Your Kids Are Their Problem

No matter how well behaved the darlings are, there's a growing group of people who wish they weren't around. The new 'child free' movement sees anklebiters, crib lizards and sprogs wherever they look.

By Lisa Belkin
July 23, 2000

The couple next door have had a baby, and with the lots so close together, Gill -- who describes himself as passionately, even militantly, "child free" -- can hear every wail and whimper. The family on the other side has a baby girl and two young sons who used to peer at Gill through the grape-stake fence until he replaced it with a solid redwood one. Now the boys use that fence as a soccer goal, often while Gill is trying to read a book or have a quiet glass of wine.

The teenagers down the block have formed a rock band. The nice elderly woman across the street and the retired empty nesters a few doors away have sold their homes to new owners who are building Mediterranean-esque overstatements where modest cottages used to be. "And here is the lovely sand-beige palace with a turret," Gill said in his most sarcastic faux real estate broker voice while giving me a walking tour of his street. "I don't know who'll move in, but you don't build something this ridiculous unless you have kids."

Countless fences divide the American landscape, and while some, like race, loom large and visible, others are deceptively transparent, subdividing people who are the same except for the choices they have made. Mothers with jobs versus mothers without. Those who own guns versus those who would abolish them. Smokers versus nonsmokers. Home-schoolers versus public-schoolers versus private-schoolers. And, most recently and vociferously, those who have children versus those who don't. We believe we can see through these fences; we can even pretend they aren't there. But like mottled glass, they warp and distort, so that what we see from where we stand is not how things look from the other side.

As the mother of two young sons and as a writer on work-life issues, here's what I see when I look at the world: parents who are stressed. Workplace policies that try to ease that stress but can go only so far. Airplane attendants who used to be nicer to children than they are now. The cost of child care and summer camp and orthodontics, which makes it tough to save for tomorrow's cost of college. Drivers who don't slow down on side streets. Louts who wear obscene T-shirts that my kids can read and curse at baseball games where my kids can hear.

Here's what Jason Gill sees when he looks at that same world: colleagues who are stressed, yes, but only because they choose to have children. Employers who expect people like him to work longer hours so that employees who are parents can balance their lives. Benefits packages full of maternity leave, pregnancy coverage, dependent health insurance and other benefits that mean parents effectively earn more than nonparents. Infants who cry during R-rated movies. The pharmacist who won't hand over a vial with an easy-to-open cap unless Gill signs a release form swearing that he'll take full responsibility if the contents kill a child.

He is hardly the only one with that view. "Could you please try and control your brats?" a New York theater critic barks at a mother whose young children are rustling and humming during previews of "The Music Man" on Broadway. (It makes all the gossip columns.) "Your Kids Are Driving Me Crazy," blares a headline on a community newspaper on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A sign at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, a city that touts itself as a family destination, warns that children under 18 are not allowed in the hotel unless they are paying guests. (Don't even bother to ask room service for a children's menu.)

An organization called No Kidding! which schedules social events for those who remain childless, had just 2 chapters five years ago; today it has 47. And there is no way to count the number of "child free" sites online (with names like Brats! and alt.support.childfree.moderated), but together they make up a parallel and expanding universe where the printable names for children include "anklebiters" "crib lizards" and "sprogs." In this world, couples in which one parent stays home are called SITCOMS (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage). Those enlightened enough not to have children are THINKERS (Two Healthy Incomes, No Kids, Early Retirement).

There have always been people with children and people without. Why all this anger now? The answer lies in the confluence of nearly every major social and economic trend of the past 30 years. Start with the birth control pill, which transformed parenthood from an assumption to a choice. Add the women's rights movement, which sent women into the workplace in record numbers, forcing employers to find ways to accommodate families, particularly women who become mothers. Mix in the baby boomers (who have produced a baby boomlet of their own) and technology (which allows infertile couples and gay and lesbian couples to have children). Then there's the fact that, statistically, parents are older and more affluent, meaning youngsters can now be found everywhere -- at the theater, in upscale restaurants, kicking the back of your airplane seat. The world as we know it can sometimes seem infested with children.

