Just The Two Of Us

By Shirely Barnes
October 24, 1999

Both 34, they enjoy successful careers, European vacations and a jazzy new townhouse in an up-and-coming neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.

He's a registered nurse, she's a freelance software consultant.

Yet many friends and colleagues seem to believe that the couple's family choice is offbeat.

Barnawell and Ford are part of a growing number of married couples who are choosing to be child free. Called DINKS (dual income, no kids), these couples are daring to forgo children at a time when family friendly issues and family values (translation: families with kids) dominate the national political debate.

Reasons for this child-free trend abound: more satisfying careers for women, worry-free birth control methods, the high cost of raising kids, overpopulation and environmental concerns. But the main reason is a lukewarm interest in putting up with children 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In their book "Next: Trends for the Near-Future" (Overlook Press, $26.95), authors Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia quote estimates indicating that 22 percent of women born between 1956 and 1972 will never have children, a figure unsurpassed in U.S. history. Although not all these women are married or child-free by choice, more and more are.

Politicians and policy makers touting family values today seem to ignore the fact that it doesn't take a child to make a family.

"To me our family is us and the three boys," says Ford, referring to the couple's three tortoise shell cats that get along not much better than squabbling kids. With photos of brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews topping their TV cabinet and the newest nephew among the photographic mementos on the refrigerator door, it's obvious that their extended family plays an important role in their home as well.

But Ford and Barnawell don't feel they're missing anything by not having children of their own. That's why they prefer the term child free, not childless. Ford bristles at the fact that she must continually explain her choice to friends and acquaintances whose vision of family is different from her own.

"Everyone assumes that as a woman you are really desperate to have a child, that you're secretly longing to become a mother. It even seems as if our decision not to have a child makes some people nervous," Ford says, remembering she never played with baby dolls when she was young.

"My dolls were actresses, models, singers, traveling around the world."

Other people seem to think non-parenting is "weird or un-American, although we're no longer trying to populate the frontier," says Ford, who gets tired of having to say she likes children, which she does. Her lap is often full of young nieces and nephews at family gatherings.

And neither Ford nor Barnawell is slamming the door on parenting.

"But since adolescence I didn't want children," says Barnawell, whose mother ran a day-care center at home. "I don't want to rule out that my feelings might change. But for now I don't envision children."

They both recognize the downside to their lifestyle choice. While moms and dads meet new adult friends at their kids' play group or on the Little League field, DINKS often feel a sense of social isolation, particularly in suburban communities where so many activities revolve around children.

That's why Ford and Barnawell initiated a Chicago chapter of No Kidding! this year to bring together like-minded people who aren't interested in hearing about "someone's C-section" for the umpteenth time.

Started in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1984 by founding "non-father" Jerry Steinberg, No Kidding! chapters are primarily social clubs for couples and singles who, for whatever reason, have never had children and like it that way. They get together to go to the theater, baseball games, wine bars or potluck suppers. The organization now includes 37 chapters in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.

Steinberg and his wife share their home with a cat and three dogs--"all fixed!"; he founded the group when he discovered most of his friends were having children and drifting away.

"I needed some new child-free friends who could chat on the phone for half an hour without a hundred interruptions," he explains.

He hates it when people claim he'll change his mind about having kids.

"Don't they realize I thought long and hard about such an important decision as parenthood? Did they have kids and then change their minds, deciding they didn't want them after all?"

Other "child-freers" meet on Internet message boards to swap their strategies for surviving in a child-centered world, where they often feel like misfits, or to find out about the latest books written by or about child-free couples.

Melissa McPherson founded the Internet-based ChildFree Association in 1997 "after about the 50th person at a family gathering wanted to know when I was going to have kids. I wanted to scream. What is it with people and this obsession with kids?"

She offers a "Living ChildFree" booklet, a primer for couples considering a child-free lifestyle, and newsletter full of mostly "tongue-in-cheek articles to help readers maintain their sense of humor" about their frequently challenged family choice.

