Time Magazine Asks: Who Needs Kids Anyway? Extols the Child-Free Life

I miscarried my first child less than a month ago, so I see babies or lack of babies everywhere.

When the latest issue of TIME arrived at my home (it was free, okay, shut up) with the words “THE CHILDFREE LIFE” emblazoned across the cover, I just sort of rolled my eyes. “When having it all means not having children,” read the sub-head. I looked at the cover photo of a young, relaxed couple lounging on the beach. The woman wore giant sunglasses and a little Mona Lisa smile that I guess is supposed to communicate her disdain for her uterus and her utter satisfaction with her size-4, cellulite-free, vacation-filled life.

Cover Photo Lady has lots of company: the American birth rate has literally never been lower in our recorded history. That includes the Great Depression, when people were too busy being Greatly Depressed to have babies. TIME tells us that the birth rate declined 9% between 2007 and 2011, which apparently is like whoa.

In other words, more and more American women are looking at the motherhood and saying, “You know what? No.” And after exploring the many reasons why women might decide not to procreate (and it’s usually looked at as a woman’s decision, not so much a man’s), TIME‘s Lauren Sandler decides that this is a pretty cool decision.

So what are the reasons? Unfortunately, they are painfully obvious and, in my openly biased opinion, tiresome. “Our lives are so great already.” “My mom had 16 kids and she was always tired and her life sucked.” “I wanna do what I wanna do.” “I’m afraid I would be such a devoted and awesome parent that everything else would suffer.” Et cetera.

But in some of the women interviewed for the article, there are – surprise, surprise! – hints of regret. Take Leah Clouse, a 27-year-old Knoxille, Tenn. woman who keeps a “baby box” in the closet “with a pink tutu she once bought for an imaginary infant girl.” Her explanation is that the box is “indulgent of a life I have to grieve. If we decided to have children, we’d have to grieve the life we currently have.”

And what life do they currently have? Leah “commits her time to working on her own creative projects and starting up a bakery.” Her husband writes a blog and works in customer service at a credit card-processing company. Ahem. Ahem hem.

Does anyone else feel like one day Leah and Paul might find the grief for the family they never had far outweighs their grief over blogging and baking?

Hey, it may sound nuts to me to give up the most creative project of all – baby-making – to write blogs and bake, but then that’s me. Who am I to judge? I am one of those rare pro-lifers who doesn’t believe in forcibly impregnating women with the seed of country music singers and Republican senators and replacing all their highfalutin’ books with Bibles and recipes. I know most of you are totally into that, but hey, not me.

Look: if you don’t want to have a kid, no one is forcing you to. But even when I try extremely hard to be objective, I can’t help but think some of the reasons couples give for avoiding parenthood are deeply, deeply lame.

And guess what! This means I’m dumb. At least that’s what Satoshi Kanazawa at the London School of Economics says. He has “begun to present scholarship asserting that the more intelligent women are, the less likely they are to become mothers.” But don’t hang your heads yet, Mom: many of his peers have found fault with those findings. (And may I add, again: surprise, surprise.)

Lest you start thinking the childfree life is all fun and games, it’s not. It gets lonely, especially in your 30s and 40s. I can attest to that, although I am not childfree by choice but because I was kind of a late bloomer when it comes to settling down and having kids. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a wife and mother ’til I was in my late 20s. I spent most of that decade in creative pursuits and having both a lot of fun and a lot of decidedly not-fun. I’m sure my conversion, at age 28, to Catholicism from Semi-Pagan Agnostic Pantheist Hotmess-ism was instrumental in my recognition of my own desire for children.

In any case, at nearly 34 and no children yet, I can tell you it is lonely. It’s hard to find friends who can hang out, and when they can hang out, it’s usually at their place with their kids. Even if you love kids, maybe especially if you love kids, that can be hard after a while.

