In all while my life I think is way better than if I DID have kids, it’s not like I’m living in a mansion with tons of sports cars in the driveway!!

And yes, I totally agree, OK having kids may have been a wonderful joyful experience for some people. (And BY the WAY, sometimes that joy turns to sorrow and pain when they become teenagers or adults!) But that DOESN’T mean it’s that way for EVERYONE and it CERTAINLY DOESN’T mean it would be that way for me.
It’s a crap shoot.
And I’m NONE too fond of THOSE!

Finally, once I posted on yahoo answers are there any other childfree couples or singles in my city. WELL one person REALLY got his nose out of joint about it just because I’d used the term childfree he thought you know I hated kids and so on.

You have your parent friends and groups for kids and families, I’m sure, Mister, let me have my childfree groups PLEASE!

there was childfree then, and there was the same things then as now.. just a little less advanced.. even in nature there are childfree.. one example wolf packs, only the alphas breed, everyone else cant have children. that equates to us but instead of chemicals making us not have puppies, we have a brain that tells us not too.. animals will eat their young, will breed to excess then kill themselves off.

in todays pro natalistic world, there seems to be less choice, less options, due to societal pressures, pharmacists refusing to fill in prescriptions for birth control..

but there are still herbal remedies,

“So to close, a drastic example here to illustrate the possibility of trend reversals, a la P.D. James in The Children of Men: what if the human population were threatened with extinction? Would everyone who was currently childfree remain so?”

Currently childfree? That sounds a bit like we could change at any time. I most certainly would remain childfree - since I didn’t base my decision to be childfree on propagating the human race. Most of what humanity has done is to ensure that many other species are made extinct in the process of satisfying their every need, from fur coats to expensive designer furniture, to gas guzzlers. Not to forget by breeding too. And we’re more than happy to let almost entire continents waste away because of starvation… while in other parts of the world we dump wheat into the ocean and create butter mountains - because farmers have produced too much for their subsidies.

As Feh and merc say - if the human race was going to be extinct it won’t be from lack of having babies that’s for sure. It’ll be the grownups all the way.

in 40,000 years of civilisation, we havent changed much.. we still kill for stupid reasons, we still die due to famines, before we couldnt destroy ourselves in great numbers now we can.. what is there to save us..

we havent made our lives better.. we have more stress more deaths than in the labour intensive times..

humanity is a disease.. we just take and destroy.. regardless of everything else. like a cancer cell or a disease that reproduces over and over and kills the host..

Yes, I would remain childfree. Simply put, humanity hasn’t really done much to make this planet any better. Were we to drive ourselves to possible extinction, it seems to me that we wouldn’t DESERVE a second chance to repopulate. There would be some pretty drastic environmental and/or social reasons why humans would be rendered extinct and to bring an infant into that situation, when your life as a parent, and the life of humanity on the planet is faced with such a dire and unsurvivable threat, would be cruel and thoughtless to the extreme.

I have no problems with allowing humanity to go extinct, escpecially considering that extinction level event would most likey be as a result of our own folly.

As a long-time vegetarian, I have to tell you that a lot of people thought I was quite crazy almost twenty years ago for refusing to eat meat, and there was condescension and ridicule among many comments I received. I don’t think the numbers would be wrong if being vegetarian was also marked as a growing trend, and I don’t see that as insulting either. Things change, people feel freer to exhibit behaviour that diverge from the norm, and sometimes things change to reverse those trends. So to close, a drastic example here to illustrate the possibility of trend reversals, a la P.D. James in The Children of Men: what if the human population were threatened with extinction? Would everyone who was currently childfree remain so? I think we forget sometimes that many of our choices are created because conditions are such that we can exercise them freely. I know I would never have even considered being a vegetarian in this country a hundred or two hundred years ago- it would have been pretty impossible to survive because we did not have the global food transportation networks to allow me that choice.

There’ve been people who have chosen to NOT have children for as long as there have been people having children. Those people who have chosen to NOT have children are also able to express deeper reasons than “my cats are my babies” (which also drives me nuts to no end). For anyone to claim it’s some sort of “trend” is just spewing a steaming pile of condesending B.S.

JSD - I hear ya! But don’t forget most childed people will tell you they are selfless - or self sacrificing - which is really funny because having a child for most of the reasons they give is completely selfish.

Shelley, Initially when I first heard the term DINK I didn’t find it offensive either. But then I noticed that whenever it was used it was to put childfree people, or the childfree lifestyle down in some way, particularly it was used to imply that we are selfish (all that money and no kids?? Why? What are they spending it on, if not on kids?). It’s odd that people who know nothing about a person see fit to make a judgement on their lives as soon as they find out they don’t have kids. I never will understand that.

My husband and I got to the point where we were totally willing to give up our discretionary income in order to have a child, if we had a peace about becoming parents and felt that was the right thing for our lives. We completely ruled out money as a deciding factor. However, the peace still didn’t come. I HATE being called selfish by people who don’t have a clue who I am, what I’ve been through, or where I’m coming from.

What people decide to do with their hard earned income is their business.What we as a couple do with our hard earned income isn’t anyone’s business except ours. I should say though that a good chunk of it goes into supporting those who do have kids through the taxes we pay, whether we’re earning six figures or five.

The societal straight-jacket that dismisses marriages and long term relationships as less important, no matter how stable and loving they are because they have two incomes and don’t need kids in them needs dismantling.

Because it’s simply wrong.

AMEN

I love cats and I have cats but I don’t like to call myself a “parent of cats” or call my cats my “children”. It seems rather strange.

The article was ridiculous. So what if some dipshit named Paul Johnson thinks “being a dad is the best thing in the world.” I might love nectarines and think they are the best thing in the world, but I’m not going to bicker if someone else says they don’t like them.