You know, come to think of it…having kids is just about the only thing you can do that you can’t “take back.” That’s pretty fucking scary right there.
Oh the reasons are many and varied in my case.
My two cents on the selfishness of not having kids: I’ve always believed that having children you can’t afford or having too many children is one of the most selfish and irresponsible things you can do. One of my brothers is 26 and has two kids of his own and three stepchildren. He affords them all (barely) by working two full time jobs and being horribly tired all the time. My sister is 24, unmarried and has three children (by three fathers) that she can not afford. She relies on relatives to support her and them as her 15 hour a week job doesn’t even come close to covering costs.
My wife and I both work and have decent jobs but a kid would almost certainly mean that she’d stop working for at least a year or more. We could not maintain what our current lifestyle on my paycheck alone. We’d have to give up too many things that quite frankly I’m not willing to give up.
Besides the economics, kids are an enormous time sink. My best friend at work had a kid a little over a year ago. He can easily afford having his wife stay at home but he’s miserable. He’d never admit it but it’s the truth. His entire evenings and weekends are centered around what ‘the baby’ needs or wants. There’s almost no time left for himself. I recently started guitar lessons and he told me how much he’d wishes he could take up a hobby like that but it’s just not feasible with his current home life. No thanks, that’s NOT for me.
Religion is factor as well. I am an atheist and my wife is a Catholic. Though not terribly devout, she has said that she wants to raise any children that we might have as Catholic. Obviously, I have major problems with that. Since we can’t have it both ways, we’ve talked about compromises. She gets to have a christening ceremony but I don’t have to participate. She gets to take them to church but I get to tell them that it’s all a load of hooey. It would be a constant and horrible strain and would drive a wedge between us that does not exist now. The best solution is to just avoid the problem altogether.
Kids have too many checks in the ‘cons’ column and nearly none in the ‘pros’ column. Seems like a no brainer to me.
That is exactly the household I grew up in. Mother was very Catholic, father is atheist.
Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t all that bad. My mother herded us all off to church, my father would make comments about it all being a load of hooey. We all went to Catholic school.
It never seemed to be a strain on my parents at all. They just exposed us to both sets of beliefs and didn’t do much beyond that.
For what it’s worth, none of us are church-goers as adults. I don’t know my brother’s specific beliefs, but I hover between agnostic and atheist. So Dad won 
I’m not so much childless by choice as by circumstance. Usually you need the whole ‘penis goes into the vagina’ setup to breed.
Having said that, I can’t see myself wanting kids, at least not for a long, long time. Granted, I’m young (23), so there’s still plenty of time, but I just can’t see myself being in the position that I would like to be in before having kids. I still don’t have a ‘career’, I don’t own property or make a lot of money, I haven’t found anyone to play mommy, nor am I particularly happy or fulfilled in my own domain. And until all of these criteria are met, I won’t even consider bringing a helpless, screaming, poop & vomit machine into this world.
Furthermore, is this world so brilliant that we’re doing children a favour by having them? There’s shit loads of cynical advertising everywhere you turn, mothers are brawling over school placements and piano teachers, depression rates are fucking abysmal, we’re all (apparently) time-poor and overworked, we’re fucking the environment over, etc. Yeah, the media hype over terrorists and paedophiles is way overblown, but life is crappy enough without having to try and raise kids, it seems to me.
I deal with kids all freaking day as my job. Why on earth would I want to come home to more of the same?
This was the reason my favorite teacher in high school gave. It’s the reason I use most often now.
Our reasons are simple: we enjoy our current lifestyle too much to have someone else living with us.
On a recent Friday, Only Mostly Dead walked in the door complaining that he has had it with his old car and was kind of taken aback when I said rather nonchalantly “Then go buy a new one.” He spent the next 48 hours researching and we bought one on Monday.
I don’t think I could have the same attitude on our salaries if we had to support a child.
One thing I forgot to add to my previous post is that everybody, parents and childless/childfree people alike, should read Nicki Defago’s Childfree and Loving it. It’s a great read on the subject and offers insight into people who don’t want kids, people who’ve had kids and regret it, and people who enjoy being parents.
I have all the maternal instincts of a dragon lizard - given a chance, they eat their young (hell, one of my pet ones ate her own eggs). You have children. I am pleased for you. I may think that they are tiresome, demanding, selfish, smelly, screaming, expensive, ungrateful parasites, but that’s not important. You love them. They are the center of your world, your entire reason for existing. Good for you. I can just about cope with the fact that every sentence you utter starts with the name of one of the blessed offspring, or the phrase “my child” - after all, I can always stop listening if I get sick of it. I can just about cope with your bewilderment at finding out that the rest of the world does not regard your little darlings as the center of the universe (I’m just as bewildered as to why you’d think they’d be the center of anyone else’s universe). But I am sick to death of and *WILL NOT TOLERATE WITH GOOD GRACE * your vicious, virulent and venomous ranting attacks on me for choosing not to have children of my own. What the hell does it matter to you?
