The array of narratives reveals that the choice not to have children can be as complex—or as elemental—as the desire to have them, as reflected in Nobody’s Mother: Life without Kids, a 2004 anthology of essays by a diverse group of Canadian women, and Nobody’s Father from the male perspective, published in 2006. Many women knew they didn’t want children as children, a claim backed by research in The Childless Revolution that explores the notion that the impulse not to have children is genetic, like being gay. Most were clear-eyed that the choice required a new anchorage. “Children were not a way of ensuring happiness or endowing my days with meaning,” the poet Lorna Crozier writes. “That hard task was mine alone.” The American author Lionel Shriver, who never wanted children, writes in “Separation From Birth” that her greatest fear “was of the ambivalence itself”: “Imagine bearing a child and then realizing, with this helpless, irrevocable little person squalling in its crib, that you’d made a mistake. Who really, in that instance, would pay the price?”
But no book on the subject has been more provocative or summoned more furor than Corinne Maier’s No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. It isn’t the first time the Freudian analyst hit the French national nerve: her 2004 book Hello Laziness: The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace pilloried the country’s famously lax workplace culture. In No Kids she deploys an acerbic wit to dismantle the idealized depiction of parenthood perpetuated by the French state, “the fertility champion of Europe,” a distinction greeted by the country’s media like a sporting triumph.
Speaking from her home in Brussels, Maier says she was prompted to write No Kids by a conversation she had with two female friends in their 30s who told her they felt like social deviants because they didn’t want children. That perception is well-founded, she writes: “To be childless is considered a defect; irrevocably judged, those who just don’t want children are also the objects of pity.” But Maier believes “conscientious objectors to this fertility mythology” should be rewarded, not stigmatized. “To have a kid in a rich country is not the act of a citizen,” she writes. “The state should be helping those who decide not to have children: less unemployment, less congestion, fewer wars.”
She admits there are times she regretted having her own children, now aged 14 and 11, a declaration that has predictably branded her a “bad mother” whose children are destined for a lifetime of therapy. (Yet she’s only saying what many mothers silently think but aren’t allowed to say. In 1975, Ann Landers famously asked readers: “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” Seventy per cent of respondents said “no.”) Maier reports that when she had her children she was madly in love, a hostage to her hormones. She too bought into the modern parenting mythology that children could be psychic curatives. Raised as an only child, she believed children would end her feelings of loneliness. Instead, she says, their arrival created new forms of loneliness.
The professional provocateur cuts through the gauzy romanticized depiction of parenthood promoted in France, which has far less to do with love of children than “a form of nationalism to enhance our identity,” she says. Maier doesn’t mince words, calling labour “torture,” and breastfeeding “slavery.” The idea that children offer fulfillment is also dismantled: “Your kid will inevitably disappoint you” is reason No. 19 not to have them. Much of what she has to say won’t be breaking news to most parents: children kill desire in a marriage and can be demanding money pits. Without them, you can keep up with your friends and enjoy your independence.
Research backs Maier’s assertions. Daniel Gilbert, who holds a chair in psychology at Harvard and is the author of the 2006 best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, reports that childless marriages are far happier. He also reports researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids: “Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework,” he writes in Stumbling on Happiness.
Yet a 2007 Pew Research Center survey found people insisted that their relationships with their children are of the greatest importance to their happiness. Gilbert believes the reason people say this is because they’re expected to. He puts it in clinical economic terms: the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it, and children are expensive: the latest data suggests it costs upward of $250,000 to raise one to age 18.
No Kids is less anti-child polemic, however, than scathing cultural criticism. Maier lampoons the modern family (“an inward-looking prison focused on the child”) and the prevailing mindset that celebrates reproducing one’s DNA as “the ultimate objective of human experience.” Over-attentive focus on children saps cultural creativity, she argues: “Children are often used as an excuse for giving up on life without really trying. It takes real courage to say ‘Me first.’ ”
