Like It Is

And you can afford to have children. What’s the problem? Why aren’t you doing your duty and pro-creating? Or what about the sub text:

“Society needs stable working (at least initially) married people like you to have children”.

I once had a conversation with someone which threatened to go along those lines. Generally… there is nothing strange in someone asking conversationally about your job and what you do, and how long you’ve been doing it. I don’t mind that at all. But when the conversation starts to go along the lines of “so, you’ll probably be thinking of having children soon, since you both have good jobs… After all it’s not as though you can’t afford it,” I start thinking of holding my breath and counting slowly to ten. Of course, they already knew that we travel a lot and do all the stuff a couple unencumbered by children can do. Including nothing if that’s how we feel. They seem however to feel it’s their business to try to remind us that jobs are for raising kids, not for irresponsibly gallivanting around the world. Like they can no longer do. Men get told that it’s time to “settle down and be responsible.” Hmm.

I think some people just don’t get it. In their minds, as I have touched on in one of my previous posts in this series, having children is the culmination of a woman’s “career.” And so a job that is not about rearing children comes in as secondary. That is fine for some. There are plenty of women who can’t wait to opt out of their jobs and take up the job of having children instead.

You probably know them… they are off every 18–24 months it seems, on maternity leave. They pop into work to show off the latest kid as if it’s a trophy, which I suppose it is for them. That’s their choice. It isn’t mine and it would be so helpful if people stopped assuming that every woman is just longing to stop work and go and have kids. Or that every woman even wants to.

They seem not to get that once kids enter the picture the likelihood is that, for women, they have a high likelihood of being side-lined in their career, with their economic power and independence either abruptly reduced or completely disappearing. Children will always take precedence and women especially often no longer have the freedom to make career or job choices that are best for them; they have to be best for the children. In many cases, work becomes part time (and low paid with few, if any benefits) or women have to juggle or opt out altogether to bring up the children. Opting out of working by this time may be less expensive than working to hand over all your money to a child minder. I know I would neither want to opt out of working nor have to rely on childcare.

They seem not to get, (or maybe they simply ignore ) that kids are an expensive business and that unless you are rich enough to hire an army of nannies and pay for expensive childcare you are going to have to live on a reduced income at a time when you actually require more.

But I think what’s most annoying to me, (and I imagine it would be to any childfree person) is the expectation of people (mothers mainly) that married+good job = must have kids or what’s wrong.

Nothing is wrong, except for the very flawed and rather ignorant assumption.

But all that is beside the point really. We are childfree. We’ll be staying that way. And the fact that we both have good jobs is a great plus for us. It means we can do the things we want to do.

But it never was a reason for us to have kids.