You have chosen to be a parent, and that’s your business and your life choice. I have chosen not to be a parent, and that’s my business and my life choice. Why the hell do so many of you feel the need to attack me with such a malevolent torrent of abuse for this? You hiss at me, through a face contorted by anger, that I am “not a real woman if you don’t want children”, that I am “doomed to a life of regretful yearning”, and I will definitely become “a shriveled, twisted and vicious old woman driven by resentment and bitterness.” (There is also usually mention of cats. Not sure where the cats come into it - some sort of bizarre contraceptive process?) Er, excuse me? “Resentment”? “Bitterness”? So, not like what you, in your blissful maternity, are pouring over me?
What I said was, “I don’t really like children and don’t want to have any of my own”. What you seem to think I said was, “I’m in favor of bashing them to death at birth, selling them for medical experiments or organ harvesting, feeding them to carnivores at the zoo or mincing them up to be sold as pet food.”
Can you either get your hearing aid fixed, or try to get a bit of perspective here?
Could it be, could it possibly be, that sometimes, when you’ve been awake for 48 hours with an unsettled baby, whilst your toddler tantrums and screams until he pukes because he’s not allowed to continue drawing on the walls with your most expensive lipstick, and your hair is full of cereal and your shirt has milk stains and you can’t buy that DVD or book or dress because the money went on more Huggies and the new booster seat, and you can’t even leave the house without going through a logistical exercise that makes the US deployment to Iraq look like a quick trip to the park, could it be that a tiny, tiny treacherous little voice deep inside your head mutters to you that your blissful maternity is not, in fact, 24-hours-a-day heavenly fulfillment? Possibly? Maybe just a little???
If I am missing out on the joys of parenthood, then huzzah for you, you will enjoy a contentment that I will never know. Could it be that you, in fact, are the one seething with bitterness and resentment? Do you look at me - body, mind, career, and disposable income unravaged by the brutal realities of bearing and raising children - and somehow feel that my contented child-freedom is an insult to you? Do I remind you of what you’ve chosen to give up?
If you sometimes miss the freedoms that you had before you became a parent, surely it’s perfectly normal to have occasional thoughts like that. I’ll bet all parents have such thoughts from time to time (for example, when the lipstick artistry explores new inspirations. And walls.)
I have friends who are parents and they acknowledge what they have given up to become parents - they compare it to what they have gained, and judge it to be worthwhile. They sometimes mention doubts during the most difficult times; but invariably, they say they wouldn’t change anything, and they’re very happy with their choice. They leave it at that.
So just be happy with your kids. Stop trying to put me down in order to try to make yourself feel better about some of the more difficult aspects of parenthood. Usually, I just let you virulent breeders rant and vent at me - I suspect that I know what motivates your rage, and I pity you. But you are numerous. I’m warning you lot, the next one of you that starts to abuse me simply because I didn’t breed, I will let you have it with both barrels - I will rub your nose in it, and you will wish that you’d just crossed your legs and claimed to have a headache.
Uh, dude. People who venomously, virulently, violently, and vehemently attack other people for not having kids suck. I think we can all agree with that. But all of the invective about “virulent breeders” etc. is not particularly pleasant either.
And my God, woman:
The mixed metaphor! It burns!
FYI - written after a particularly ugly incident with a woman at an old job (6 kids and COUNTING UP) and I was tired of her condecension.
She, in my opinon, was a “virulent breeder” and did nothing to hide her disdain for those who were childless by choice. The point of the rant was clear, and I was not TRYING to be pleasant - nor was I trying to apply perfect literary technique. Apologies for any offense to your tender sensibilities or bodily harm said “mixed metaphor” may have caused. :rolleyes:
I simply do not like children. Period. And so have never felt the need to be a father.
The mere thought of childbirth frightens the wife to death. She was ecstatic to find someone who insisted on no children. One of the few Thai ladies who never wanted any.
Please please please tell me you actually said that to her.
Too selfish.
The future looks dim.
Don’t want to raise a killer.
Don’t want to get stuck with a dumb kid.
Don’t want divorce and child support payments.
Barely able to make rational choices for myself, let alone someone else.
Always hated parent teacher conferences.
No room in wallet for baby pictures.
Want to sleep uninterrupted.
Afraid of child predators – everything from pedophiles to bobcats.
Too tempting to sell to rich people for parts.
Would not be able to get kid “fixed” before puberty – I actually asked a doc about this once.
Don’t want my kid to have a kid and dump it on me.
Can’t afford one.
Don’t want to take the time.
Don’t want to move to a bigger place.
Can’t stand noise of baby crying.
Can’t have kid ‘put down’ if too ill.
Don’t want to fight over internet time.
I’m sure there’s a lot more. These are just off the top of my head.
Apology accepted! Except, it wasn’t a “mixed metaphor”. It was a mixed metaphor. But that’s okay, I know you meant well.
