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When I was a kid, whenever my mom would get exasperated with me (often), she cursed me with "Just wait until you have kids!"

    The adults celebrating child-free lives  

That was very effective in ensuring that I wouldn't have kids. I wouldn't want to deal with anyone remotely like I was.

As the owner of Childfree Millennial TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts, Munoz is one of a growing number of influencers producing content designed to validate why they never want to have kids.

Much as I despise TicTac, it's about time someone provided a counterbalance to the insipid mommy bloggers.

“The number-one thing that I always say when people ask me why I'm child-free – it's because I don't have a desire to have children,” says Munoz, a small-business owner from Kansas, US.

I mean, as reasons go, that's a compelling one. I never do (or don't do) anything for just one reason, so that bit at the top was just the beginning for me. There was also the 1980 Presidential election, which I think is when I realized my country was doomed.

In one of her other recent posts, she jokes, “if you have baby fever take a nap, if you enjoyed that nap don’t have kids”.

Credit where credit is due, that's a great one. I always called it "baby rabies" though. Rhymes are more memorable.

While deciding against having children is nothing new, a trend for owning the ‘child-free’ label and discussing that choice more openly is picking up pace.

Oh, come on now, we were discussing this sort of thing in online forums even before social media was a thing.

The term ‘child-free’ has existed since the early 1900s, although it wasn’t until the 1970s that feminists began using it more widely, as a way of denoting women who were voluntarily childless as a distinct group.

Oh, bite my ass. It's not just women. Sure, the social consequences are different for men, but some of us don't want to be saddled with all it entails to be a dad. To be clear: I'm not talking about the assholes who have kids and then abandon them. That's not being childfree; that's being irresponsible.

However, most academic research has typically “lumped all people who don’t have children into the same group,” explains Elizabeth Hintz, an assistant professor in communication at the University of Connecticut, US, who’s studied perceptions of child-free identities. This doesn’t reflect the very different experiences and feelings of child-free and childless people, she says, and means there’s a lack of long-term comparative data looking specifically at either group.

Which is another important point: people who do want kids, and can't have them, have my sympathy. Hell, my parents were in that group (be careful what you wish for). People who want kids and have them, well, that's great; they've achieved their desire. Then there's the people who don't want kids and have them anyway, through "accident" or social pressure, and that can be a problem.

In any case, there's a world of difference between childfree (I drop the hyphen on purpose, but I suppose the BBC has a style guide to adhere to) and childless.

In the US, a 2021 Pew Research Center study showed some 44% of non-parents aged 18 to 49 don’t think they will have children, up from 37% in 2018. More than half listed their main reason as “don’t want to have children” rather than more circumstantial factors such as medical issues or not wanting to raise a child without having a partner. In England and Wales, a 2020 YouGov study suggested that more than half of British 35-to-44-year-olds who haven’t had kids never plan on doing so.

Those are pretty high numbers, but I suppose they seem inflated because the base group is people who already weren't parents.

However, in my opinion, "don't want to have children" just kicks the question can down the road. Not that anyone is obligated to give a reason. If someone asks me "why don't you eat eggplant?" I just say "Because I don't like it," and the conversation usually ends there. But the way society is, one is tempted to ask "why don't you want to have children?" And the answers can be all over the place. Personally, I often cite the rise of fascism, environmental degradation (a lower population would ameliorate some of that), a moral obligation to not bring new life into a decaying world, being unable to afford it, and my love of being able to sleep whenever I want.

Some call it "selfish," but I can't think of anything more selfish than wanting your precious genes to somehow continue, or expecting someone to automatically care for you in your old age.

A lot of those reasons are echoed there in the article, but, again, all women.

Another burgeoning online community is We Are Childfree, run by British-born Zoë Noble and her partner James Glazebrook, who are both in their early 40s, and live in Berlin.

Finally, a dude. At least I'm assuming based on the traditionally masculine name. All I mean by that is, well, representation is a good thing.

Munoz’s content has frequently attracted harsh online comments from those who’ve disparaged her choices as being “anti-child” or “selfish”, or from followers who simply don’t believe she could find her lifestyle fulfilling. “A lot of parents just don't understand that it was a choice. And so, they see it as an attack on their choice of having children,” she says. “They immediately go on the defence mode and tell you, ‘oh, but you're going to regret it’ and ‘you're going to die alone’, and ‘who's going to take care of you when you're older?’ and ‘you'll never know true love’.”

I have, of course, heard all those things, myself. I can only imagine it must be worse for women, who, historically, have faced even more pressure to reproduce. All I can say is, different people have different priorities. Just like in my last entry, on the topic of sleep schedules, I'm not criticizing others' decisions. I'm not one of those voluntary human extinction people, just, to borrow a phrase, pro-choice.

Hintz points out that much of the criticism hurled at child-free advocates tends to be steeply gendered. “Reproductive decision making has always been a burden placed on women more so than their partners,” she says. “And motherhood and femininity are so closely intertwined as well, so that is also, I think, a part of it.” As a result, this means there’s still often more pressure on women than men to follow a traditional “life script” and start a family, says Hintz, even in Western countries that have made great strides towards equality.

So the article acknowledges what I've been saying. Still, it generally takes two to make a child (even if one of them is just a donor), so stop with the double standards, already.

Practical and financial issues are also covered, including how to plan for retirement as a non-parent. “There's a lot of fear of getting older and ‘who's going to take care of me’ and ‘what is my future going to look like’?

Those are legitimate concerns, but I offer this: last I checked, which was a while ago, it costs something like half a million dollars to raise one kid to adulthood, and that's not including any costs of higher education. It may be lower for subsequent offspring, but my point is that if you're earning income and have some discipline, you can invest that money, instead, and use it for long-term care.

O’Connor says it’s important to point out that most child-free advocates “are very pro-choice for everyone”, and don’t have the goal of “convincing people to be child-free” or “trying to recruit for the community”.

Just re-emphasizing this so people don't get defensive.

O’Connor strongly agrees that the media has an important role to play moving forward. “There's a lack of positive representation of what being child-free or childless looks like in society,” she says. “We don’t have in the wider media, in TV shows and in film, older people living just happy content, child-free lives.”

There's a reason for that beyond enforcing social norms: in entertainment, drama and conflict are key (as we all know as writers). Hell, one of the best superhero shows of the past few years is Superman and Lois, and how do the writers create drama and conflict? Clark and Lois have teenage sons. There are also potentially world-shattering villains, as befits a show about Superman, but those aren't nearly as relatable. Anyone can relate to dealing with kids, even if they don't have any, because they were, once, kids.

Happiness and contentment are great, but they can make for shitty plots.

“More and more articles are coming out about people not having kids … and seeing more accounts pop up, more channels being created on YouTube, it’s so refreshing,” she says. “I’m not discriminatory to people who have kids. I have a lot of friends in my life who are parents. But I just love that people are now thinking a little bit deeper about parenthood, rather than just assuming it's the thing to do.”

I don't usually quote the last paragraphs in the articles I feature, but this one sums everything up perfectly (thanks, BBC). That's all I want: not for everyone to make the same life choices I did (good gods no), but to acknowledge that there are other choices in life besides following the script.

I should probably end on a personal note: as I mentioned, my parents were unable to have genetic offspring, so they adopted. That was their choice, and it worked out great for me. My mom's sister, on the other hand, was a feminist before it was cool to be a feminist, so she never married, focusing instead on her career and taking care of their mentally ill brother. Sometimes, she traveled the world. One of the most impressive people I've ever known.

So this kind of choice is nothing new. It just might seem that way.