But the childfree-by-choice have chosen their fate. They don’t want kids. So it’s hard for me to shed a tear for their loneliness. After all, that annoying idea that children are a blessing is as old as time. It’s biblical, in fact. So, when you deny something that’s pretty natural, you may have to – and I say this with gentleness and love - get an app that blocks your friends’ babies from showing up on your Facebook and replaces them with fast cars or kittens or whatever you like. Because apparently that is a thing. And that thing kind of says it all.

See, some women claim they don’t have a maternal instinct. And maybe some truly don’t. But is that always an inborn characteristic – or lack thereof – or is it a result of living in a culture that is increasingly self-obsessed? This is a selfie society. Young people are being taught to share the highlight reel of their lives via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and kind of marvel at their own brand. In another time, all that oohing and aaahing would be directed at our children, not at ourselves.

Although Sandler’s article is dismissive of branding childfree-by-choice women “selfish,” I think she may be lacking objectivity. Whether it’s bad or wrong or what, it is most definitely selfish. ”It takes all of you, and I don’t know that I want to give it all,” said Leah Clouse of motherhood. Simple as that.

Furthermore, in my experience, there is far more of an anti-religion, anti-family, counter-cultural attitude to many of these women’s choices than TIME feels the need to explore. “Babies scare me more than anything,” says radical fauxminist Margaret Cho, in a delicious display of the pot calling the kettle scary.

I have known many young women who are self-described feminists, radicals, or liberals who delighted in disdaining babies and children and the desire to have them. In fact, in my 20s, I was one of those. Very deep down, I wanted children even back then. But in the circles I ran with, of actors and artists and filmmakers and punk rockers, wanting a baby was a weakness. It was for mainstreamers and sell-outs and church people. If you did have a baby, it was after getting pregnant by accident and considering abortion.

The article does not touch on how many of the couples interviewed use hormonal birth control to maintain their childfree existence, but I’d guess it’s a lot. I’d imagine there have been tubal ligations and vasectomies, too, and to be honest, the thought of human beings sterilizing themselves like animals irks me, and I don’t care if that makes me a lame church person. And of course, many people who insist on remaining childless have “oopsy-daisy” moments that lead to abortion. In other words, they’re not willing to sacrifice their comfort or convenience for a child, but they have no problem sacrificing a child for their comfort and convenience.

Still, if all these people were remaining childfree using a technique such as Natural Family Planning that didn’t end even the teensiest-weensiest human life, I’d probably still be bothered by it. (And, yes, it is okay to feel bothered by something other people do, even while accepting their right to do it.)

I’m all about people finding their own way and choosing their own happiness, but I find it difficult to believe that none of these people are going to wish they’d made a different decision. And that bothers me for them. I read between the lines of Leah Clouse’s interview, I picture her hiding her “baby box” in her closet, and I anticipate pain, regret, and loss. She already describes her feelings as “grief.”

It boils down to this: I’ve met lots of people who regretted not having children, but I have never met a single one who regretted her child.

That pretty much makes the point for NOT having kids now... The future for white Christians in this country is bleak.

It is only as bleak as we choose to make it. The left has embraced every method of collapsing society that can be done. Society will collapse, in our lifetimes. But there will be survivers, and those will inherit the country. The survivers must be culturally separate from the Left. If white Christians choose to have five kids per family, and keep their culture, not only would they save the country, they would inherit it.

My only “regret” is that we didn’t do it sooner, I’d be an empty nester by now at 50. ;-)

I wish I had more kids so I wasn’t an empty nester at 52. Enjoy your boys while you have them they are gone all too quickly. Mine are now 24 and 28 and I miss them both immensely. You are probably going through the toughest time with them right now - after the teens are over it is pretty much reaping the rewards of all the work in the teen years from then on.

I have 3, Oldest is 20, then 17 and 14 (Girl, Girl, Boy). Given the fact that all three are thinking about sticking around till they finish their first two years of college, I wont be an empty nester till I’m 55.

Still, the only thing I would change is to have more (I originally wanted 6) but the wife was done after 3.

I spent most of the summer in Sweden and everyone was pregnant, kids were every, things were actually getting more affordable, packages of food were getting bigger, etc.

