To ask why you didn't/don't want children?

[alfie22]

I'm in no way judging anybody who have decided not to have DCs.

But I am genuinely intrigued for the reasons why after reading a thread about somebody's DD not wanting children.

What are your reasons for not having children? Would there any be "what ifs" further down the line?

@chanderl I am not odd, thanks for your opinion on my life from one sentance though! I said about going away at Christmas because of comments on this post saying you can't have children expecting they will want to spend holidays with you. I am saying I am fully aware having a child doesn't guarantee you will never be alone for a holiday and I am prepared to go away and enjoy myself rather than sit on mumsnet/gransnet complaining my children don't live to spend time with me.

I didn't not want them, I just never did want them. Plus never met anyone I would want to be stuck with for life.

Kind of assumed if I met the right man I would then want kids with him, but either I never met him, or I really didn't want kids enough.

But also, the idea of being pregnant is horrible. I was pregnant once, only eight weeks, and it was totally ghastly.

'Calling a baby an alien is irrational.'

Not at all

Infant my very own OBS referred to mine as an alien/parasite when I was hospitalised with HG.

Fantastic analogy

and then argue and pick apart everything you say as if you are somehow wrong.

Yep, I see it all the time in real life. "Oh I don't want children"

Queue people telling me i'll change my mind, oh you say that now but just you wait, and so on and so on.

I never felt the urge to have a child myself, although I generally get on very well with children, lived with and helped care for three children for many years, have been closely involved with friends' children etc., and I'm very glad to have had that privilege. And I love babies! But honestly being a mum looks like such hard work, so unrelenting, and such a gamble - seeing the terrible struggles some people have with their DCs, I just think, phew, thank god I never did that.
On an intellectual level I understand how much joy people get from their offspring, but I can't really understand it!

'Infact'

Surely the discussion here is about why people make different choices, not to attempt to change people's decisions about having/not children or tell them their reasons are irrational.

@chanderl

Calling a baby an alien is irrational.

While I didn't think of my babies as "aliens" I could see how they could be described as benign tumours. Just not unwanted ones.
And removing them from your body can be a lot more bloody and life-changing than having, say, a lipoma taken out.

Just to be on the safe side, that's meant to be lighthearted.
And wouldn't "Lipoma" be a lovely name for a girl?

My partner and I will be mortgage free in our late 30s and also able to retire early when we reach 50. These wouldn’t be possible if we had kids.

I need a lot of sleep and couldn’t cope with the broken nights.

I don’t find babies cute at all. They are just boring and annoying to me.

Pregnancy and giving birth are two things I never want to go through.

I love my freedom and being able to do what I want when I want. I also like being able to save money every month and afford nice things.

My sister has kids and her life couldn’t look less appealing to me if she tried. She’s constantly exhausted and has gained a lot of weight. She’s always skint and the relationship with her partner has suffered because they are both permanently tired and irritable. Her day to day routine looks like drudgery at its finest.

The world is already far too over populated so I don’t want to add to it. The planet isn’t going to be a nice place to live by the time children of today get older.

I suffer with anxiety and would spend my whole life constantly worrying about them. My mental health would plummet as I would always be on edge.

These are just a few of the reasons why I have zero interest in ever being a mum

Its strange how some parents seem to take it as a personal insult/criticism when a person says they don't want children.

I couldn’t be bothered, quite frankly. I enjoyed my freedom, my sex life, liked spending my money on what I wanted and being able to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I liked being able to sleep, to rest, to lie on the sofa and read or watch tv for as long as I wanted. I liked to get drunk and not be responsible for anyone. I liked my body and didn’t want it ruined.

DH wanted a baby, so after seven years he basically said either we had to have one or he’d divorce me to have one with someone else. I didn’t fancy being a tired old 40 year old back on the dating market trying to find a new husband, having to sell my home and not being able to afford such a nice house on my own, losing all my friends because they would probably side with him, etc. So I figured having a baby was the lesser of two evils.

DS is lovely. I have no plans to have a second child - one is enough to achieve the purpose of keeping my marriage together. I question whether it was actually the lesser of two evils though. My stomach is ruined and I have permanent pain from my c section. It’s destroyed my looks and my self esteem. I get no sleep and I’ve aged about ten years overnight. My life is over - no privacy for sex, no freedom to travel or go out, no peace. I can’t read or watch tv, I can’t drink. I can’t even enjoy a meal because I’m putting food in DS mouth and picking up bits he’s thrown. I’m constantly alert for DS falling over or touching something he shouldn’t, my entire life is keeping him safe and trying to make him sleep when he doesn’t want to. DH is basically like a stranger, we’re never together because one of us takes DS while the other goes away to rest. We don’t even sleep together because DS won’t sleep on his own.

I do love DS. But I was right not to want him and I shouldn’t have let myself be pushed into it. Unfortunately you can’t send them back!

I only take it as an insult when people constantly say that having children is committing to a life of drudgery when that just isn't true.

Because I knew deep down I'd be the same sort of mother as my mum, and I didn't want that.

Btw I don’t dislike children especially. I like my nieces and nephews and I am a good aunt. However I like them for the humans they are rather than because they are small and cute. In fact, I struggle until they can properly interact and walk/talk.

I’m polite and friendly with children in our friendship circle (not many thank goodness) and generally can be relied upon to play a game, or do some crafts.

