Toward a Childfree Identity

[naamah_darling]

A friend, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of leg-biting, poses a question about being childfree. It's a legitimate one that I have been asked before, but never seen answered. (And no, dear anonymous reader, I don't find the question offensive. I'm actually glad you asked.)

"I've been wondering why it's necessary to have the label.

Comments

[wiccarowan]

Well, I am a breeder but it still makes me ashamed how some people react to the statement "I don't want kids". (A bit like how I'm mortified to be English whenever there's a football-based riot on the news

[mgs_naughtycat]

Sure, the human race would die out... but it would take a LONG LONG LOOONNNNGGGGG time before all the idiots quit involuntarily breeding.
So we're safe for a while... at least safe from a sudden lack of breeding... definately not safe from the idiocy though, unfortunately.

[achanchinou]

Hah! I've often thought the same thing. My only bit of dismay, distress, or distaste toward childfree people (apart from the immediate back away slowly response to the rabid dogs of the lot, that is) is that entirely too many people I know who label themselves childfree are very intelligent, articulate people. The kind of people you WANT to have kids to help balance out the idiots, so we don't wind up like that movie Idiocracy.

Alas, it would be a much more beneficial use of my time to go on a vigilante sterilization run for the idiots than to beg the smart people to reproduce.

[achanchinou]

You misunderstand - I would not hope for those intelligent folk to have ACCIDENTAL children, I would hope that they would of their own free will and for reasons of their own decide that they want to have a child, and would therefore raise them to be intelligent, freethinking, and teach them how to not be one of the idiotic masses. I know that in 99.9% of the caseses of people who choose to be childfree this will never in a million years happen. I'm cool with that. I'm just saying that in my fairly limited sampling, most of the people I know personally (or slightly personally as in via the net) are the sort whom I would wish to pass on their genes and their upbringing and their knowledge. My only touch of dismay at childfreeness period is that the kind of people *I* know who are childfree are exactly the kind of people who would, assuming they didn't hate children period, make the best parents.

I would never wish an accidental child on anyone - no matter how smart, assinine, nice, upstanding, intelligent or stupid they were.

[ms_daisy_cutter]

The kind of people you WANT to have kids to help balance out the idiots, so we don't wind up like that movie Idiocracy.

I don't owe it to "society" to breed any more than I owe it to "god" to breed.

And stupidity isn't necessarily genetic - nor necessarily any worse than it used to be.

[achanchinou]

Please don't assume I said anyone OWED anyone anything.

[naamah_darling]

Ah, I reserve breeder for blantantly horrible parents

[pixxelpuss]

See, I don't want full-time kids, but I'd like (to steal a term from else-thread) rentals. I don't even think I'd hate the incubation process that much. But T & I are all smart and funny and liberal. I feel like those are good genes to put out there. And many of my friends are similar. Maybe we should have a smart people communal children kibbutz. Where some of us have kids and they get raised by the community, and possibly a hired nanny.

Seriously, though? The more developmental psych class I take, the less I want kids.

[naamah_darling]

In all honesty, seriously, if I had an extended network of help that would assist me in child care, I would be much more interested in the idea of having kids. I mean, I still wouldn't, but I would at least have really considered it at some point before I decided that it would be not only bad for me and the kid, but logistically impossible for me to manage with sanity intact.

Modern life is superior in most ways. One of the ways it fails is in the absence of a large family/clan structure to provide support to mothers and children.

[achanchinou]

What Naamah said - the idea of a community of like minded folks to help with the kids... YES! I'd jump on that. I would, in part, like to reproduce, but I know my limits mentally and physically and I would NOT be the worlds #1 best parent - I simply can't hack it. There's also the fact that for the most part, kids annoy the piss out of me. Usualy they're the ones raised by bad parents, but still. I would wind up hating myself if my kids turned out like that.

Maybe we should coin a new term, and use it as the start of forming a commune somewhere where those who are inclied to do the incubation and those who are inclined to be part time parents can like. Make that happen or something. Wouldn't be the first time.

[achanchinou]

I'd hear people say intelligent people have an obligation to breed, and it drives me nuts because I don't completely disagree.Yeah, that's where the fine line of almost insult comes when I talk to childfree people. I almost never say what I said above - and I would never go so far as to say anyone has an obligation to breed, that'd be like... "assholier than thou" attitude to the extreme. But it may be a valid point. There are people who're sure that we have, overall, gotten stupider in the last ten generations. And there are people who're sure we've just got a lot more subject matter to go over, and so we can't all be as apparently smart as we were in general because we know less about more. (does that make sense

[naamah_darling]

Knowing less about more is a good way of putting it. I think this may have a lot to do with it.

It's nice. A lot of the smart people I know do have kids, more than one. So I feel good about our odds. And that's all I need to worry about, isn't it? Feeling good about the future I will not see.

I don't have to worry about the world my kids will live in.

Thank goodness.