by Lisa Hymas
Laura S. Scott has surveyed and interviewed more than 170
people for her Childless by
Choice Project. “I’m
keenly interested in the process of decision-making,” she says. “How
do we get from assuming parenthood for ourselves to the point where we’re
saying, ‘No kids, thank you!’?”
She shares what she’s learned in a new book, Two
Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, and in a forthcoming
documentary.
I called Scott to find out whether environmental concerns
were a factor for many of the people she spoke with—and we also got to
talking about whether the feminist movement is supportive of childfree women,
how a nurturing instinct is different from a maternal instinct, and why we
shouldn’t try to save Social Security as we know it.
——-
Q. How many of the people you talked to mentioned
environmental issues as a reason not to have kids?
A. I was trying to find the top six most compelling motives to
remain childless. The environmental motive was not among that top six, but it
showed up fairly regularly in the mix of motives. In a questionnaire, I asked people an open-ended question:
“I remained childless by choice because I believe ___.” The motive that was
most frequent was, “I don’t feel the desire. I believe you shouldn’t have a
child unless you feel a desire to have a child.” Then other frequently cited
belief systems included, “The world is already overpopulated. I believe that
the world does not need another child.”
Even though [the environment] didn’t come out as the most
compelling motive for the group, it was the most compelling motive for a number
of people. I interviewed people
who felt very strongly that if they were going to be responsible global
citizens, they needed not to have children. I talked to a couple in Canada and
[the woman] said to me, “As much as I love the potentiality of a newborn,
I don’t think the planet needs another garbage-producing human.” Her partner
actually wrote himself a letter the week he was going to get a vasectomy,
making a list of reasons why he got snipped. The No. 1 reason was that the
world is overpopulated and Mother Earth’s problems are a result of too many
humans.
Q. When a person is thinking about whether or not to have a
child, environmental concerns might break down in two ways: There’s concern
about overpopulation and that a child will cause environmental damage and use
resources and worsen climate change. And then you might be concerned about
bringing a child into a polluted and crowded world that’s going to be a less
pleasant place to live. Did you hear from people on that latter point?
A. There is that too. There was worry that we’ve messed up this
planet so badly, is it really fair to bring this little person into it? And I
think “environmental,” more broadly, is not just a distressed planet, but also
the social ills that might threaten the environment [in which you raise] a
child, whether it be crime or drugs or sexual promiscuity.
But it was more of the former that I heard about. There was
a guilt aspect. Some people said, “You know, we really messed up this planet
and I feel guilty bringing a child into this place.”
People who I interviewed thought long and hard about what
it would be like to be a parent in this day and age, and it didn’t look like a
pretty picture to them. They didn’t have a lot of faith that they would be the
parent they really wanted to be based on the stressors that were out there for
parents.
Q. Were people who cited the environment as a reason younger
or older?
If you like this article, you’ll love my piece on being a GINK: green inclinations, no kids
A. I got it across the board. I saw slightly more of the 20- to
29-year-olds expressing concerns about the environment, but only slightly. I
anticipated that I would see more people concerned about the environment who
were children of the ‘70s, when we had that zero-population-growth movement.
There was a time, in the ‘70s and even in the early ‘80s, when it was totally
cool to be childfree, particularly if you were in environmental-activist
circles. But I think this next generation, anyone born after 1980, is
going to be much more aware of environmental concerns because we’re doing a
better job of educating children about global sustainability.
I was influenced after the fact. I made the decision not to
have children in my late teens, early 20s, and environmental motives were not
among my primary motives. However, as I grew to be an adult, I became much more
conscious about environmental concerns. I read Bill McKibben’s book Maybe
One and was incredibly influenced by
it, to the point where I felt myself nodding on every page, saying, “This guy
is so right!” and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a chance to
read this book and really think long and hard about how many children they
bring into the world?”
Q. In your book, you mention meeting an older woman who asks
you whether you have kids, and you tell her you’ve chosen not to, and she
responds, “Back in my day we didn’t have a choice.”
A. The choice to remain childless didn’t really exist even 50
or 60 years ago. Birth control methods were really dodgy and not particularly
safe or accessible or widely available to most people. And there were laws on
the books against using contraceptives if you were married, even until the
1960s in the United States and Canada. The fact that you can as a couple choose
to remain childless and you can take the steps to ensure that you do not have
children and you can do it safely and you can do it legally—this is new!
Q. Maybe the culture hasn’t caught up with this dramatic
shift?
A. That’s very true. The assumption that everyone will have a
child at some point in their life and it will all be good and happy—that still
has a lot of power. People who make the alternate choice are really swimming
against the tide, and their decision-making is not endorsed or understood or
accepted in a lot of communities.
It used to be
that you went from high school to marriage to children and the question was,
“How many children are we going to have?” And that question has
morphed into, “Should we have children?” As you delay marriage and
child-rearing into your 30s and perhaps even your 40s, you come to appreciate a
childfree life. Then that fertility deadline hits, particularly for women, and
you go, “OK, gosh, if I’m going to have kids, I really need to think about it.
Do I need to look at my partner as a possible father for my children? Am I going
to find a new house that I can raise a family in? Or am I going to refill that
birth-control prescription?” And then you are a decision-maker—you’re no
longer assuming kids for yourself.
Q. Do you think there’s more pressure on women than on men
to become parents? Or do women feel it more acutely?
