’m childless, they tell me they’re ‘sorry’.
‘Childless’ is how you describe people who want to have kids and can’t. Childfree is how you describe people who don’t want to have kids and don’t have them.
You are obviously one of those people who will never understand what it is like to spend your entire life with a natural, instinctual aversion to babies and children. That’s fine. But do me the respect of not telling me that I’ve ‘duped’ myself. I haven’t.
The only way I could have ‘duped’ myself is if I tried to tell myself I really wanted kids so I could be more like the rest of the people on earth. Being gay is not a lifestyle choice, and neither is my aversion to pregnancy, babies and children.
Collounsbury, did you read my post where I suggested that in modern living conditions people who don’t want children may be the next evolutionary step? I think I answered your assertion that people who don’t want kids are evolutionary failures before you even made it.