Go to work, watch the news: the sound of institutions competing to be "family friendly" can be deafening. "Let us create a family lobby as powerful as the gun lobby," Al Gore says, and every issue, from gun control to tax reform, is now presented as being good for children. The unintended result of all this is that the 13 million childless baby boomers are left bristling because their lives -- whether chosen or the result of circumstance -- don't seem to count. This simmering resentment might not qualify as a "movement" (a word that is thrown around too often, as if anger does not exist unless it is organized), but it certainly represents a deep divide and a ripe opportunity for sniping between neighbors, between co-workers, between those who have and those who have no interest.

"It angers me and saddens me at the same time that my little piece of paradise is being ruined," says Gill, whose baby face belies an inner daredevil. He passes a truck with such ferocity that I grab the safety handle and do a mental review of my life insurance. He'd never be this reckless, I think -- sounding woefully like a parent -- if he had kids to worry about.

"I live with constant noise, but because it's made by childruuuuun," he says, layering sarcastic emphasis on the final syllable, "I can't even call the cops." (Although he has called the police twice about the rock band down the block.) "What's picturesque to a parent," he adds, "is annoying to someone who's trying to sit on the porch and nap."

We leave the truck in the dust and continue our race along Interstate 5. Farther north, the road leads to Legoland and, eventually, to Disneyland. I know this because I drove that route last summer with my boys. Today, of course, I won't visit either place. What Gill plans to show me is how different the same landscape can look through a different lens, in this case the windshield of a two-seat Miata.

When I first heard the phrase "child free," I rolled my eyes. Here's another politically correct and therefore politically loaded term, I thought, and a combative one at that. It smacks of eradication, like "smoke free" or "pesticide free." Those who use it, however, say it's not about hating children (some do; some don't). "Childless" has connotations of loss or regret; "child free" implies satisfaction and deliberate choice. To be child free, they argue, means giving far more thought to not having children than most parents give to having them.

"This wasn't an overnight, let's-really-annoy-the-relatives kind of decision," says Monica Ricci, who is 34 and owns an organizing business in Atlanta. "I remember being in my early 20's and thinking, I don't really want to have kids, but I'm going to have to do it and I'm going to hate it but I'm going to have to do it. Then, slowly, I realized, No, I'm not."

Melody Fohr, 30, who works as a telephone operator at a national chain store outside of Pittsburgh, has a similar story. "I knew from an early age that I didn't want to be a mommy," she says. "It just never appealed to me. I was never a kid like the other kids. It took the relatives a long time to realize that I never played with dolls. They kept buying them for me."

I have heard this tale before. In fact, I have lived this tale, to a point. I, too, was a child who had stuffed animals but few dolls and who pretended to be a rock star during playtime, never, ever a mom. I baby-sat -- once. There was a blackout that night, and the children cried, and I vowed not to try that again. When my friends began producing newborns, I held them awkwardly, and only when I couldn't find a way out. Four years into my marriage I was still waiting for my maternal urge to kick in, and when it didn't, I closed my eyes and took a leap of faith. Not until my son's first smile did I catch the fever and become a besotted parent.

It might be easy to find a moral here, but those who call themselves child free warn the rest of us to stop assuming that they will somehow see the light. "No one goes up to the goo-goo-eyed mother of a baby and says, 'I'm sure you'll change your mind,' "Gill says. In fact, he would argue that my life is an example of how society pressures people to have children against their better judgment. There would be fewer neglected children, he says, and fewer stressed and miserable adults, if more people felt free not to reproduce. "This isn't some cute stage that I'll grow out of," he says. "It's a legitimate life choice."

Monica Lightner, a 25-year-old newlywed in California, fought to prove exactly that late last year when she asked a doctor at her H.M.O. to perform a tubal ligation. First he tried to talk her out of it, she says, "insisting that I would change my mind one day." Then she was told that she would have to undergo a psychiatric exam, which she refused, because the suggestion that she was crazy to want a life without children was "absurd and insulting."Eventually she was referred to a second doctor, who told her that the last tubal ligation he performed was on a woman who later regretted having it and, as a result,took her life.

Finally, six months after her initial request, she found a doctor willing to do as she asked, and her surgery was done on April 26. She is outraged that she had to fight so hard. "Have you ever heard of a woman being told to take a psychiatric exam before she was permitted to have a baby?" she says. "They kept telling me this was a permanent choice, as if that hadn't occurred to me. Having a child is an even more permanent choice, but no one would have dreamed of talking me out of that."

