187. SHOUT OUT TO CHILDLESS CAT PEOPLE - Why I Still Don't Want Kids
In the year 2000 I wrote a guest column for the punk fanzine MaximumRockNRoll called ‘Why I Don’t Want to Have Kids’ in their ‘Parenting and Punk Rock’ special issue. I was eighteen years old and although I said at the end of the piece ‘I hope this issue of MaximumRockNRoll will show me why it’s ok to have kids’, it didn’t. It is now twenty-four years later and, despite the thought-provoking issue, I still do not have children. The decision to not procreate has been an intentional life choice, not a sad circumstance of infertility, and in the wake of this summer’s comments from Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance about ‘childless cat ladies’ (and as a US citizen who is registered to vote in November and will be voting for Kamala Harris…who actually does have step-children) I thought it might be worth reviewing the sound reasons for my own decision not to have children and defending the decision of others who have done likewise.
To be clear though - the argument I will make for not having children is not an argument against those who have chosen to have them. I am not advocating universal non-procreation and our intentional species-death, even on my most cynical days! There are many wonderful reasons for having children and those people I know who have had them (mostly) seem happy with their choice to do so. Nor is this an argument against children themselves. I like children just fine - my nephews, my nieces, the kids of my friends… I’m a teacher, after all. I spend all of my working days with children. My personal decision not to add another one to the mix is not because of a dislike of children in general. It is just a reasoned and defendable choice I have made to not have one I am responsible for forever living in my home and dominating my life.
So here’s why I think it perfectly rational to make the decision to deny myself something that many people suggest to be:
a) the whole biological purpose of our lives
b) a thing of which no greater joy exists
c) a unique means of ensuring my genetic legacy and being remembered
d) a type of love which has no equivalence
e) an opportunity to bring positive change to the world
f) the way in which we hold a meaningful stake in the future
To begin, I’ll review my thoughts from 2000. Back then my argument went something like this:
1) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a child (in fact having a child can be quite lovely if you want one and commit to being a good parent).
2) However by choosing to have a child and become a good parent you are making the choice to bring a new life into the world, and that world is specific. It is not an ideal world or possible world, it is the real world as it currently is.
3) The world as it currently is just has way too much wrong with it to justify making someone, who doesn’t need to, suffer through existence in it. Even in the best-case scenario of giving a child a healthy and comfortable life, such a life is still somewhat compromised and corrupted by the embedded circumstances of the world as it is under capitalism.
4) Therefore it is not obvious that bringing new life into these circumstances is an inherently good thing, even though it is a social and biological norm to do so. it might even be a moral wrong.
5) Therefore it seems hard to justify bringing new life into this world.
Again - it is not an absolute argument making the case that having a child is completely wrong. There is definitely a case to be made that the world isn’t as bleak as I make out. But what it is doing is saying that the idea of having a child and providing a loving home for them seems wonderful on paper, but the actual world into which we are really bringing that new life is not the ideal world in our mind. It is life under capitalism. And, as I put it then in the column, “capitalism has f**ked up our society so much that no child born into this system can have a good upbringing”. Which is not to say it is impossible for a child to enjoy their lives and for a parent to do their best. Only that our best under capitalism, and even enjoyment itself, becomes compromised. Critical of the way the media corrupts our thinking even then, so many years before social media began to show us this corruption on steroids, I argued that any child born into the world today (and every living adult) would inevitably have their mind captured by commercial and ideological messaging from every avenue of media, as well as within the education system where “schools kids are forced into by law teach them to accept authority and take away their natural intrigue until real education becomes impossible.” This would deny them their true sense of self and influence them (as it does us all) to fall into step with a self-destructive and exploitative culture. Situating children in their social context, I argued further that any attempts to isolate your kids from all this would either mean alienating them entirely from their culture and ability to socialise with others, or be undermined by those social interactions with others who do not care or realise that their minds have been co-opted by capitalism. Either you would make your kid’s life miserable for some weird personal ideological battle against the way the world is, or would have to watch as your child becomes part of the problem.
