A few parents even shared what they feel unable to say publicly: that had they to do it again, they wouldn’t. One woman wrote: “Parenting is full of worry, upset and grief. A lot of doors close when you have a child. Yes, the good tends to outweigh the bad. I love my kids and would give my life to protect them, but if I could turn back the clock and go back? I’d have chosen to be child-free. I glad to know after reading your article I’m not the only one.”
An educator wrote in to voice her support. “As a society, we should applaud these people,” she wrote. “Too often, over my 20 years as a teacher, I have taught children who are ‘raised’ by parents who obviously regret having had kids. Those are the parents who have no patience or time to spend with their children. They are the ones who resent their kids, let the teachers do the raising, and then blame us when their children are a disappointment to them.”
Maier, the author of No Kids: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children and an outspoken social commentator in her native France, also came under attack. She wrote No Kids as an antidote to the romanticized view of parenting currently in France where generous state subsidies to those who procreate has resulted in a rise in the fertility rate. In it, she admits she has had regrets about having had her two children, a statement that provoked some to judge her as a “bad mother” for being so candid.
No Kids is worth reading: it’s a scathing, witty social critique that offers an often farcically extreme overview of the huge sacrifices involved in raising children and the current culture of hyper-parenting. To quote it out of context is tricky and can be misleading, as I learned when I repeated one of Maier’s most intentionally incendiary lines: “If you really want to be host to a parasite get a gigolo.” When I interviewed Maier she said she expected people would know she was being ironic and provocative: “I hope that people will understand the book and laugh about it and see themselves in it,” she said.
Thirteen-year-old Bryton Swan was offended by the quote, and for that I am sorry: “I found your article very insensitive and thoughtless,” he wrote. “First of all I have no problem with people who don’t want to have children but when people start calling kids names like “parasites” and such, its rather pointless and irritating. It’s like if someone is having a birthday party and they go out of [sic] there way to not invite you.” Excellent point: name-calling is hurtful and invariably will weaken one’s position in any argument.
Many readers wanted to shift the conversation to the social consequences of the decision not to procreate: “Why worry about nuclear waste, global warming and extinction of species, if you and your offspring won’t be affected?” asked one reader. Marcia Redmond echoed the theme: “I am a 58 year old mother of three adult children—soon to be a grandparent. I am content, even grateful for all that experience has brought to my life—and it has not been all easy, what life is? I feel my choice has tied me to the future—something I do not see in friends my age who chose the ‘no kids’ option.”
Jan Nelson, on the other hand, cited the imperiled eco-system as a prime reason not to bring more children into the world: “Melting glaciers, growing landfills, pesticides killing fish, growth hormones in meat, factory farms making lives miserable for animals, monoculture destroying the taste of vegetables as well as the soil, increasing allergies, MRSA, AIDS, SARS, H1N1, acid rain, dioxins, formaldehyde in clothing, melamine in food, smog alerts, floods, fires, droughts, endangered and extinct species, milk that goes rotten instead of sour, jellyfish blooms, deforestation, obesity in North America, starvation in Africa, buying water, plastic containers for everything, bees unexplainably dying off, oceans acidifying, shellfish and coral reefs dying, carcinogens, mutagens, six billion plus people. These are the reasons not to have kids! Do you really want to bring children into this mess?”
Of course, whether or not to procreation is not only a personal decision; it has political ramifications. When I interviewed the University of Toronto economist and demographer David Foote for the story, he mentioned that no single issue affects a population more than its fertility. Andre Villeneuve picked up this thread in an email, arguing that “by refusing to have children Canadians are committing demographic and cultural suicide.” He writes: “Yes, raising kids is a tremendous investment that means hard work, sweat and tears. But when was a great future ever built without sacrifice?”
We’ll leave it there for now, with last word given to an email that managed to be critical and encouraging: “ ‘No Kids, No Grief’ is a paper-thin exploration of this topic,” the reader wrote. “I hope to see more on it in future issues.” If the breadth and passion of the responses is any indication, there’s an untapped gold mine here to explore.
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