Via Sullivan…

The No-Baby Boom

Considering the state of the economy, it should come as no surprise that the ranks of the child-free are exploding. The Department of Agriculture reports that the average cost for a middle-income two-parent family to support a kid through high school is $286,050 (it’s nearly half a million dollars for couples in higher tax brackets). Want him or her to get a college education? The number jumps to nearly $350,000 for a public university, and more than $400,000 for private. Though if your kid’s planning to major in Male Sterilization, it could wind up being a good investment: The vasectomy business seems to be one of the few in America that is booming. In the past year, the Associates in Urology clinic in West Orange, New Jersey, has seen a 50 percent jump in the procedure. So you could stress over starting a college fund, or you could consider that you can get a vasectomy at Planned Parenthood for less than the cost of a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller. Unless you’re among the less than 2 percent of Americans who farm for a living and might conceivably rely on offspring for free labor, children have gone from being an economic asset to an economic liability.

But for the child-free, the benefits go beyond dollars and cents. There’s less guilt, less worry, less responsibility, more sleep, more free time, more disposable income, no awkward conversations about Teen Mom, no forced relationships with people just because your kids like their kids, no chauffeuring other people’s kids in your minivan to soccer games you find less appealing than televised chess.

In his best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes, “Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home.” No wonder so many are choosing to spend their entire marriages as empty-nesters. A 2009 University of Denver study found that 90 percent of couples experienced a decrease in marital bliss after the birth of their first child. And in a 2007 Pew survey, just 41 percent of adults stated that children were very important for a successful marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. Meanwhile, nearly one in five American women now ends her reproductive years without children, up from one in ten in the 1970s.

Growing up I used to get odd looks from people, friends and adults both, whenever I expressed my utter disinterest in raising a family.   It marked me as weird as far back as elementary school, probably long before anyone began to get a clue that Bruce wasn’t the sort you’d ever see holding hands with a girl to begin with.   But it wasn’t that I thought the married life wasn’t for me, or that I harbored some deep seated disgust at the thought of having children around.   I would hate to live in one of those adults only communities where everyone is just old and tired.   As you get older especially, you really appreciate the cheerful anarchy that happens around kids.   It keeps you thinking.   I just never saw any personal need within me to do the parent thing and I reckoned early on that if you were going to raise a kid right, you needed to really want to have kids.   I knew almost right from the start that I didn’t.

To a lot of people apparently, that makes me defective somehow.   I guess the thinking is it doesn’t matter what you do for your community or your country or the good of humanity if you don’t also produce children.   But…that’s bullshit.   And I’m happy to say that finally some heterosexuals are standing up for their life choices here.

For Heather McGhinnis, a married 35-year-old marketing specialist in Elgin, Illinois, motherhood is simply a lifestyle choice that’s not for her. “The job of being a parent doesn’t interest me,” she explains. “Just like I don’t want to be an accountant, I don’t want to be a parent.”

This is the case for nearly all of my straight friends, who were all theoretically lead to believe growing up that being parents was their natural destiny. They didn’t go there for the same reasons I, a gay man who could nevertheless adopt if I really wanted to, didn’t either.   No interest.

That’s not to say I have no interest in the welfare of kids.   I care very much care about their welfare, about the world they must grow up in.   I care they all get a good education.   I care that they grow up safe and sound and healthy and strong.   I care about that very much.   That’s a natural adult thing, whether you have any of your own or not.   If you need to have kids of your own to care about the welfare of kids then there is something wrong with you, not me.

Now at last folks like us are finding our voices.   And for once I am so very, very glad to see heterosexuals taking the lead here because a gay guy like me can’t plausibly be standing up for the virtues of childlessness with any sort of credibility.   Of course you’re childless, you’re a fucking homo and homos don’t reproduce, they recruit… It’s sad but there it is.   Not that childless couples are going to get a break from the culture warriors simply because they’re heterosexual.   Oh no…they’re easily as much the Enemy as we are, if not more so.   If you think the culture wars are only about homosexuality you really need to look more carefully at what right wing lunatics think of contraception.     And no, it’s not about sex being only for having children either.

According to Laura S. Scott, who surveyed 171 subjects for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, that kind of attitude is linked to a specific personality component. “A lot of introverts, thinkers, judgers—these are people who think before they act,” she says. “They’re planners, and they’re not the kind of people who can be easily led into a conventional life just because everyone else is doing it.”

[Emphasis mine…] How unsurprising that it’s mostly my fellow introverts who are going the childless route.   No doubt the culture warriors will say this is all the fault of Teh Gay.   We’re setting a bad example.

Well…yes.   We are.   And happy to be of service!   We’re showing heterosexual couples that you can have a happy and contented love life without kids if you are not really into the parent thing.   That you can contribute to your community and your country and to the future of humanity in many ways besides childbearing.   That you don’t have to follow orders.

Especially orders from louts who are waiting with bated breath for the end of the world.

Yes, yes…blame Teh Gay.   We showed our heterosexual brothers and sisters what you never wanted them to know:   that you can make the world a better place for everyone…kids included…and that’s fine, you’ve done your part, you’ve left your mark, you’ve borne your share of the burden of civilization more nobly then anyone who ever added souls to a world they didn’t give a good goddamn about.