Kid You Not

Child-free and what's it to you?

By Melissa Starker
August 15, 2002

Most consider this a bumpy part of the responsibilities of adulthood, the time when you should get married and have children. But over the last three decades, more people have stopped wondering when they'll have children and, instead, started wondering why they should.

Even 40 years after the Pill, it's still a wild thought, what with family-friendly government policies like the Pro-Marriage Initiative spending tax money supposedly to make welfare recipients better parents (ignoring the statistics that prove a solid education and a living wage would do a lot more good for their kids) and a constant, pop culture barrage of photogenic infants (as in Friends and Sex and the City). Most any woman who, for whatever reason, has not had a child by a certain age can attest that her fertility is considered a ripe topic for conversation among family, friends and co-workers, sometimes total strangers.

You'd think this would be a subject too touchy for Sunday dinner or lunchroom conversation, as U.S. Census data indicates that more women are remaining childless. The number of women in their early forties who have never given birth nearly doubled in the past 25 years, to 19 percent.

The choice of career over starting a family right away has left many unable to conceive by the time they feel prepared for kids. Some give up thoughts of children under a partner's pressure. Bringing up the lack of a traditional family just refreshes a sense of regret.

But there's something about the human drive to propagate the species that turns a normally private realm into a source of common speculation, and there's a growing minority who feels the need to play defense when talk turns to kids. National Opinion Research Center polls suggest that cohabitating without a marriage license and having children out of wedlock have become more socially acceptable, but the state of coupled childlessness hasn't gotten quite as much slack.

People who get together and don't procreate are often met with responses from "Who's going to take care of you in your old age?" to the other end of the reasoning chain, "How can you be so selfish?" Women get the worst of it, fed scary statistics-which usually don't wash under scrutiny-that after 35, they're more likely to meet a terrorist than Mr. Right or, more recently, in Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book Creating a Life, that if they are successful, they will always be unfulfilled unless they spend part of their twenties landing a man and squeezing out some offspring.

More women and couples in countries across the planet are tuning out this noise and letting the world know they're not having kids. They're not changing their minds. Get used to it.

The United States is one of more than a dozen industrialized nations with birth rates lower than the rate of replacement. In Columbus, according to numbers compiled by the city's planning office, both the number of women living alone without minor children increased and married couples without children under 18 years old increased disproportionately throughout the 1990s.

This trend has become a major field of sociological study and the subject of a growing number of books, including The Baby Boon, in which Elinor Burkett unleashes frustration at preferential treatment for parents in corporations and in Washington D.C., and Madelyn Cain's The Childless Revolution, which allowed a variety of women to explain their individual reasons for the choice.

Cain found that some women remain child-free out of valid environmental concerns. The country's birth rate may not be at replacement level, but we Americans do suck up an inordinate share of natural resources and developing nations are making up for our reproduction numbers. According to Stephen Hawking, if growth continues as it is, in six centuries the world's population will be standing shoulder to shoulder. Other women have a spiritual calling that takes all the energy and care they'd devote to raising children.

Within the third, largest category of intentionally child-free women are those who just don't think they're cut out for child-rearing. They're on a lifelong career track, or they cherish private time or unfettered intimacy with a partner. Some simply don't like children, though they've learned not to bring this up in public. You might as well say you love Hitler.

Some of the myriad personal reasons spurring non-breeders have seen print, as in the current issue of Utne Reader, and been ranted on websites like heartless-bitch.com and hissyfit.com ("112 Reasons to Lead a Barren, Childless Existence That Ends in Your Death"). The Internet has apparently brought the greatest supply of reassurance and sense of community to people who have watched friends have children with no desire to follow the lead.

No Kidding, one of the earliest social organizations for adults without children, was formed in 1984 by Vancouver resident Jerry Steinberg. He had lots of experience with kids through his own family members and volunteer activities, but knew he didn't want his own.

Steinberg, like many adults (particularly women), had trouble finding a doctor who would surgically sterilize someone who hadn't parented. The doctors couldn't explain their reluctance to let Steinberg exercise his reproductive choice, which spurred him to seek others like himself and those still on the fence over parenthood. His organization now has 78 chapters in four countries. There are three in Ohio, including the one that just started in Columbus and, according to local chapter co-founder John Stacy, a fourth is about to start in Cincinnati.

Stacy's wife Jennifer said, "I don't always like to be the one to start things," but after seven years of marriage to John, she found that "We were running out of friends! When your friends start having kids, they're no longer available to go out and, at first, it's no big deal. But then everything is focused around that child, from where you eat to what you eat to conversation."