Ultimately I summarised my position this way: “My problem with having children in the world today is that I do not think the world today is a very nice place.” And I gave an illustration, suggesting it would be difficult to imagine an unborn child giving their consent to be born into such an existence: “Do you want to come to this place with me? Yeah, chances are you could be born with some poor medical condition due to all the chemicals in the air. You won’t see much of your parents because they are wage slaves and have to give up their lives just to be able to afford the bare minimum of life support. You will have people constantly attempting to brainwash and indoctrinate you into their way of thinking and each person, myself included, will think their own philosophy is right. The food and drink is pretty bad for you and the entertainment is worse. The best thing is that once you reach a suitable age, you too will be out on your ear and into a job where you have to slave away for someone else to get rich from your labour while you take home a pittance. Oh yeah, and thinking for yourself will get you in trouble, and the entire place is run by a corrupt bunch of thugs who carry weapons and have complete power over you and are accountable to no one.”
Although perhaps a bit childishly articulated at eighteen, sadly none of what I noted about the world in the year 2000 seems to have gotten any better since. If anything, it has gotten worse. Add to my eighteen-year-old concerns about ideological indoctrination in capitalist consumerism and wage-slavery and add to it a deepening climate crisis (also a consequence of neoliberal capitalism). The current conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza show also that the other concerns I had back in 2000 about “the constant threat of war, nuclear or otherwise” continue to ring true. “Each day people in the armed forces die for stupid causes” I opined. “One day the dead solider could be your child”. These days children die in these battles as matter of course. They don’t even need to be soldiers to die as drone strikes and bombs do their indiscriminate work. And of course the threat of far-right violence and the rise of fascism in recent years has worrying echoes of Germany a century ago. When I said in 2000 that “there is intolerance on a massive scale, with racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, punk-a-phobia, different-hairstyle-a-phobia, t-shirt-a-phobia… Basically, people these days will do horrible things to you for the smallest and stupidest of reasons…” it is depressing to think that the same sentence could have been written today, even with all the positive changes that have made some of us far more inclusive than we were back then.
But while the MaximumRockNRoll argument still stands, I think more can be added to the argument that it is rational not to have children than simply the argument that the world is not currently a great place in which to raise them.
Let us therefore return to the positive reasons for having children and argue against them one-by-one. Having children is, after all, supposed to be:
a) the whole biological purpose of our lives
Yet this is clearly a fallacy given the many human beings who have natural fertility issues or sexual attraction to members of the same sex which means that intercourse cannot produce a child. I am always suspicious of people who try to hold one singular goal above all else as the ‘purpose of life’ when it is so clear than human life is full of a diversity of purposes. Yes, humans, like all animals, can procreate, and if we do not do so our genes will die out. There is therefore arguably some sort of biological instinct for procreation. But many follow that instinct to no avail. Many get pregnant and lose their children. Having a child is no guarantee of that child surviving, even if the pregnancy comes to term. Young people die every day. More importantly, one can live a happy and fulfilled life without having a child in a way that one cannot do so if they eschew other natural biological needs: breathing, urination, defecation, eating, for example. The sexual and procreational urge is clearly of a different order of things than the things we really biologically must do. It is something we can do (like survive without one of our kidneys) but not necessarily something we must do. It is also worth remembering the scale of the human race when considering procreation as a biological incentive today. An evolutional inheritance, yes. but only certain numbers of populations are sustainable, whatever animal you are. And while once, in our early evolutionary days, having children might have been necessary for continuation of the species, today perhaps it seems more urgent for the continuation of the species that some of us do not have children in order to allow those who do to continue to have the space and resources in which their children can thrive. Perhaps our sexual drives today have evolved to be more pleasure-based than procreation-focused precisely because procreation is no longer universally necessary (whereas pleasure/happiness is)? It was either that or our sex organs become like the appendix: a relic of our evolutionary past with no real purpose anymore. The biological argument is no argument for required procreation at all. It is simply an argument which reminds us that, like all animals who procreate, can and there are reasons that we might like to. But there is no mandate that we must.
And so we turn to the argument that having children is
b) a thing of which no greater joy exists
Such a claim, unfortunately, is unprovable, as joy is subjective. There are many things which might be of a higher quality than the version of it that I have (consider the difference between analogue television and a crisp, modern High Definition digital picture), but in the absence of anything better I do not really know what I am missing. (As a child, before the pictures became HD, I just thought they looked amazing). Furthermore, being subjective, I might discover upon experiencing the ‘superior’ thing that I like it less than what I had before (see the resurgence of vinyl records after the seeming dominance of digital music). The point is, contentment is as legitimate a human goal as the highest joy. Being happy with what we have. There may well be certain joys and experiences we lack in our lives. Indeed, there will be, in every life, something we do not experience simply because of the finite nature of time and limits of our situation. So those of us who choose not to have children can be content without experiencing the alleged joys parenting bring just as those who have children miss out on other, different, joys that come from being a free adult with no parental responsibilities.