"There's nothing wrong with not wanting to have children," McPherson says. "But there is something wrong with parents who, with little thought, planning or sanity, have children that they can ill afford to support."

Childless by Choice offers a "Still Deciding" information packet for people struggling with "societal or family pressures that are making them feel as if not having children is a wrong choice," says founder Carin Smith.

Before joining the Chicago area chapter of No Kidding!, Cathy Nerad of Oswego felt "increasingly isolated and depressed. I felt as if I always had to make excuses for the very private and very right decision" that she and her husband, Roy, had made to forgo children.

"It was a very difficult choice, especially for a woman, because it's not the popular choice," Nerad says. But she says she sees "so many parents who don't seem very happy. I see a lot of people who never should have had children."

To Roy Nerad, the No Kidding! gatherings offer an oasis from "the embarrassing questions, judgments and pity" they continually receive from people who can't seem to accept the fact "we're not anti-child, or anti-parent. We love and respect our family, friends and neighbors" who have made the choice to have children.

Among other advantages, having no children "has made us closer as a couple," says Roy Nerad. In fact, a number of studies have shown that child-free couples are happier. No-kid couples remain throughout their marriage as happy as pre-kid couples are before the babies start to come, according to a 1997 Arizona State University marriage satisfaction study.

Nonetheless, "people look at me as if I'm a freak because I don't have children and they think I'm selfish," says Megan Kafalas, 39, of Highland Park, who runs a computer consulting business with her husband, John.

She says she did "a lot of soul searching to realize that I really don't have a maternal instinct.

"Well-behaved children are a joy forever but I know so few of those," she says. Parents use "a child as an accessory these days." Having a child in tow has "become a fashion statement," she says.

Newlywed Tani Randolff, 35, of Fayetteville, Ark., is another who rejects the selfish label. A wildlife biology student whose military husband is stationed at Ft. Bragg, she claims "having a child just to satisfy your parents, to carry on the name, to leave your `mark,' to save a marriage, these are definitely more selfish," she says. "People should have children because they want them, not to fill a void somewhere."

Randolff, who has a Hispanic background, says having no kids is "almost unheard of" in her culture "since children are generally the center of any Hispanic family. But I grew up wanting to be something other than a mother, like I saw all my aunts and cousins become.

"I'm the only female in my whole family that's ever joined the military (she's now retired), went to war (Desert Storm) and doesn't have any children at age 35."

Steinberg has a ready answer for "religious zealots" who point out that God, according to the Bible, calls for believers "to be fruitful and multiply. If she indeed said that, it was when the population of Earth was two! I think I can hear her screaming, `Enough already!' "

He also decries the fact that non-parents have to cajole reluctant doctors into giving them a vasectomy or tubal ligation. Three doctors turned him down before one said yes, for fear he would later regret the decision. "Come back after you've had some kids," one told him.

Other non-parents complain about "taxation without representation." Family-friendly tax breaks and child discounts at hotels, airlines, restaurants, movie theaters and on public transit are among their pet peeves. They feel they are subsidizing families that have children.

And unlike yesterday's childless woman who shied away from flaunting her lack of interest in motherhood, non-parents today are just as eager as working parents to fight for what they feel they deserve. As a result, progressive companies are scrambling to offer benefit packages that are fair to all employees regardless of family status.

At Aetna and Downers Grove-based Spiegel Inc., flex-time requests are now "reason neutral." It doesn't matter if an eligible employee is a mother wanting better hours to meet her children's schedule or a child-free man who wants to do volunteer work or go back to school.

But Cheryl and Dave Beauvais of Palatine, who know their decision not to have children was the right one for them, aren't as concerned about the issues of special breaks for parents.

"I think we all in our society have an obligation to take care of the next generation, regardless of whether or not we have children," Cheryl says.

"We just want to be looked upon as individuals who have made an intelligent and rational choice," she adds.

She's tired of hearing people say, "You're going to regret it." "That's automatically the first thing out of people's mouths" when she mentions she is child free by choice.

"I don't consider this a decision that requires either sympathy or disbelief," she says.