When an "adult night out" ended with friends singing songs from Barney videos, Jennifer felt she had to find an alternative for their social life, so she contacted Steinberg. Like No Kidding's founder, the Stacys enjoy the company of children. They acted as foster parents for a time for a relative's child, Jennifer is active in the Girls Scouts of America, and both do family- centered volunteer work through the Kiwanis Club. Ultimately, Jennifer felt that "You have a responsibility when you're married or when you live with someone to kind of look after each other. I didn't want to do it for anyone else."

She admires friends who are mothers, almost all of whom have sacrificed a career to stay at home, but she couldn't see it for herself. "The whole thing, from being pregnant to raising a kid, none of that was flashing bells or saying to me this is what I need to do," she said.

The choice has allowed her to focus on her supervisory position at a credit company, and for John to become the first member of his family to complete college. He's now at work on a graduate degree.

With the events they schedule for No Kidding members, like wine tastings, movie nights and an excursion this coming Sunday to a Columbus Clippers game, "It's a lot more relaxed," John explained. "With parents the focus is on the kids, and this is how it should be. That's where their responsibilities are, they're talking it and living up to it. This is very casual."

"I think probably the coolest thing about the group is, because you're in that right age demographic, the social pressure is not an issue," Jennifer said. Luckily, both have siblings with kids to divert judgment of their child-free status, but they have felt some pressure to reconsider, especially from Jennifer's aunts. "I finally said, `It's not going to happen,'" she said. "So hopefully my sister, now that she's married, will step in there."

Though Mark and Margaret Minnich have careers and are near the end of child-rearing years (he's 41, she's 38), their new marriage to each other has brought calls from others to reproduce. Margaret, an executive secretary, has been hearing the "When are you having children?" question frequently from co-workers, and their families have also chimed in.

"We just set them straight," said Mark, who oversees contracts for the U.S. Air Force. "We just got married in May. We're at an age where we need to concentrate on developing our relationship, and kids don't fit into it."

"Most of our friends have children," he went on. "We haven't gotten pressure from them, but their lives are child-oriented, and that leaves us out." When the Minnichs saw an announcement for the first No Kidding meeting in Columbus, they thought, "Hey, that'd be the perfect place for us." More people are having that thought; according to the Stacys, attendance and interested e-mails have swelled steadily since the group began in June.

As for kids themselves, Mark said, "Let's put it this way, children are great as long as they're someone else's and I can give them back."

This sentiment was echoed almost verbatim by Gailee Agin, another newlywed. She and her husband Chuck were married in May and they've been spared from much of the grandchild harangue by their respective sisters.

"We had a baby boom recently," Gailee explained. "We have nephews now, which is great because I can get my baby cute quotient and then hand them back. `There you go, Mommy wants you.'" At this young stage of their marriage, Chuck's assertions that they won't have kids have been met with "You'll change your mind" from his parents.

Though they're considering foster parenting in the distant future ("There are just so many kids out there that are broken and could use any kind of help," Gailee said), they've decided not to add to the population. Finances factored into the choice, as has a practical look at their lifestyle and the realities of raising kids from birth. With Gailee currently searching for full-time employment and starting school next year to become a veterinary assistant and Chuck recording his own music in time spared from his job in publishing design, they're much more comfortable with the thought of being responsible for the well-being of their three cats. "If you leave them home alone with a bowl of food and water, the police aren't called if it's a cat," Gailee noted facetiously.

"And [babies] screams are really loud and high-pitched," Chuck added with a shudder. "It's upsetting. It's like listening to Japanese noise."

"You're supposed to grow up, have the house with a white picket fence, start a family as soon as you can and then live the American Dream," Gailee said. "Everything points to that, from television advertising to food in the grocery stores. It's packaged for more than one person."

"When you tell people you don't want to have kids," Chuck added, "if you say you're not ready, what do they always say? `You're never ready.' Well then why have them? What kind of answer is that?"

A surprisingly common one. According to the most recent numbers available from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, almost half of the children conceived in this country were not intended at the time. These single women and couples, either through contraceptive failure or carelessness, didn't have the chance to ask whether they were ready for kids, much less if they'd ever be ready.

Still, given the awesome responsibility of creating a human from scratch and raising it to be happy and healthy, it's a wonder anyone would try to impose their concept of family on another couple. No matter what an author or your cousin or the woman in the next cubicle might say, there is something worse than not having kids: Having them and not wanting them.