Because the promised joy does not come in isolation. There is also stress and fear unlike anything you have ever experienced before, from what I understand, when having children. And a colossal sacrifice of free time, emotional capacity, money and personal space. Heroin, too, I am told, brings quite an impressive level of joy to the user, but at what cost? I have chosen to live without the supposed joys of heroin (as well as one without the supposed joys of having children) because the costs seem too great for the momentary high. Likewise, it seems reasonable for some of us to decide the costs that come with having children to so many other things we enjoy in life are far too much to sacrifice for the potential joys that children also can bring.
So there is no joy with the argument from joy.
What about the idea that children are
c) a unique means of ensuring my genetic legacy and being remembered
it seems obvious to me that this is an entirely selfish and unconvincing argument. Though Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists tell us to submit to the selfishness of our genes, there are many biological drives we reject and control as humans, from over-eating and addictions to the way we kill germs and combat diseases despite their selfish drive to want to consume our entire healthy bodies. We can be remembered when we die by friends, family, or any of those whose lives we have touched in the wider world without having children as some sort of future PR person for our memory. But also, none of us are remembered forever. We will all be forgotten one day and, crucially, none of us will ever know if we are remembered or forgotten sooner, later or at all - because we are dead. Our genes continuing on is pure ego, and based on a premise which ignores the fact that the majority of living things do not propagate their genes and end up dying out. And there is much of the ego that we are happy to ignore when we see it getting irrational or out of hand. What does it bother me if I am the last of my family line? Who cares? And often, as in my own case, it is not even true that my personal decision not to have a child means the end of the line for my family’s genes. Though my genes won’t continue, I have a sister and she has had a child. Our family genetics still go on through her child if that really is something to care about. But outside of outdated notions of hereditary monarchy and old fashioned questions of inheritance and heirships, it seems hard to know why we ought to care about such things at all beyond mere curiosity?
And again - procreating is no guarantee of such genetic legacy anyway. Many children die. Other people’s offspring die, as adults, before their parents do. It’s just a throw of the dice that our genes might continue, not a ineluctable outcome.
Which brings us to the claim that having a child introduces you to
d) a type of love which has no equivalence
This is a different claim than the one about joy because it is not the claim you will be loved by your child in a way no one else can love you (leading to a special kind of joy), but rather the claim that when you have a child you suddenly know what it is to put someone else’s needs entirely ahead of your own. To feel like your own heart is now outside of your body. To feel love for another like you have never felt it before.
Those who have children will say that I don’t understand, but it has always been my feeling that this claim only further confirms my eighteen-year-old point about life under capitalism. The fact that we do not put others before ourselves and don’t know what it is to care about someone else’s wellbeing over our own is perhaps merely a damning indictment of how selfish and individualist our current society is rather than a reason to have kids? It is entirely possible to put other people first and to care deeply about their wellbeing. We just don’t do it enough. It should be our everyday instinct towards all who we share a life with. But it isn’t. Possibly because the parent/child relationship is the only one which modern society has given permission for such selflessness to.
Working on our compassion and love for others and being more selfless is an admirable goal, but it isn’t one which requires us to have a child to achieve. Having a child is just the quickest and most socially acceptable route to it. And it is also, arguably, the most corrupting route, as it tends to ultimately leave parents hyper-focused on the wellbeing and needs of their own offspring over the wider needs of others. Dare I say that it can make some parents a little bit selfish? Believing their child’s needs to surpass the needs of everyone else’s? It certainly seems that way sometimes in conversations with, and observations of the behaviour of, parents.
And it is existing parents who, for my entire childless life, have always made the next argument to me. Especially the ones who read my early polemic in MaximumRockNRoll. Yes, the world is messed up, but having a child is
e) an opportunity to bring positive change to the world
As one parent put it to me “if all the ‘good’ people don’t have kids it means only a**holes will. It’s your duty to fight against the a**holes!”. The argument, therefore, is that ‘people like me’ should bring more of us to the table and help shape the world in a positive direction we’d like to see. Less ‘them’ and more ‘us’.
