Reasons you’re childfree by choice?

[DownThePubWithStevieNicks]

For me, the main reason is I have never particularly had a maternal instinct. There are scores of secondary reasons backing up the main reason, including:

• Having partners who for various reasons (being useless, inflexible career) would not have been truly equal parents
• Really valuing my financial and physical freedom to live as I please, go where I want
• Hating thought of pregnancy and childbirth
• Liking sleep
• Worries about passing on familial MH problems and/or poor parenting
• Concerns about the state of the environment and national and global politics
• Fear that a child could be disabled and require lifelong care
• Not wanting to be a single parent in the 50-50 eventuality that relationship broke down.

I am at the very end of my fertile years now and have no regrets! I’m lucky in that I am rarely asked about having/wanting kids, and when I am ‘I never wanted them’ is always accepted.

Did you have other reasons I missed?

I could write a book of secondary reasons but it basically boils down to the fact that I don't want to.

And that’s the only reason necessary.

Absolutely no maternal instinct. I preferred my toy animals to dolls. Now I have real ones. Also frightening sex education in the early 1970s. Of my group of four close friends, only one has has had children. Sister hasn't either.

Yes to the animal thing! Obviously I care about humans and global disasters, war etc but it doesn’t gut-punch me emotionally like anything to do with animals does. I mean, I can see footage from, say, Gaza and think how incomprehensibly devastating it is, and I care very much, I donate to several humanitarian charities. But it doesn’t make me burst out sobbing in the way a video of a puppy being rescued from a bin does. I’m not sure what that says about me.

@Ratisshortforratthew I feel the same about animals. Although anything bad to do with the elderly really gets me too. Everything else whilst awful doesn't affect me in the same way.

Same. Animal stuff gut punches me. Human stuff... not the same.
It is not something we can help.

It’s sensible to not have kids if you don’t want them. There’s far too many neglected and abused children in the world. There’s a lot of parents who should never have had kids.

My desk faces the window & I can see my cat basking in the sun while I’m working. Every so often she looks up at me & blinks & my heart overflows a bit.

Although not to the extent of feeling as if I’ve left it on the M1.

I like the comedian Sarah Millican's view on kids. She said her and her husband can't have kids... because they hate them 😄