Pressure also comes from closer to home. Gail G. (who works with adoptive parents for a living and asked to remain anonymous because they might resent her decision never to have children) began to dread conversations with her mother, who could not believe she would never give her a grandchild. "If I said or did something that made her proud she would sigh and then get this pitiful look and say, 'Too bad you'll never have kids to share this with.' And then when I did or said something she didn't like, she would say, 'Well it's a good thing you're never having kids, you're too selfish.' "

In self-defense, Gail "made a deal with Mom." She set up "appointments" -- every few months -- and declared that these were the only times she would answer questions about being child free. "If she brings it up between appointments," Gail says, "I am justified in hanging up on her or walking out of the room, neither of which I have had to do since we set up the arrangement."

Anne Noble, a graphics artist in New Jersey, has tried in vain to find a similar way to silence her co-workers. One recent lunch hour, tired out by a late-night party (people without children get to go to those, she points out), she took a long nap in her car. Returning to the office she was ribbed by colleagues who had seen her feet jutting out of her rear window. They wondered if she needed the nap because she was pregnant.

"I have made it fairly clear to my office associates that we don't plan on having children," she seethes, explaining that the choice was one she reached after a long internal struggle. "I also made a point of telling my friends at work that I just started my Depo shots. Yet I still get this question and it just infuriates me. As if there couldn't possibly be any other explanation for an upset stomach, feeling fatigued, whatever. I always answer definitely not, but I really want to say, 'What a rude question.' "

It is the last day of school at Prior Lake High School in suburban Minneapolis, and Elinor Burkett wanders the halls, gossiping with the graduating seniors. "Did you hear Justin didn't show up for detention, so he won't get his diploma?" "Did you hear Roger didn't pass Phys Ed?"

Burkett, 53, has the voice of a serious smoker, and hair that is, by her own description, a most "unnatural" shade of red. The students clearly trust her, and she just as clearly adores them, which is somewhat surprising to me because she is the author of "The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless," a book that accuses parents of wanting "their child and their Lexus, too" and describes having children as "squirting out spawn." (Burkett doesn't actually use that term herself, but approvingly quotes someone who does.)

Burkett's next book will be about a year at Prior Lake, which means she has spent an entire year with teenagers. When I comment on the fact that the "Betty Friedan of the childless" has surrounded herself with children, she dismisses it as missing the point. Too many childless people, she says, focus on the wrong things -- the undisciplined toddler at the next table; the insensitive comment by Aunt Marge. "This isn't about hurt feelings," Burkett says. "There are policy implications, financial implications. This is about a political and economic structure which relegates the childless to second-class citizens."

At the top of Burkett's list of targets is the federal tax code, which has long allowed a "dependent deduction" ($2,800 at the moment, which is worth about $784 to a family taxed at 28 percent). To that is added a dependent-care credit (up to $4,800 in expenses for two or more children, which is worth about $960 to that same family) or, if sponsored by an employer, a dependent-care spending account (up to $5,000, worth $1,400). Then, in 1997 -- just when political consultants became obsessed with soccer moms" -- Congress added a $500 per child tax credit.

Burkett is in favor of the deduction for dependent care. "That says that we as a society believe that those people who take care of dependent people -- children or adults -- need some help. I don't have a problem with that." Nor would she have had a problem, she says, if Congress had increased that existing deduction by $500 so that it applied to all dependents. But by creating a tax credit solely for the care of children, she explains, "we said implicitly that we think that socially that's more valuable."

How is this different, I ask, from something like a mortgage deduction, in which the tax code is used to shape behavior or reflect social priorities? It isn't, Burkett replies, adding that mortgage deductions are just as arbitrary. "There are renters who are not terribly happy about it, I can tell you that."

Even the tax credits would not infuriate her if they were not part of a definite and very recent trend. During the 106th Congress alone, she says, dozens of bills designed to lighten the tax burden of parents were introduced, including ones that would increase the child tax credit to $900. ("Who subsidizes that tax break?" she asks. "You're looking at her.") Last month President Clinton opened the door for states to allow new parents to receive unemployment insurance during the weeks they stay home with a newborn. ("So now, in this wonderful world where welfare has allegedly been reformed," she writes, "the poor lose federal benefits if they don't work,but doctors and lawyers who don't work after they have kids can receive checks from Uncle Sam.")