You can look at the overall picture of parenthood and shudder, whilst appreciating there are good parts.

I like seeing parents out with a little kido getting them into something like cycling or climbing, showing off your passion to a child looks cool and you get a fun little mini-me to adventure with you. Or you might not. They might hate your chosen activity and be a home bird.

Basically, what BananaCatto said: But what it really truly comes down to is that I don’t feel that a part of my life is missing.

It's not even that I have a mega-exciting life, am out all nights, etc. But I love coming home from work and then deciding whether to go to the cinema that night or just crash out on the sofa binge-watching Netflix.

Also, raising a healthy, nice kid seems already like a massive commitment in itself, but raising a child with severe additional needs seems like a whole other ball game. I simply don't think I could do it without (awful as this may sound) ending up resenting the child, and no child deserves that.

I think it does help that very few of my friends have kids. I think some (in their late 20s/early 30s) still might, but I know others (mid-late 30s) have made the deliberate choice to be childless, and it does make it feel like a more accepted choice.

Having children is a risk. There are no guarantees of a healthy baby or how the child will turn out or whether or not you will have a good relationship when they become adults - just look at the many threads on here and on Gransnet regarding non-contact and estrangement.

I did take the risk, three times, but was fortunate to be relatively senior in my career to be able to employ a full time nanny etc, but it was still bloody hard work when they were little. The love is different because it is unconditional so you will always worry about them, even when they are adults, and they have the capacity to hurt you as nobody else ever could.

Funnily enough, most of my best friends are child free, and they often comment that they enjoy my company whereas some of our mutual friends did have children, who became the centre and purpose of their lives, and these friends became boring. I totally agree with the previous poster who said that if having children is your only purpose in life, it says a lot about you - and not in a good way. These are the parents who will also struggle to let their children go, as they then no longer have a purpose, and become a burden on their adult offspring.

There is no wrong or right, only what's right for the individual, but I can well understand why people avoid what is the biggest and endless responsibility which children bring.

Just as a by-the-by...

Clicked on "Active Threads" just now (being lazy and putting off starting some cooking that needs doing ) and saw:

"AIBU To ask why you didn't/don't want children?"
"AIBU Things other people do that you just don't 'get'"

Maybe it's just that simple....

@chanderl you don’t think it’s drudgery, personally I think that providing cooking, cleaning and other services to another human is objectively committing to a life of drudgery.

It’s fine for you not to think it is, and it’s fine for other people to think it is.

And it’s not just the baby stage is it? You’ve got school drop offs, name tags to sew in, parties to be a taxi service for, nutritious food to cook because you can’t afford a Deliveroo and it’s not cool to feed the kidos beans on toast two nights in a row.

my figure

In my experience, if you have no trouble maintaining your figure before birth, you have none after.

In fact it's very easy to not feed yourself enough when looking after babies.

As for boobs, as a thread on here showed - that varies a lot by person.

Someone I know married a bloke with cross eyes and now has four cross eyed children.

Loooool.... I told a friend 20 years ago not to choose the guy who was crosseyed to be her kids dad. As they would look like Quasimodo. And guess what???? Loooool.. this is true

Holy fk, you two sound shallower than a damp patch here.

Just never 'wanted' them, and I think having kids is something you should really, really want before purposely doing, given the enormity of it.
Also, I am not a 'kid' person.

I don't have children and I have just never wanted them. I can't explain why I don't want them, I just don't. I have zero interest in them and it's something that I have never really thought about.

That feeling that the OP has had from being young, of always knowing they wanted children? Well, think of that in reverse, that's probably the best way of describing it. I didn't make a "choice" not to have them either, because it's a complete irrelevance to my life.

Not surprising to see some of the mothers here getting defensive and judging the childfree posters' reasons for not having kids. Some people seem to consider it a personal attack if others don't follow their life choices.

If someone says "I don't want the responsibility, the pain of childbirth, the mess, the lack of sleep, the anxiety and the financial constraints", why can't that be accepted rather than picked apart by the "you'll never know love like it" brigade?

We are all different, for some people the sacrifices are worth it and for others they're not. The world is overpopulated anyway so it would be great if more people would actually think about their reasons for wanting children, rather than blindly doing what society expects.

I tried to force myself to want children because I felt it was expected. When I was 21 I would say ‘Oh yes, of course I will, but not until I’m at least 30’. By 23 I realised I was dreading 30. Suddenly it clicked one day that, if I was desperately clinging on to the last few years before I HAD to have children, I probably didn’t want to have them.

I struggle to look after myself sometimes, never mind a completely dependent person. Someone utterly reliant on me the whole bloody time - it would kill me. I can remember when I was about 11 my nan phoning my mother to tell her one of her aunts had died. My mom cried a little bit, then sort of sniffled as if sucking it up and said ‘Right, I’d better get tea on’. It hit me even at that age that she felt like she couldn’t even take five minutes to grieve - she had two children who needed feeding and she just had to get on with it.

The other thing I can’t handle is the screaming. When a child has a proper screaming fit because they can’t get their own way and nothing can calm them down; that noise goes through me like nothing else. I know I would just snap. Of course people queue up to tell you it’s different when it’s your own child, but I’ve known me for the best part of 40 years - I think I’m the most qualified person to say how I’d cope.