They're Childless And Proud Of It

By Diane White
June 3, 1996

Childlessness may strike those who have children as an odd issue to rally around. Either you have kids or you don't. What's the big deal?

Many people who don't have children know that it's not that simple. There's enormous pressure from family, friends, society at large to reproduce. If you don't have children, perfect strangers feel they have a right to scrutinize the most intimate details of your life. Those who can't have kids resent being pitied. And those who choose not to have kids don't like being seen as selfish, or weird, or both. People who are childless, whether by choice or by chance, rightly believe not having kids is their business and theirs alone.

It's a coincidence that National ChildFree Adult Day fell on the same weekend as the Children's Defense Fund's rally in Washington. The two occasions might seem to be at odds, but that's not entirely the case. Many child-related problems stem from the fact that too many babies are born to people who have no idea of the enormous responsibilities involved in parenting. The ChildFree Network advocates more education in schools about the realities and consequences of having children.

The ChildFree Network put me on its mailing list a few years ago, after I wrote a column about a chance meeting with an old acquaintance who, in the course of a casual conversation, asked if I had children. I told him I had a stepson. This cut no ice, apparently, because he responded by saying that it wasn't too late for me to have a baby. ``You don't know what love is until you have a child,'' he said.

The column generated lots of letters and phone calls, most from other women who said they were tired of being treated as less than fully human because they haven't borne children. The ChildFree Network has tapped into that discontent. The California-based organization is small -- 3,000 dues-paying members -- but growing. There's no lack of prospective members. Census Bureau figures indicate that 16 percent of baby-boom women don't have children, compared with 8.2 percent of women in their parents' generation.

Just how many of them are militantly childless remains to be seen. That's how I think of the members of the ChildFree Network, militantly childless. It's the impression I get reading the newsletter, ChildFree Lifestyle. It's fair to complain about being viewed as a freak because you don't have children. But is it legitimate to feel superior to those who do have them? Of course it isn't.

Even to a sympathetic eye, some of the articles and letters in the newsletter have a distinctly self-congratulatory tone. They're not anti-child, exactly, but they do extol the delights of child-free travel and child-free restaurant dining, the joys of not having to pay for college tuition, the freedom to do all sorts of things unencumbered by kids.

The newsletter covers issues great and small that bear upon the childless. ChildFree Network members understandably object to tax cuts based on deductions for children. But when some of them crab about having to pay taxes to support schools they don't use I can't help thinking of the bumper sticker slogan, ``If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.''

A few letters and articles cross the line and are, frankly, whiny and curmudgeonly, full of complaints about having to endure the presence of other people's children in public places. So what's the answer? ``No children'' areas? Should we discriminate against children to make life more pleasant for the childless? The ChildFree Network has some important points to make, but some of its members need to grow up.