Most "absurd" of all, she says, is an executive order, signed back in May, prohibiting discrimination against parents in all areas of federal employment. Forget the fact that the White House could not produce a single convincing example of a parent who had actually faced such discrimination, Burkett says. More troubling to her is the fact that the law takes sides.

"If employers are refusing to hire or promote parents because they believe they won't work as hard as nonparents, that's unconscionable," she says. "But I also think that if that is illegal, discrimination against nonparents should be illegal as well. Last time I checked, discrimination law generally cut both ways. We don't bar discrimination against women; we bar discrimination on the basis of gender, and so on. So why single out parents? Why not bar discrimination on the basis of family status? Why not make it illegal to presuppose that a nonparent is free to work the night shift or presuppose that nonparents are more able to work on Christmas than parents?"

Which brings us to the workplace, which promises to be the bloodiest beachhead in the brewing war between parents and nonparents. From where I sit, the increasing insistence by employees that employers accommodate their lives has been a welcome revolution -- and I don't think that "revolution" is too strong a word. Although things like flex time, telecommuting, adoption assistance and emergency day care are hardly ubiquitous, they are at least a part of the national conversation about what workers might need to do their jobs. I am personally grateful for that conversation, because without it I could not work the way that I do -- from home, on my own schedule, available to my children and judged as a worker by what I produce, not by how many hours I log in the office.

But where I see progress, Burkett sees something else entirely. All these fancy benefits, for instance, like on-site child care, and even the most basic ones, like health insurance for dependents, are examples of perks the childless are not getting. "Parents get more than nonparents," she says. "Every childless person can tell you exactly how much money their compensation package is worth versus the person sitting next to them." She points to Marriott International, which provides approximately $5,000 per child in the form of subsidized day care at its headquarters in Maryland. "What that means," she says, "is if I worked for Marriott they would be offering fewer benefits that are relevant to my life. All this talk about how you have to have all these benefits to take care of the morale of working parents? What about my morale?"

A more rational approach, she suggests, in a voice that says, "See, I can be reasonable," is a "menu" of benefit options. Every employee would be given a dollar allotment for benefits that they might divide as they choose. A parent might spend most of those dollars on health insurance. A nonparent might choose additional vacation time. At Eastman Kodak, she says approvingly, employees can request "personal opportunity leave." You can take it to bond with your newborn or you can take it to travel. It's unpaid time off, with a guarantee of a job when you return, and it's very unusual for a childless person to take it. But it's an acknowledgment that we're going to treat all of our employees equally, and it's a real morale booster to people without kids."

Eastman Kodak, however, says that its "personal leave of absence" program is not automatically available to all employees. It must be requested and approved. They add that they don't know if childless people are less likely to take the leave, because they don't track this information.

When the conversation shifts to workplace flexibility, Burkett loses her "let's be reasonable" tone. "Every time someone takes off for that sick child or that school conference, then someone else has to pick up the extra work," she says. "And the supposition on the part of management almost always is that the person without kids is more able -- and it's true -- to do that than a parent. And it happens again and again and again. After a while you're doing two jobs for one salary."

I am tempted to argue that this doesn't really happen often, and that parents are more likely to ask other parents for help when they're in a bind, on the theory that they would be more likely to understand. But I have spoken to enough child-free workers to know that however often this happens, it is far too often for them. Melody Fohr, the Pittsburgh telephone operator, describes attending night college classes but arriving late because "the pregnant woman who was supposed to take over my shift at 5 was sick for months so she never made it in." Fohr remembers being told, "Well, you have to understand, she's not feeling well."

"I was supposed to worry about their lives, but they couldn't care less about mine," she says. "If I got one personal phone call at work, I heard about it from my boss. But nobody says anything to the parent who's on the phone every 15 minutes to the kid who's home from school."

The unwritten rule at work here, Burkett says, is that people with greater needs should receive more, and people with fewer needs should do more, which goes against the doctrine of equal pay for equal work and is a step back to the days when married men were paid more than single men because they had families to feed. Childless workers have "had it up to here" with this, she warns, and those childless workers are the one of the fastest growing segments of the work force. The childless also make up nearly 10 percent of registered voters, meaning employers and politicians better start to listen.

