In a culture in which Jennifer Aniston’s childlessness provides weekly tabloid lamentations, a female star who goes public with a decision to remain so demonstrates courage. In a recent interview in U.K. Cosmopolitan, the 36-year-old actress Cameron Diaz, who is childless, expressed a disinclination to have children, citing environmental reasons: “We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.” She noted stigma still exists: “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned.” But she also expressed optimism the tide was turning: “I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do,” she said.
Now the childless in North America have their most defiant advocate in a mother of two: Corinne Maier, a 45-year-old French psychotherapist whose manifesto, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, created a furor when published in France last year. Count on the same happening when it’s released here this week. Among Maier’s hard-won advice: “If you really want to be host to a parasite, get a gigolo.”
The societal shift in attitudes toward childlessness is most evident in language, with the buoyant “child-free” replacing “childless,” a word stigmatized for conveying a void or handicap. The childless minority has always been with us. But in the past why they didn’t procreate wasn’t the concern of mainstream academic study or social debate: to the extent it was even considered, it was assumed that they couldn’t due to some biological reason or chose not to for negative reasons, such as having had a bad childhood themselves.
The arrival of the pill in the 1960s, which allowed women to delay childbearing, also permitted them to forgo it altogether. Support groups popped up to allow like-minded people to congregate—the first being the National Organization for Non-Parents formed in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1972.
With the advent of the “child-free” came a rethink of the reproductive imperative, formerly assumed to be hard-wired in every human brain. But as demographer David Foot, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto, points out, social factors also play a role, the most significant being female education, which was also abetted by the pill’s arrival. “The higher the education a woman has, the greater likelihood that she won’t have children,” he says. This is consistent across cultures, he notes. The birth rate in Iran, where women go to university, is lower than that in the U.S., where census data reveals voluntarily childless women have the highest incomes compared to other women. In the U.K., 40 per cent of university graduates aged 35 are childless; it has been estimated that at least 30 per cent will stay that way.
Why this is happening is the subject of much theorizing: educated women delay childbearing until it’s no longer an option; they refuse to pay what economists call the “motherhood premium” in which the salaries of university-educated women plateau after childbirth and then drop, while fathers’ incomes are unaffected; they recognize that raising children is a sacrifice of time, money and freedom they’re not willing to make; or they simply don’t want to have children and are able to say no.
(The matter is complicated, Foot observes, because income level is also linked to procreation. What is known is that paying women to have children doesn’t work: the only variable proven to increase the chances of women having children is to offer a supportive social network, as evident by the rising fertility rates attributed to government initiatives in Scandinavian countries and France, where generous tax breaks, incentives, and maternity- and parental-leave provisions have resulted in the birth rate rising to 2.7 per woman, the highest level in Europe.)
A growing literature on childlessness has emerged. It has been deemed a “revolution” in The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain, herself a mother. Academic treatises such as Mardy Ireland’s Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity attempt to diffuse stereotypes. There are also the cheerleaders, viz. Nicki Defago’s Childfree and Loving It! And the issue has been politicized in books such as Elinor Burkett’s The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless, which contends the “child-free” subsidize “breeders.”