Whenever threads like this come along, they make me think – in itself a damn chore, and probably dangerous – and the thread of my thought goes like this:
Why do people have children? Well, in the olden days, it was (1) to propagate the species and (2) to have help with the mammoth-killing, seed-planting and war-fighting. It was in the process of all of those necessities of daily living that people taught children values, life skills, etc.
But now we have advanced technology and specialized people to kill the mammoths, plant the seeds and fight the wars. All we need children for is to propagate the species. So raising children, instead of being organic and inherent to survival, has become an artificial task that we’ve bolted onto the outside of life. And because it’s no longer a necessity of day-to-day survival, we don’t do a very good job of it, all in all (standard rant here about society’s descent into drugs, alcohol and crime because of industrializaiton, blah, blah, blah).
So, why not turn the raising of children over to specially trained people who have the technology and talent for it? Y’know, kind of like daycare centers, only more intensive. They’d be tasked with improving the quality of children, the way agriculture tries to improve the quality of crops and livestock. It’d become a huge industry, run by giant corporations (imagine the Super Bowl ads for *that * company). Of course, we’d still have to give birth to the little darlings, and we’d be responsible for feeding and paying for their upkeep. But in the process, people unfit for having children (and they’re out there, believe-you-me!) could be sort of subtracted from the baby-having pool until they were fit.
Of course, as with all utopias, this one rather quickly turns dystopian because I wouldn’t be appointed Daycare Czar, and my vision would be twisted to serve other people’s agendas, and soon only profits would matter.
That’s what I get for thinking!
No one has really addressed this in depth, so permit me an excursion into this line of rationale. It’s not just that a child of an abusive parent or relationship will unwittingly perpetuate the so-called “cycle of abuse”; the larger issue is having or developing the correct skills and attitudes to rear a child in a healthy fashion. Much of child abuse isn’t intended to be hurtful per se, and the phrase “this hurts me more than it hurts you” is rarely spoken in ironic tone; the reality is that when parents visit this kind of abuse, it is done out of a twisted (and sometimes sociopathic) expression of concern. And what you learn about raising children and especially disciplining them comes almost exclusively from direct adult authority figures, primarily parents or guardians. If what you have learned is wrong and harmful, or you were just plain neglected as a child, you can command yourself to not repeat those attitudes, but then you’re left with a gulf of what to do instead. A spouse or partner who has appropriate experience can go a long way to make up for this and help guide a lesser-adapted parent cope and learn, but a situation in which both parents come from a far-less-than-ideal background, or a single parent without good experience is not a good basis for child-rearing. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, that a parent abused as a child can’t make conscious choices to avoid abuse, but it is a lot of work and personal discipline to keep from falling into behaviors learned in childhood. Many people who are abused either don’t want the effort (and don’t see the benefit or desire to have children), or struggle with trying to emulate good parenting with variable results. It’s also the case that people with abusive parents or families probably don’t have the best familial support network to help with extended child-rearing behavior. Personally, I wouldn’t want to have children without a wife who is very comfortable with the idea and willing to take the lead in outlining discipline and expectations; even then I would be very uncomfortable with being presented as a role model for social behavior, and would be concerned about imposing my own interests and goals upon them as a proxy for unfulfilled potential.
As for reactions to not having children, I think that having a family is a very character-defining life choice, and one that requires substantial sacrifice; when confronted with a very different lifestyle (especially one that is or appears to be a deliberate choice), it’s natural to feel questioned or implicitly criticized, particularly when the issue of finances enters into it. Many people might be perfectly comfortable and satisfied with taking care of children, but still be resentful when presented with middle-aged childless in peak earning capacity who are able to travel, dine, and otherwise spend money freely on themselves rather than on childrens’ clothes, health care, tuition, toys, et cetera. That can seem very “selfish”, whereas spending money on children is (from the perspective of a parent) a “selfless sacrifice” which nonetheless deprives the parent of time, money, and energy to entertainment or self-improvement. In other words, it’s all about opportunity cost. Healthy parents find a way to balance both, so that caring for children isn’t just a burden and isn’t a two-decade stall in personal life and development, but having that kind of balance requires a willingness to feel that children bring their own benefits and rewards.
In more metropolitan and educated societies, the cultural pressure to have children is reduced, and so the disadvantages seem larger while the perceived benefits (i.e. participating in family culture, satisfying parental expectation, et cetera) are decreased. Hence declining family sizes and increasing rates of intentional childlessness are more prevelent, as is the decision (facilitated by medical fertility technology) to defer child-rearing to a later state when potential parents are more financially and career-wise secure, even if that turns out to be not such a great advantage in the long run (if you plan to have children eventually).
Stranger
I can’t have them, and neither Mrs. Homie nor I want to go through the expense of adoption or fertility treatments. So we’ve chosen to be happy withou them. Easy choice, it turns out.