Already there are signs that the "child free" are taking a page from Burkett, who has become a cult figure in these circles. "The book put hard numbers to my feeling of being ignored by politicians and my vague sense of being ripped off in general," Jason Gill says. "I've gotten more politicized," he adds. "I used to keep my mouth shut to be polite, but now I'm more willing to tell people what I think."

What he thinks about a friend who was looking for a job but not mentioning that she was pregnant is this: "I told her husband she was committing employment fraud," he says. Never mind that the law says her pregnancy is not the employer's business, and that to hold it against her would be discrimination. Gill believes that the law is wrong. "She'll get the job, they'll spend money to train her," he predicts. "Whenever she has a doctor's appointment, and especially when she goes on maternity leave, someone else will have to fill in. Then she'll take months off and probably never come back."

And what he thinks about a recent family-friendly policy developed by his former employer is equally blunt. "They announced this 'great new employee benefit,' "he says, "several thousands of dollars in tuition money for the children of employees." Last he'd checked, Murphy, his 11-year-old spaniel-collie, wasn't interested in going to college, so instead of keeping his mouth shut, Gill wrote an e-mail message to the company's C.E.O.

"What about employees who want to go back to school to better themselves?" he asked. Within two months the tuition funds were made available to employees as well as their children. But Gill left the company shortly thereafter to become an independent consultant, in part so that he wouldn't "have to do all the work when all the parents left for middle school graduation."

How do you find a neighborhood that is not "infested" with children? Gill still has 20-odd years to go before he qualifies for the only type of real estate development -- those communities substantially filled by residents 55 and older -- that are legally allowed to bar children. None of the standard home-buying guides cover his problem, either, and real estate agents look either confused or aghast when he explains what he needs. "If there was someplace that said, 'You have to pay double rent but no one under 18 is allowed,"' he says, "I'd be lining up."

But there is no such place, so Gill is doing the detective work on his own. He thinks he sees clues in the real estate ads -- developers who present silver-haired models alone on a beach at dusk are hinting that children are not wanted, he thinks, while those who hold open houses featuring petting zoos and clowns are telling him to look elsewhere. He has posted the question online ("What are some good strategies for finding Minimum Breeder Quotient neighborhoods?" were his exact words. "What can I do to minimize the likelihood of landing in a noisy, sprog-ridden neighborhood?")

Some of the answers were sarcastic (I hope). "Tell the real estate agent that your brother visits you quite often and it's a condition of his parole that he not be within one block of children under 12," was one reply. Others were practical, from members who had searched, mostly in vain, for their own quiet places over the years. "Avoid homes in great school districts like the plague!" or "Live on a main road. Lots of mooomies and daddies avoid places where, if their kids play in traffic, they're road kill."

He was advised to look in "gay neighborhoods," which he would do, except that he is a surfer, and in San Diego those areas are not close enough to the beach. It was suggested that he look for neighborhoods with small yards, where children can't play, but he points out that he lives on a block with tiny yards and all that seems to mean is that children feel free to play hide-and-seek in his. He has also been told by his online pals to look for larger yards ("Lots o' land, modest houses + no trendy 'McMansions' with very spoiled sproggen") and for slightly worn, scruffy neighborhoods ("Seems most breeder-yuppie-scum are drawn to the new subdivisions").

Those last two reasons are why we are spending the afternoon in the town of Leucadia, about 25 miles north of San Diego. "It has a funkier, surf-town sort of feel," he says, "with piercing parlors here and there, and it's close to where the farm workers live, so maybe that will give pause to people with children." But as we start to cruise the side streets, eyes peeled for For Sale signs, Gill is disappointed. There are chalk drawings in front of one house. A blue swing set and a little blue pool in front of another. Like a scene in a David Lynch movie, the symbols of suburbia take on a threatening vibe.

Eventually we spot an Open House -- three bedrooms, two baths, 2,790 square feet. It is a sprawling home, on property that seems to go on forever. There's no family room, I notice, and no safety cover on the pool. The master bedroom shares a bathroom with what I call a second bedroom and Gill calls an office.

Standing by the open-brick barbecue pit I mutter, "Children with third-degree burns."

