I know the topic comes up from time to time, but I’ve never seen anyone ask this in particular.
If you’re Childfree (you choose to not procreate or are happy with your infertility), what kind of person are you? A professional? Religious? Social? Hobbies? Pets? Age? And so on.
When did you know you didn’t want children? What inspired your choice?
This is not a thread to bash parents or kids. There are plenty of others for that. I just want to know a generic profile of the Childfree person.
I didn’t want to make the top post long, so here’s mine:
Thirty-four, married almost eight years. I own four cats (and just picked up a stray, hoping to find his owner). I spoil my cats rotten.
I’m introverted. No friends offline except aforementioned husband. I see my parents (divorced) perhaps three times a year each. Mom emails, dad doesn’t. No siblings. Two close online friends I speak with on a frequent basis. No social networking. I hate talking on the phone, so I don’t own a mobile.
I don’t drink or smoke.
I enjoy gaming, roleplaying (no, not the kind with costumes), reading, baking, museums, music, photography, robots. And Apple products.
I live in a one bedroom apartment and have lived in apartments all of my life. I have no desire to own a house. Houses eat up free time. I prefer to engage my brain, not toil on housework.
I’m a graphic designer that makes pretty good money.
I believe in God, and I’ll leave it at that.
I knew I was Childfree pretty much my whole life. I wasn’t raised around babies, have never held a baby. The few younger cousins I had were all born at least eight years after me.
My life satisfaction is pretty high most of the time. My life is quiet, simple, and clean, just the way my nerves like it.
Let me take a mad punt and suggest that the reasons that people choose not to have children are wild and varied. Your request for a universal (generic) reason is not appropriate.
Thirty-eight, married to my college sweetheart. Reasonably extroverted, professional job. One dog. I have nine nieces and nephews, but all of them live 200-800 miles away. I like kids (and they seem to like me), but I just never needed one of my own. In our twenties, we gradually came to the realization that we don’t really want to have children – it’s just not for us.
We’ve agreed that if we ever get the desire to have kids, we’ll foster and maybe adopt older children (because they need parents as much as, or more than, babies).
On another note, I think you’ll find that it’s couples with professional jobs who aren’t having kids. I don’t know why that is.
47
librarian/genealogist
bicyclist
atheist
I usually have a glass of beer or wine, with dinner or in the evening
I married late in life, (42) wife has kids but they are grown and I became an instant grandpa.
I do enjoy those kids and I have no regrets about not having my own.
We recently found a dog and took him in.
I am fairly satisfied with my life, though I miss some of the peace and quiet and alone time from my single days
I’m a satanic mechanic.
Don’t get strung out
By the way I look
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
43, female. When I was younger, I figured that I’d someday want kids, but not now. At 43, I still don’t want kids, and I figure that ship has sailed, at least for bio kids. I’m not interested in a pregnancy at my age, too much risk.
All the women/couples I know who have kids got to a point where one or both of them REALLY wanted a kid. As in, it was an overwhelming desire. I never got past the idea that hypothetically the idea of a kid wasn’t bad, but getting pregnant? Caring for an infant? Dealing with a toddler? Blech.
I still don’t really like kids all that much. I think they become interesting/cute at about age 8 or 9.
Sometimes I do regret my decision, but it’s always couched in my fears that I’ll be old and alone someday and wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to take care of me? I realize, though, that having a kid is 1) not a guarantee that he/she would do that and 2) a shitty reason to have a kid if that’s the only or major reason you had one. So I’m OK with it. I have lots of kidless friends, I figure someday we’ll all move into a commune together or something. 
what kind of person are you? One who likes to be let alone,
A professional? yes.
Religious? No.
Social? Only with close friends.
Hobbies? Many (I’ll try out every new craft/skill/sport that comes around, but I will not be a spectator).
Pets? 10+ (I have a full football team of cats, and the neighborhood dogs I count among my best friends).
Age? 46
When did you know you didn’t want children? Before the age of 10. I was aware of the patriarchal division of roles in childcare from a very early age, even though my father played a very large part in my early childhood.
What inspired your choice? The realisation that children and babies are hard work, and that as a girl/woman, I would be doing almost all of it. Besides, I like being able to spend all my material and temporal resources on myself, and absolutely refuse to complicate my life by adding a child to it. The painful mechanics of childbirth and the wear and tear on the body by a pregnancy is another reason why I would not consider having children.
There’s no such thing, any more than there’s a generic profile of a parent. The only characteristics we share are that we’re happy/content not to have kids, and we hate patronizing twats who assure us we’ll change our minds. Everything else–job type, socioeconomic status, personalities and hobbies, religion, family history, path to childfreedom–varies wildly.
Single, professional woman, age 27. I’ve known for at least a decade that I have absolutely zero desire to have kids. I have a bunch of nieces and nephews, and while I like them well enough, spending any extended period of time with them eventually becomes tedious. How many times can you crash two Matchbox cars together? If you’re a kid, the answer is apparently, “all day.”