A. I think females do feel it more acutely, and the reason is
that having children, being a mother, is so tied to the female identity, more
so than to the male identity. People I interview will say, “People don’t think
you’re a real woman unless you have a child.” There’s that sense that others
are thinking, “Well, she’s not really going to be fulfilled as a woman, or
empowered as a woman, or empathetic as a woman if she doesn’t experience
parenthood.”
Studies have clearly shown that voluntarily childless women
do experience incredibly good well-being and do have a great quality of life
and are experiencing the full range of Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs—that self-actualization that we all hope and pray for.
But then there’s that niggling suspicion, especially from women who have
children, that this can’t be legit, that childfree women are in denial and are
going to regret it and are going to feel lonely and isolated and have a very
poor quality of life. I think there’s a sense that a man in the world will do
fine without children, but a woman in the world without children is going to
face some tragic end.
Q. Do you feel like the feminist movement—not that
there’s some monolithic movement that you can pin down—but do you feel like
it’s supportive of the choice not to have children? Or is it really focused on
helping women balance work and children?
A. Women who choose to remain childless really haven’t been
embraced in that umbrella of modern feminism. Maybe earlier, in the ‘70s, when
we did have a very strong environmentalist movement, the childfree choice would
have been embraced within the feminist movement. But I don’t see that in this
sort of neo-feminist movement that we have now. The focus really is on working
moms. I think that will change as the numbers of women who remain childless
increase. Now, in 2010, close to 20
percent of women don’t have children and will never have children.
Q. A number of the people you interviewed in your book work
with or volunteer with kids. Do you think it’s a disproportionately high number
compared with the rest of the population?
A. Maybe, because we have time. Frankly, I don’t think I would
have mentored had I been a parent—I just wouldn’t have had the time nor the
interest. When you parent, your focus is justifiably on your own children;
they tend to consume a large portion of your disposable income and
discretionary time. The reason why I think so many of the childfree are engaged
in volunteerism, and especially volunteering with youth, is because they can.
Many of the people I’ve interviewed emphasize that just because we’re childless
by choice doesn’t mean that we’re without children in our lives. Our choice is
to have nieces and nephews in our lives, to be able to mentor and to be able to
volunteer in the community with children.
I was quite surprised when I was doing the research for the
book how many people I came across who were teachers. These were people who had
chosen careers that would put them in daily contact with children, and they
loved their jobs. But on the other side, they’re saying, “I’m so glad I’m
childless by choice, because I don’t know how, after spending eight hours with
30 kids, I could come home to a houseful of children. I would be overwhelmed.”
I think there’s an understanding among the childfree that
if you choose, you can have children in your life, and if you don’t choose, you
don’t have to. There’s that incredible freedom to create a family of affinity
versus a family of blood—what we call the tribe. The childfree are very adept
at creating tribes because they know that if they want to have a good quality
of life surrounded with people who love them and who they love, they need to
seek out people who can function as a de facto family, and some of those people
might be little people.
Just because you’re childless by choice doesn’t mean you
don’t have a sense of nurturing. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, “I don’t think
I have a maternal instinct, but I have a nurturing instinct.” That nurturing
instinct could be expressed by nurturing my community or nurturing my pets or
nurturing my spouse. I think
there’s an assumption that if you don’t have children, you must be this
cold-hearted, isolated, curmudgeonly person. I don’t see evidence of that with
the people that I’ve interviewed.
Q. How do you respond when someone says it’s selfish not to
have kids?
A. I question how they define selfishness, because to me,
selfishness implies a victim. So who am I victimizing if I don’t have a child?
Unless my parents anticipated a grandchild and didn’t get one, I don’t see that
my choice not to have a child negatively impacts anyone else.
I think people see a lifestyle that maybe involves travel or
time alone and hobbies, and parents might look upon that and go, “Well, you’re
self-indulgent or you’re selfish because your activities are more
self-oriented.” And that might be true. Some people think it’s a bad thing to
take that time for yourself in isolation or go on a hike.
But I don’t see selfishness played out in the sense of, “I’m
childless by choice because I want to go out to clubs until 3:00 in the
morning,” or “I want to save every penny I make and not have to spend it on anyone
else.” In fact, I see a lot of volunteerism, I see a lot of people donating
time and money to charitable organizations, and I see a lot of people chipping
in to help their nephew go to college. That selfish label just really doesn’t
stick.
Q. There’s an argument that we need to have kids in order to
keep Social Security going, that we need more young people to support all the
older people. There’s all this worry about demographic shifts in Europe, that
they don’t have enough children being born.
A. It’s like breeding workers. That kind of thing [is] a very
scary assumption, that we can breed our way into well-being as a nation. I
don’t think the evidence supports that. To save Social Security, we would have
to have, according
to Bill McKibben, at least three kids on average, which would, in a few
generations, produce a population approaching China’s. From all I’ve read, it
just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s ridiculous that we’ve been able to double the [world]
population in such a short span of time. But certainly we can’t afford to
double the population again. I don’t think the earth will support that. I think
it’s in everyone’s best interest if we find a way to plateau our population so
that we do have a good quality of life. It may not include Social Security
benefits. But it will be a world in which we might be able to feed ourselves
and might have enough fresh water on the planet for everyone. That would be a nice
world to live in.
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