Standing by that same pit, Gill says, "What a cool place for a party." Despite the fact that, at $835,000, the house is more than $200,000 out of his price range, he adds, "I have to bring Dorothea here."

Dorothea Ragsdale is Gill's girlfriend of five years, and it is with her that his "child free" identity officially began. Gill was married, briefly, when he was 21, to a woman with two young boys whom he describes as "the spawn of the devil." When he met Ragsdale, though, he still assumed he would marry again and have children. But she was 15 years his senior and had already reared her children, who are now 23 and 25. Instead of ending the relationship over the question of children, as Ragsdale feared he would, Gill found himself relieved that he did not have to become a parent after all. Finding others online who felt the way he did was "liberating," he says. "I felt like a gay person must feel, coming out of the closet and having these people validating me."

Ragsdale, who is divorced, admits that if she could make the decision all over again, she probably would not have children. As a manager at an e-commerce company, she chafes at the expectation of today's parents that they can have it all. "There were positions I couldn't take when I was raising my children, and I sacrificed because of them," she says. "I made these hard choices, and now they're saying that other people don't have to make them. I find that insulting."

Still, the fact that she is a parent means she can never see the world exactly as he does, and when he rants about children, she has to remember "not to personally internalize that he's talking about mine." He, in turn, censors himself around her, saving the worst of his rants for the computer.

I suspect he is censoring himself around me too. I know I am censoring myself around him. Just as I didn't realize how often I ate carbohydrates until a nutritionist told me not to, I had no idea how often I talked about my boys until I tried to stop. They are, I admit, one of my favorite subjects, not only when chatting with friends, but also professionally; I think nothing of swapping "cute kid" stories during interviews.

But then I spent weeks interviewing childless people, and hearing how sick they've become of parents who chatter endlessly about their children. In fact, escape from that kind of talk was one reason Jerry Steinberg, a Canadian schoolteacher, became "founding nonfather" of the group No Kidding! in the first place. "Conversations with my child-burdened friends became monologues," he says. "I'd say, 'How's it going?' and they'd bombard me with information about the kids."

So when Gill and I talk about surfing, I don't mention that my first grader would love to learn; and when he, Ragsdale and I go out to dinner, I keep the story about my fourth grader's first taste of calamari to myself. I give everybody my cell phone number, so that my children won't answer the phone when they call. And I specifically arrange to interview Jerry Steinberg when the boys are out of the house. During that interview, he complains about how often he's subjected to the background noise of children during business calls. "They make it impossible to have a thoughtful, quiet conversation like this," he says, and I bite my tongue.

As Jason Gill well knows, the "child free" do not live in a world by themselves, and on a recent Monday those on the other side of the fence gather to make their presence known. In a wood-paneled club off Fifth Avenue, dozens of parents and their defenders nibble canapes and sip sparkling water. Their host is the National Parenting Association, whose goal is "laying the groundwork to spark and sustain a social movement" of, by and for parents. The meet-and-greet portion of the event is short -- there are baby sitters waiting at home -- and when the time comes for speeches, each participant is introduced in a way that would make Elinor Burkett cringe.

Lesley Stahl, one scheduled speaker, is described not only as an award-winning CBS News reporter but also as a mother who managed to "balance work and parenting." Stahl, in turn, introduces Ruth Wooden, the former president of the Advertising Council and current president of the parenting association, as "the mother of John." Then Wooden proceeds to introduce Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the Harvard-educated economist who founded the National Parenting Association, as "the tireless mother of four."

"There are 63 million parents" -- of children under 18 -- in the United States," says Hewlett, getting down to the evening's business, "and if they were to vote as a bloc they could swing the election."

Hewlett is the co-author (with Cornel West) of "The War Against Parents," and from her side of the looking glass parents are anything but pampered and powerful. To the contrary, she describes them as "demoralized," the victims of "a culture of parent-bashing in this country." Everywhere parents turn, she says, they are told they are doing a bad job -- simultaneously ignoring and spoiling their children so that they grow into obese adolescents whose reading and math scores are low and who are likely to blow up the school cafeteria.