I come back home --no one wants to have kids out of fear of the financial implications, everything is costing twice as much and all of our food stuffs are shrinking.

Am I in some sort of hellish bizzaro world?

Hedonists do not like the responsibility of raising children. Nor do socialists... It’s too much like work. I wish he hedonistic socialists of the 60s had thought as much. The ruling class just hires someone else to take care of them. I have never understood why you would have children and not fuss over them and teach them yourself. Didn’t the Bush empire have nannies? I think that was his reason for backing amnesty.

Those who will inherit the country are streaming across our southern borders and coming in from the Mideast. Your theory is based on IF Christian families would have 5+ kids. The current economic and social trends are a deterrent. Prospective parents fear their children being swept up in the societal breakdown that will result.

People who choose not to have kids have lots of disposable income that they can spend exclusively on themselves, and their lives are relatively carefree. But what about when they get old? Nobody cares about them. Too old to find a decent mate. No grandkids to dote over and be proud of. Nothing left to love except Cuddles the yappy dog. And the regret and bitterness that comes from being a lonely old spinster by choice.

I see babies or lack of babies everywhere.

So do I, Kristen. That's not just because you had a miscarriage: it's God speaking in your heart about what He loves. Don't ever start thinking that babies are a burden or scary or anything but pure divine love.

How is this different from a report on heavy metal rockers, or punks ...

If Time did a report on heavy metal rockers or punks or dog breeders or people who collect old Ford transmissions, I'd wonder how publicizing those groups was expected to benefit the Democrat party. The possibility that the topic was just of random interest wouldn't even cross my mind.

Lots of assumptions there, Bucko.

I'll mention two. One, my wife and I ARE old and we're continuing to do just swell. We have financial assets (having avoided, among other things, college tuition), two houses, and a great pension income from having worked two jobs.

You're also assuming that one of us is widowed--did I mention "my wife"?

Oh, one other thing. I consider myself blessed to not have grandchildren yapping around. The dogs are much more pleasant to deal with, thank you.

You people who think that everyone should fall in line with your thinking! I had different ideas and I instituted them and believe me, there are no regrets.

The demographic collapse will become self reinforcing as we enforce policies that will eventually cut off immigration, even though we will want immigrants. People will immigrate here when they think they will have a better life here. They immigrated because our freedom was much higher than other countries. That is no longer the case. Mexico is growing faster than we are, and that will probably continue for some time to come. We are starting to become less free. Some will move back to their home countries as conditions improve there. And if there are fewer givaways for the poor, which there will have to be in the future, fewer people will move here. Native born Americans are the ones who can't leave.

Immigrants have more children here for a while, but then they also will join the rest of us in having less children.

“No problem. Abdullah and his three wives will pick up the slack. I figure each bearded Imam could produce 30 children.”

Yea but how many of those kids end up dead either from a bomb with a bomb attached to them?

“We are starting to become less free”

Which is an absolutely rock-solid example of why prospective parents had better think past the Norman Rockwell idealism of big families at Thanksgiving as the norm. And remember that, no only are we less free, the purveyors of the twin evils of income redistribution and forced acceptance of perverted “alternative” lifestyles as “normal and mainstream” are gaining ever more traction in their quest to remake this once great country.

gaining ever more traction in their quest to remake this once great country.

For now. Nothing is a straight line, everything goes in cycles. If things went in straight lines of "progress" that the progressives believe in, then the Soviet Union would be the leader of the communist world, leading the charge for more abortions, more gay rights, more communism. Yet today, there is no Soviet Union, and the Russians that inherited the land are now more religious than we are, more conservative, fighting against abortion, and now gay rights, because they see it is not in their best interest. This causes cognitive dissonance in linear thinkers like progressives.

We have lost the culture war for now, but the winners are unsustainable anyway. Things will turn against them, rather quickly too I think. They will destroy themselves just like the Soviet Union. Our main tasks are to survive, be prepared for what is coming and to offer a viable alternative to progressivism.

This means no RINO weaklings. We must offer a logical alternative to the pain caused by the left. Even if we become a minority party for a while.

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