James Lileks on the people who choose not to have kids:
When the New York Times runs a piece by someone explaining why she didn’t have children, runs a feature on authors who have banded together in a book to celebrate child-free lives (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids), and runs a review of the book a while later, you know it’s a matter that consumes the thoughts of the nation. Well, part of the nation. Okay, a few thousand people on the Upper East side. So it’s a big deal.
Without reading any of the pieces, you can probably guess why people don’t have kids.
- You put it off to pursue a career, and refrigerated your eggs for so long the doctor warned you the baby would look like that Olaf snowman from Frozen.
- You had fertility problems that were your own, or your mate’s li’l swimmers behave like guys who quit halfway into a 10K charity run and find a sports bar to watch the game.
- You are a man who warns every prospective mate, “Baby baby don’t get hooked on me, because you’ll just love them and then you’ll set them free,” in case she didn’t get the message from your customized van with the water-bed and the orange shag.
- You are part of a couple who realized that children simply do not fit into your busy world of travel, concerts, literary salons, and pretending he’s not gay.
- You don’t want ’em. They make messes. Cats’ll do.
Okay? Sure, okay. Not everyone should reproduce, and we should celebrate those who know themselves well and decided to be childless. It’s their choice. We should be sympathetic to those who find themselves childless against their wishes, and pay heed to their observations about how society regards them. We should be a bit suspicious of those whose proclamations on the child-free life have the tiresome characteristics of the Braying Atheist, or those who say they don’t want kids because they’ve seen what it does to other women in Park Slope in Brooklyn. I mean the money they spend on strollers.
But one suspects the book goes a bit too far in exalting the barren-loin option. According to the NYT review, it “concludes with Tim Kreider’s rousing defense of the child-free as ‘an experiment unprecedented in human history … A kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.'”