Nothing represents this backlash better than what she calls that "contemptible" book. "Baby Boon" (which mentions Hewlett numerous of times, none of them complimentary) "is making my blood boil," she says in an interview in the association's offices, which are located on the ground floor of a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Hewlett is recovering from walking pneumonia. She has been up most of the night caring for her 3-year-old daughter and helping her 16-year-old son study for a biology exam. (At 54, she also has a 19-year-old, a 22-year-old and a 28-year-old stepdaughter.) But you would never know this to look at her. She is elegantly dressed and perfectly manicured, even as she describes how outraged she is.

"This is pernicious, it's brand-new, it's gaining traction," she bristles, as she proceeds to take "Baby Boon" apart fact by fact. Yes, there is a new per-child tax credit, she says, ticking her objections off on her fingers, but that paltry $500 hardly "redistributes the nation's wealth to those with children," as Burkett claims. "The fact is that our tax code has tilted in favor of those without children," she counters, and because the standard dependent deduction has decreased as a percentage of income, parents are getting far less help from the government than they did a generation ago.

"That deduction," she fumes, "is one of the things she harps on because it's one of the few things you can hang your hat on because it's one of the few things parents do get." But look at the cost side of the balance sheet, she says. She points out that a two-parent household with an income of up to $62,000 a year will spend about $160,000 to feed, clothe and shelter a child until the age of 18. "And this figure doesn't even include college tuition," she adds. It also doesn't include income lost by women who have children. Quoting data from a 1998 study, Hewlett says that childless women now earn 90 percent of what their male counterparts earn, while mothers earn only 73 percent.

"In the face of those numbers," Hewlett says, "Uncle Sam actually does very little." (Or, as James Weikart, of Weikart Tax Associates, scoffed when I asked whether parents reaped unfair gains from the tax code, "Kids are a very poor tax shelter.")

Burkett's contention that benefits packages and family-friendly policies are de facto bonuses for parents also rankles Hewlett. How many working parents, she asks, actually receive such benefits?

According to a 1998 study by the Families and Work Institute, 46.8 percent of companies with 100 or more employees offer a family-friendly package that includes flex time, paid parental leave and child-care assistance. But, Hewlett points out, "We must remember that the majority of women work for firms smaller than this, and these firms typically offer much less."

Lisa Benenson, the editor in chief of Working Mother magazine, agrees: "The vast majority of people in this country do not have flex time, do not get to go home early." As for benefits packages, she says, childless workers are not alone in not using all available benefits. "Do you deny someone a benefit just because you can't take advantage of that benefit? Do you deny someone mental health coverage because you don't need mental health coverage? If the person at the desk next to you gets cancer, do you think of them as 'earning' more because their health dollar costs are higher?"

The limited benefits that parents do receive in the workplace, Benenson says, are a reflection of their worth as employees -- in other words, their economic clout. "Companies don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts," she points out. "This is what they need to do to keep good workers. This is economics, pure and simple." The same economic laws are why children are allowed to swarm freely at any Starbucks and why even the most upscale restaurants have a supply of polished teak high chairs. "The trend in travel now is 'bring your kids,' "says Kim Clay, corporate communications manager for Omni Hotels. "And we want to make our customers happy." To that end, the upscale chain welcomes children with a goody bag of games and candy at check-in.

This status quo, the one Burkett and Gill see as oppressive, is only a rough draft of what Hewlett and Benenson think the world should be. Look at France, they say, where new mothers are guaranteed 16 to 26 weeks of paid maternity leave, or Ireland, where children are welcomed everywhere (including the family-friendly local pub). If parents are to get all they deserve, Hewlett argues, they must flex their political muscles as well as their economic ones.

The language of politics over the past four years hints that this is happening. Gun control used to be about reducing crime; now it is about protecting children and about mothers marching on Washington. The fight against smoking used to be about lung cancer; now it is about Joe Camel's influence on youngsters. "It's absolutely exploitative and disgusting," Gill says. "Even if I agreed with gun control it would turn me off because it's all about kids. Things like car safety, food safety -- it's O.K. if I die or get sick, because I'm over 21, but to keep a kid from getting hurt we have to change the whole world?"

Hewlett, not surprisingly, sees progress where Gill sees pandering. Framing policies in terms of children, she says, is the only way to challenge the belief at the core of the "child free" worldview -- that caring for children is in no way an obligation of the childless. The dismissal of parenting as a "choice" and the concomitant belief that only parents are responsible for the stress, the cost and the complications of that choice is "outrageous," Hewlett says. "This assumes that having a child is the moral equivalent of buying a boat or getting a manicure," she says. "True, not having children is an option for each individual. In some cases it is an honorable choice. But childlessness is not a choice for society."

