RECHARGE! Social
Childless by choice – a decision you may live to regret Hot yoga and shopping trips to New York won't sustain you when you're eighty-plus and lying in a resthome. When it comes to major life decisions, who in his right mind wouldn’t choose what sounded like more fun and less work? This, according to one observer, is the rationale behind a new trend in Canada: childlessness. Says Joe O’Connor in a recent National Post op-ed: Imagine a scenario where, on a Friday night, after running around like a beheaded chicken at work all week you get home, smooch the person you love, grab a glass of wine and enjoy the silence, the blissful quietude of being a committed and adoring couple – without kids. Indeed. No great effort of imagination is required, and, while not agreeing with his overall these-folksare-just-plain-selfish tone, I do think Mr O'Connor has put his finger on real problem. Between the pressures of work and the possibilities for self-indulgence today's couples could very easily decide that there is no room in their lives for children. It’s not exactly news that western nations are in demographic freefall, but the statistics are never pleasant to contemplate. Canada’s latest batch of 2011 census numbers shows that nearly half of Canadian couples (44.5 percent) are “without children”. Of course the stats are skewed somewhat by the inclusion of Boomer empty-nesters: people who have
children that are not living in their household. And we know that smaller families are a long-term trend. However, University of Calgary sociologist Kevin McQuillan confirms that there is a new element, "a turning away by couples from having children, period.” Maybe more like an exclamation mark: the in-yourface "childless by choice" meme has been around for decades, though I was sheltered from it in my home town, where five kids was considered a small family. I recall being surprised and disconcerted by society’s anti-child mentality as a university student and then a naïve young mum in the 1980s; now, not so much. I just like to sit back and savour the irony. O'Connor cites one childless woman who told the Post: “The benefits of not having children are in the driveway, in our closet and stamped on our passports. Kids are expensive.” And spending lavishly on yourself isn’t? They don’t teach logic in school anymore, do they? And they don't need to teach "me first’ or "the path of least resistance", since it is simply imbibed from the environment these days. Do it if it feels good; do it if it’s convenient; avoid suffering at all costs. It was not always thus. As O’Connor says, "Having children used to be the point of being a pair. It was the great aspiration – along with finding love everlasting –
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