Childlessness is becoming more popular and the proof is apparent not only in sub-replacement fertility levels and 100,000 abortions every year in Canada, it is being mainstreamed in the popular culture. Maclean’s ran a cover story on August 3, entitled, “The Case Against Having Kids.” A new book by French author Corinne Maier, No Kids, 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, is getting plenty of media attention, including a page 3 feature in the National Post. But read between the lines and the argument is not so much against having children, but against becoming parents.
Maier, a mother of two, says people who have children are not good citizens, because they contribute to some problems afflicting modern society, such as congestion, add to the environmental impact that human beings are allegedly responsible for and perhaps even encourage war by adding another child to a supposedly over-populated planet. It all sounds pathetically like the cant exhaled by the environmental scaremongers, zero-population growth activists or even voluntary human extinction advocates. But get beyond Maier’s citizenship talking points and the real issues are about the impact of children on the parents (mostly the mother), not society.
Most of the 40 “good” reasons Maier provides focus on the costs of children, as in what mothers (might) sacrifice: freedom, money, care-free relationships, unending happiness and much more. The problem with this view is that it both idealizes the life of non-parents and degrades family life. Are childless women really free to do whatever they want, have sex whenever they wish, meet all their financial needs effortlessly and never have a moment that is not entirely blissful? Are parents always miserable, poor, without non-familial relationships and stuck with their children 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
In No Kids, Maier admits to regretting having her two children, compares giving birth to torture and breastfeeding to slavery, and states that, “Your kid will inevitably disappoint you.” She says children destroy desire within a marriage (how does she explain large families?) and kill adult relationships. She calls family life an “inward-looking prison focused on the child.”
On some level, Maier is offering a legitimate cultural criticism of a certain type of parent, who focuses exclusively and unhealthily on the child (usually an only child). But Maier and her adoring press go beyond such criticism to setting up parenting as a complete sacrifice of the self to the child, a phenomenon that does not occur in healthy families.
Among the 40 reasons not to have children, Maier includes “you keep having fun” without them, “you keep your friends,” “you avoid becoming a walking pacifier,” “your kid will always disappoint you,” “kids are conformists,” children “signal the end of your youthful dreams,” “you can’t stop yourself from wanting your kids to be happy” and a number of other selfish reasons.
Maier seems to be celebrating life without responsibility and sacrifice and fails to recognize the joys that children do bring parents. Perhaps that is not surprising. In his 2006 bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert reported that, according to surveys, taking care of one’s children was among the least satisfying and enjoyable things individuals did, rated only slightly better than lawn care and housework. But asking people about their feelings concerning taking care of one’s children is not the same as asking whether or not they are happy being parents.
Newer research that scans brain activity finds a strong correlation between thoughts of one’s children with positive neural reactions. Another survey reported in Psychological Science earlier this year found that when weighing rewards with costs, time with children ranked as the second most worthwhile thing people do. Matthew White and Paul Dolan, two British academics, said, “When reward is also considered, time spent with children is ‘relatively’ good time.”
There are plenty of rewards in having children. The disappointments are usually outweighed by the joys they bring; parents can maintain relationships with other adults and often create new ones with other parents, not to mention the enriching relationships they will have with their children. Rather than “giving up on life,” as Maier says, parents embrace it. Maier says it takes “real courage to say ‘me first,’” but that sounds like a justification for embracing hedonism, self-illusion and irresponsibility.
Maier’s book echoes Mardy Ireland’s 1993 academic treatise Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity, which claims a false dichotomy in her title. Motherhood can be – is designed to be – a part of female identity, but not its entirety. Maier and Ireland sets up a false conflict between child-rearing and self-fulfillment. The lives of mothers change when they have children, not for the worse, but to something different. To diminish the idea of parenting, as the popular media are doing today, is dangerous for both society and women: society, because it is cultural suicide, and women, because it discourages motherhood, which may appear more daunting and joyless in the abstract than it is in practice.
The ideal Maier and her ilk celebrate in rejecting children is to embrace permanent childishness for themselves. That is selfish and irresponsible.