In other words, if no one had children, there would be no more society. Nonparents have heard that before, and point out that overpopulation is a bigger problem than underpopulation, and that parents rarely decide to be parents out of a perceived obligation to humankind. Parents have children, nonparents say, because they are selfish -- because they want a baby to coo over, or a genetic link to the future, or the family of their own childhood dreams.

In fact, this whole debate can be distilled down to the word "selfish," and Ruth Wooden, president of the National Parenting Association, throws it right back at the child free. Parenting, she says, means "realizing that someone else's needs are more important than your own." In that way, she argues, becoming a parent means becoming "a grown-up," and as the percentage of childless adults increases, the result is a society that is "not as mature."

"It's untrammeled individualism," Hewlett says. "It's all about 'I want what's good for me and to hell with the other guy.' "

The most sweeping societal clashes, are, at their core, deeply personal -- an accumulation of moments between people who didn't realize they were making assumptions until they collided with others who assumed something else. My moment came during lunch with my children a few weeks ago, at a white-tablecloth restaurant near the river on the edge of our town. It's not the sort of place I would usually take young boys, but we were celebrating the last day of school, and because there's a village playground on the restaurant grounds, I wagered that the staff had seen its share of kids.

My sons behaved beautifully. When it came time to order dessert, I didn't want to break the peaceful mood, so I tried to tell the waitress, in a kind of cryptic parent-speak, that we would take the Valrhona Chocolate Mousse Cake Served With Vanilla Ice Cream and Caramel Sauce in the form of a piece of chocolate cake for one child and a separate dish of ice cream for the other. In other words, I wanted them to share, but I didn't want them to know they were sharing.

The waitress, I soon realized, was not conversant in parent-speak. She brought two full desserts. Then we each waved the banners of our respective armies as I tried to explain -- patiently, then less so -- what I had meant to order.

"I don't have children," she finally snapped. As she turned to leave she added, "And thank God that I don't."

Watching my boys devour their sweets, I blamed myself. I imagined (as best I could) what the waitress probably saw when we arrived: a table that would demand extra plates, spill lots of drinks and leave a lousy tip. I tried to see what Jason Gill would have seen had he witnessed the exchange: an entitled parent assuming the world would understand that her precious children can't possibly be expected to share. And, I wondered, What would I have thought, in the years before I had children, if I had seen the same little scene? It's a question I've been asking myself a lot of late, and the answer is: I was a different person then. There is nothing so transforming as becoming a parent, and that fact right there is the root of this entire divide.

I understand Burkett's point. And where compromise is possible, it should be the goal. It makes sense to me, for example, to increase the dependent deduction rather than add a per-child tax credit, and I'd agree that employers should aim for a menu of benefit options, one in which "family" does not automatically mean "children."

I also sympathize with the more "social" objections. Monica Lightner should be entitled to choose a tubal ligation, Anne Noble's life plan should be accepted by her co-workers, and no one should have to tolerate rude, intrusive questions from colleagues or relatives. Life without children should be respected as a legitimate, full, admirable life, not a consolation prize or an insult to those who are parents. Children should not be allowed to play soccer outside anyone's window at dawn. I would even concede that they might not belong at the fanciest restaurant in town either.

But on some parts of this stand-off there is no compromise. Parents will have to leave work early more often than nonparents, and they will need someone to cover for them while they're gone. Parents might not be able to control their children's noise level in the supermarket, or even in the library either, because acting out is what even the best-behaved children often do.

"If I were a working mother like you," Elinor Burkett told me, "I would be demanding all these things, too." And if I had never had children, I answered, I might have written her book. But I did have children, and on these less-black-and-white questions I can't help seeing the world from this side of the fence.

My answer to those who think my life intrudes on theirs is simple: Every person with children was once a person without children, so you have to take our word when we say we can't do it without help and without spilling over into your space all too regularly. The life of any given parent is more complicated, stressful and expensive than the life of that same person would be if he or she were not a parent. Feel sorry for us if you'd like. Avoid us if you need to. And, in several decades, when the children are grown, we can all live side by side again, in child-free retirement homes.