Besides its inherently divisive nature, the argument rests on the faulty assumption that a parent both can shape the worldview of the child they raise and that they have a right to do so. Both ideas are problematic. The obvious issue with the notion that a parent can shape their child’s worldview is that children, as human beings, are autonomous and free people who can be influenced by are still free to reject that influence. And frequently do. Note how many children end up opposing the views of their parents at some point in their lives. Rebellion is a well known part of any childhood. My attempts as a parent to create a positive change to the world may backfire - I might end up raising a monster! (And before you say - but doesn’t that mean a child can also rebel against the norms of capitalism that you say make growing up in the world today so awful…they remain only one human being, who cannot transform entire systems and institutions and the whole way the world works by themselves, even if they do see the flaws in such systems and institutions. Structural issues can’t be solved by individuals alone. But I digress…)
The autonomy of children entails the further issue of whether parents have a right to shape the worldview of their kids. People should be able to reach their own political, social, religious and ethical views, not have such views forced upon them. That parents do this as matter of course (see how many children are forced into the religious faith of their parents, or how often party political affiliation is homogenous as a family) does not make it right. So while I would love any child of my own to contribute something positive against the forces of everyday darkness that continue to make this first half of the twenty-first century grim, it is neither my right to demand it of them, nor is there any guarantee that they will comply.
Which leaves us with the final argument. The position of J.D. Vance. That having children is the only way in which we can hold a meaningful stake in the future.
f) the way in which we hold a meaningful stake in the future
What an absurd idea. Again, one steeped in a faulty assumption of humanity’s essential selfishness and individualism. If I don’t personally have children then I cannot care about anyone else’s children.
But this simply isn’t true.
I have already mentioned my nephews and nieces, and the children of my friends - these are all children whose future I care about very deeply. As a teacher, I am connected to hundreds of children each year who I would like to see flourish long after I am gone. But simply as a human being I can see that the world is full of children who deserve the best future they can have. I do not need to be personally connected to them to want this for them any more than I need to have had a fire myself to know the value of our fire departments. Or suffer from cancer to know the worth of an oncologist. It is only the failure of the imagination of this impoverished vision of a selfish and individualist humanity put forward by right-wing politicians like Vance that makes one think having no personal dog in a hunt makes the hunt irrelevant. I will have no personal progeny to continue living after I am gone - but I am not blind to the fact that many people do and, not being a monster, I understand that the society we are creating together needs to look out for the future of our children.
None of the positive arguments put forward for having children are compelling reasons that we must procreate, and there is no counter argument to my position that it seems fairly rational to conclude the world as it currently is is not an ideal place to bring new life into. There is certainly no clear reason why it is wrong to not have children. Furthermore, it appears to even be environmentally responsible and positive for the resource availability and allocation of space for future generations that some of us refrain from having children. Better that such choices are made willingly now, than through enforced public policy later!
Most importantly, writing now in my forties and no longer as an eighteen year old, my position on not having children today is not the future-looking guess at a possible life I might lead that it was when I wrote when I was younger. It is the life I have been actively living and enjoying for my entire adulthood now. It is a life I know from firsthand experience to be fulfilling and one which does has never felt like there is some sort of gap in it because I didn’t have kids. It is the life my wife and I have intentionally made child-free so we could enjoy other things and have time to ourselves. To prioritise each other. I have no regrets about it. I do not lie in bed sometimes and wonder what might have been if we had made different choices. Quite the contrary. Time spent with children, though enjoyable, usually leaves us relieved at the end of the day when we get to give them back to their parents. It’s just not our cup of tea, even if we are glad that it might be yours. We love our life, and we hope that you love yours just as much.
So whatever the views of J.D. Vance, Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with living a happy and fulfilling childless life, nor any logical reason that choosing not to have kids makes you any less connected to the future of your society than people who choose to have children. Unsurprisingly, on yet another issue, the Republican candidates are wrong. Indeed, it will be precisely because this childless cat person (yes - we don’t have kids but we have a beautiful old grey and white Siberian cat called Smokey Joe and we parent the hell out of him) has a stake in the future that he will be doing everything that he can to ensure Trump and Vance don’t get anywhere near the Whitehouse in November.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
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