The stigma of childlessness?

[BeardofPants]

An article by Sarah-Kate Lynch, a New Zealand writer, journalist, and columnist. No online source as of yet.

There were three of us sprawled on a sun-soaked sloping lawn in the Botanic Garden. It was one of those Wellington summer days that make you never want to live anywhere else. The year was 1984 and the empty bottle of Moët lying at our feet had cost just $20. Life was good.

Suddenly the idyllic silence was split by the ear-piercing caterwauling of an infuriated toddler, its elder sister poking it rudely with a stick as its raddled mother brought up the rear shouting at both of them, the baby she was pushing in the pram just starting a curdling squeal.

“I am never going to have children,” pronounced Hattie. “Me neither,” I agreed. “That goes double for me,” Bridget added. Fast-forward 20 years, however, and my house is the only one without The Wiggles in the video player.

Bridget decided after her father died that she wanted to add a new generation to her family and had a child in her late 30s, while Hattie changed her mind much earlier and now has an eight-year-old and two adopted Russian children. “But I can’t remember why I wanted them,” she says now. “I can only remember why I didn’t.”

So why do people have children? Is it to have someone to love them when they’re old? To pass on their fabulousness? To please their own parents? I’m interested in the answer because I’m quite often asked, sometimes by total strangers, why I don’t?

The old-fashioned answer is feck off and mind your own business. But the truth is that being a happily married couple in our late 30s (well, my husband still squeaks in, even if I don’t!) we are now something of an oddity in our childlessness. And I mind people asking why a hell of a lot less than I mind their attempts in infect me with their own limitlessly joyful parenthood virus – something friends and family would never do, but people I’ve barely met can’t seem to resist.

“Ooooh, but you’d make such fantastic parents,” a mother-of-three cooed at us over the dinner table a while ago. Her eyes were hanging out of her head with tiredness, she had baby vomit on her shirt, her cleavage was the depth of the Clutha and she checked her watch every eight seconds, her eyelids flickering as she calculated the escalating cost of the babysitter.

“No wine for me,” she said sternly, “I’m breastfeeding. And no potatoes either, thanks. Trying to get that girlish figure back. Darling, it’s your turn to ring home and check that everything’s okay. No, do it now. I said now. So, where was I?”

Truly, I am happy that little Olivia has the reading age of Methuselah and James is so gifted he doesn’t feel the need to spell and the wee one is sleeping through the night except for the four o’clock feed and Hannah is sitting on the potty even if she isn’t doing anything. But I am also perfectly content that none of these things is happening at my house, which has breakable objects, by the way, stored at knee height and a pantry sadly lack in treats but happily full of vodka and gin.

In fact, overseas studies suggest that we childless folk might actually be happier than breeders. At Professor John Gottman’s “Love Lab” research facility at the University of Washington in the United States, for example, a six-year study of 82 newlywed couples found that marital satisfaction took a steep dive after the birth of the first child, while levels of marital satisfaction stayed the same with couples who did not have children. Yet some parents seem to think it’s impossible to lead a full and satisfying life without a clutch of snot-gobblers.

“You should be passing on the best bits of you and your husband to a future generation,” insisted a passionate new father over a whine or two a few years ago. “Don’t you want to see that?”

“I’ll tell you what I don’t want to see,” I told him. “The world’s fattest, most sarcastic ginger (BoP notes: writer’s husband).” Nobody wants to see that. And it’s Russian roulette predicting what genes get passed on from what I have seen so far.

“So did you decide not to have kids or is it a medical thing?” some willowy blonde I had never met before once asked.

“Well, what with all the shopping for Robert Clergerie shoes and flying to New York to eat at four-star restaurants, I guess I just plum forgot.”

The thing is, if childlessness is due to infertility, that is a terribly distressing situation and not one to be chatted about over cocktails with people you’ve just met. And, if childlessness is a choice, you are perceived as being heartless and selfish and probably the sort of person who cuts children up into tiny pieces and feeds them to your cats, which are in no doubt in plentiful supply and have proper names like Susan and Derek and Irene.

Either way, if you’re of a certain age and not doing the school run, you can feel the need to explain yourself and it is not pleasant. “I actually get quite angry that people feel they have to feel that way, if you know what I mean,” says Dr Jan Cameron of Canterbury University’s sociology department, who has researched the subject of men and women who choose not to procreate. The results of her project were published in 1997 in a book called Without Issue.

“I used to get quite a head of steam up about it,” she says, “and I have children, but I used to get so angry when people who didn’t were made to feel as though they had to account for themselves. I mean, no one has ever come to me and said, ‘Why do you have children?’”

You see? That question just does not get asked. The other one does though, and according to Cameron’s research is quite often accompanied by a warning that the choice not to have children will be regretted. Yet none of the people she spoke to said that this was the case.

“It is far more serious to regret having a child,” says Cameron. Not that you will find too many who admit to that. “Although I suppose there are some brave people around who say that, if they had their time again, they wouldn’t have them. But that’s not to say they regret the ones they’ve got.”

So, that’s one myth dispelled. Another one she encountered in her research and similarly dispelled was that people who choose not to have children don’t like them. In fact, it can be quite the contrary. These childless folk often love the company of the younger generation and may even connect with them in a way that their parents can’t. They just don’t necessarily want to have any at home where they can fret about them breaking their bones on the jungle gym, or worry that they won’t get School C (BoP notes: out-dated formal exam that seniors used to sit at the age of 15) or whatever it’s called, or give them the keys to their shiny new VW Golfs. In fact, most people without children are very good baby sitters if you over-protective parents out there would just stop arguing about hiding the knives and go out once in a while.

cont...