That’s really what it comes down to, in my case. I have nothing against parenthood or childbirth or any of that. What’s really stopping me from having kids is my certainty that I would be a terrible parent. I just don’t relate to kids very well.
The majority of North America at the last count - that’s right, people without kids are now the majority. 
Oh, my husband and I, personal profiles - both professional, one cat, no religion, we donate to charities of our own choosing, socialize some. I’m 46, he’s 44, I have never had the baby urge, he was lukewarm to having kids at best.
I was about 10 when I decided that I would never have kids.
My parents. I was afraid that I would be like them.
I wonder about economic status. It seems like few or no kids is the domain of the non-poor, which is curious since being childless and employed is almost a sure-fire way out of poverty. My grandparents groused about the depression and being dirt-poor, but having 10 kids didn’t help.
I’m 37 years old and in a LTR for almost sixteen years with a man I love very much. I’m atheist, and a strong atheist at that.
I think I would be a pretty good Mom but I don’t want kids. I’ve known for sure since I ws seventeen but I think I felt it even before then…I never played “House” or any of those kinds of games when I was a child.
I like children (some) all right. I can play with them for a while and I’m pretty good with them but really they are just boring little things. I like adult conversation.
I don’t smoke. I drink occasionally. I have lots of hobbies but currently I am going back to school which would be approximately 1000x harder with a child.
I am very content. Going back to school is aimed to give me a career, not just a job, and a better pay rate, but other than that I am quite happy. I talk to my dad weekly but only see him a couple times a year.
I don’t have any pets right now. When I do it’s lizards, fish, or birds - never any dogs or cats. I like dogs, but they are way too much maintenance and with my luck I’ll get pukey the wonder dog.
Here’s a quote from another thread that summarizes why I don’t have or want kids :
It’s not perfect, and it’s not complete, but it’s a reasonable facsimile of my feelings.
I’m not sure happy is the right word to use in our case. It’s more an indifference, at least for me. Long ago I realized I’d be happy with or without kids, so when it became apparent kids would not happen in this marriage without expensive or objectionable interventions when went down the fork in the road marked “childless”.
Currently I’m in a trade. No, I don’t think I’d be considered white collar though in the past I might have been described as pink collar. The other half of the marriage has been a professional engineer and a professional musician. We’re a bit eclectic.
Neo-Pagan and Baptist, but not that much into our respective faiths and we both loathe organized religion.
Me more than the Other Half, but we both tend towards introversion.
Too many!
Currently, a conure and two cockatiels. We’ve had birds, cats, dogs, various wildlife we’ve rehabbed. Prior to marriage the Other Half had tropical fish (bred them for awhile, in fact), sharks, scorpion, tarantula, chickens, and probably a bunch I’ve either forgotten about or don’t know about. I’ve had gerbils as well as the others listed.
late 40’s and mid-50’s
It’s not that we didn’t want children, it’s that the Other Half can’t biologically reproduce. Nothing “inspired” our “choice”, we had a set of circumstances, sat down and discussed the alternatives, and decided we didn’t want to chase interventions. It’s not like there’s a people shortage in the world. If our siblings hadn’t reproduced that might have weighted our choice differently but we have nieces and nephews. Unlike some people, neither of us went into crying fits because we couldn’t conceive on our own.
It’s a bit like asking what “inspired” me to have green eyes instead of brown. It’s implying that this was all part of a plan and it wasn’t. We didn’t set out to either have or not have kids.
I don’t think there is one. As already noted, the reasons people don’t have kids are quite varied.
Oh, and the socio-economic thing? We’re currently living at the poverty line. So no, it’s not just the well-off who aren’t having kids.
ETA: and married for 25 years.
Mid fifties, urban professional, non-practicing Catholic, shacking up but not married. I’ve always hated kids, even when I was a kid. I’d rather saw my own head off than spawn a kid of my own. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t say. They just give me the willies.
the world is overpopulated.
47, male. My wife and I have been married for 20 years.
We definitely wanted to have children. We didn’t start seriously trying until (somewhat) late in the game – my wife is two years older than me, and she was 33 when we started trying to conceive in earnest.
After several years of no success (and several heartbreaking false alarms), we realized that we weren’t going to be able to have kids without significant assistance (expensive, but also by no means a sure thing, and that leads back to the heartbreak thing), or adoption, which didn’t particularly appeal, for several reasons.
It took us a couple of years to really come to peace with that realization, but when my wife’s sister (who is my age) had twins at age 40, and we saw just how hard all of that was, we decided that we were good with being childless.
Really, the only outside pressure we’ve ever had about our decision to throw in the towel came from my mother – she pushed adoption for a little while, but she stopped when we explained that we really didn’t want to head down that path.
We’re both very social – we have a wide circle of very good friends, many of whom have children, to whom we’re close. We have three nieces and a nephew, and my wife is a schoolteacher, so it’s not like there aren’t any children in our lives; they simply aren’t ours.
We’re both professionals (I work in market research), and religious (Lutheran). I have too many hobbies to count (role-playing games, model rocketry, following pro football, and playing guitar are the big ones). We have always had at least one pet; currently, we have a cat.