[BeardofPants]

Yet another myth is that childless couples are sad and lonely when they’re old. Not true. A University of Florida study of nearly 4000 elderly men and women last year found that those who had never had children were no more psychologically vulnerable in older age than those with families. In fact, the findings suggested that sometimes the childless were better off because they ad built up other networks over their lives.

So, while all the crumbling old parents are crying into their bifocals at the rest home because their useless, good-for-nothing offspring have abandoned them, the wrinkled childless will be playing gin rummy for money with their card groups, and paying strapping young bucks to push them along the Milford Track with all that money they didn’t spend on university educations.

And as for that wanting to pass on the good bits of yourself thing… “Yes, that whole notion of immortality is fascinating,” agrees Cameron, “and more than a bit arrogant.” The other side of that coin, after all, is that you are lumbering some sweet little unborn munchkin with you as a parent. Besides, speculates Cameron, it could be that there are some among us who spend their lives making a difference to the world in a wider sense and so don’t feel the drive to produce a child to extend themselves into the ever-after.

More disturbingly, what Cameron’s research definitely revealed – and she does not believe the climate has changed since her research – is that it is simply not cool to admit you chose not to have children. “It’s like coming out if you’re gay,” says a friend of mine (not that there’s anything wrong with that to quote Jerry Seinfeld). “Up until now they’ve let people assume they couldn’t have children and now a few of them are saying, ‘ Actually, I don’t want them.’”

“The coming out analogy is totally appropriate,” agrees Cameron. “I certainly talked to some people who told me that they got sympathy from people who assumed they were infertile. And they said it was easier for them to put up with that than the alternative: that pity was easier to bear than scorn.”

Well, excuse me, but how much does that stink? It’s a queer old world when we’re pretending our reproductive organs are munted just so people won’t hate us. I mean, whatever happened to “To each his own”?

The thing is, I know that what Jan Cameron is saying is true because when I started writing this story I was perfectly happy to out myself as someone who had chosen not to have children but in the course of researching it, I got the heebies and changed my mind because I didn’t want people to think I was a mean old bitch who hated babies. Now, obviously, I’m changing it back again because I’ve remembered that I’m not a mean old bitch. I love babies. I just could never think of a reason to have one of my own. And anyway, what’s wrong with not having children? “Bloody nothing, if you ask me,” asserts another friend of mine who has two pre-teenage boys and is most certainly not one to harass the childless to follow in her footsteps.

“I had no idea what I was getting into when I had my babies,” she says. “It was a nightmare. I hated every minute of it. No one had prepared me for how hard it was, how tired I would be, how much I would argue with my husband. In fact, I would have left him if I’d thought he could look after the kids, but he couldn’t so I didn’t. Any anyway, I was too bloody knackered. So looking at it like that I suppose you could say that those little shits kept us together. But now when I hear people bleating on about the prospect of having children I tell them not to. I say, ‘Don’t do it,’ go to Paris instead.’”

While that may seem harsh, it makes a refreshing change from being urged to jump on the parental bus, and it does seem as though we should be making childlessness more of an appealing option. There is so much pressure on everyone to breed yet, even at fertility clinics, not having kids is offered as a viable alternative.

“Obviously, some who come in are clearly determined and fairly sure that this is the avenue they want to pursue,” says Joi Ellis, a counsellor at Fertility Associates in Auckland. “But for others who are wondering whether they would want to go down the treatment road or what the options are, then that would be one of the options.”

And they don’t bring out the black arm-bands and treat it like a bad thing either. In fact, they encourage people who make this choice to consider themselves child-free as opposed to childless. But, though this is a much jauntier term that definitely accentuates the positive, there is another more grim reason for making the distinction.

“Infertile couples will tell me they meet with quite a lot of anti-feeling because people don’t know about their infertility and think they’ve made a choice and it was a selfish decision.”

So once again the child-free are the cat people with sharp knives!

I suppose it is something to do with liking everyone else to do what they’ve done because it sanctions their position,” says Ellis of the pressure on the childless to breed.

So what we really need, upon reflection, is for society simply to be more accepting of people who don’t have children and to shove their stick beaks up their own jacksies when it comes to the reasons why. It should not be an issue.

Overseas studies show, after all, that childless couples are happier than couples who are parents – and argue eight times less. And if the childless wife didn’t shop at Trelise Cooper (BoP notes: successful NZ clothes designer – expensive!) and bring her purchases home in a sale bag, even though they weren’t on sale, why, they probably wouldn’t argue at all.

We don’t need pity, you see, and we don’t deserve scorn. We are just quite well dressed and sleep in a lot.

Forgive the typos, had to type the whole bloody lot out myself! Anyway, I just read this in the week-end newspaper (NZ Herald), and I wanted to share. Thoughts?

[Wayfarer]

I like children.

You've just got to use the right herbs and spices.

[BeardofPants]

Wayfarer, you silly git. Go start your own cannibalistic thread.



Just interested to see other's POVs on this issue.... And stories. I've got a few myself (mostly involving drunken "moms" at christmas dos giving me lecturers on why I should have children, and how wonderful her own scallywags are )

[Wayfarer]

Oh, well in that case.

I can't say I've ever felt stigmatized for not having children. I can't really imagine ever wanting them.

Maybe if I could build some...

[Nurvingiel]

You can build children, you just need... no, I'm not going there.

It's not an issue to me whether or not people have children. My parents aren't the "So when are those grandkids coming along" sort. They just want us to be happy. They also don't stigmatize others for not having kids.

I don't get stigmatized for not having kids because I'm only 21. But if I do... I'll probably tell the person to "feck off and mind their own business" as the clever writer of this article put it. Thanks for your effort there BoP.