Why do we have children? Being a childless couple is the choice of smart people who want to live well, save the environment, achieve goals and be useful members of the community. Enjoy the benefits of not having kids to enjoy a life free from the constant grind and responsibility of bringing up children, which is extending more often into adulthood, as children are remaining dependents (and drains) longer. Some people who have children wonder why, but because they have them, they must act like they are in favour of having children, even when deep down in their secret thoughts and dreams, they wish they did not.
DINKS can get a bad rap as they disregard social norms and a historical expectation to have children to conform to social norms. It is not all about the obvious financial freedom, it can be so much more: better for your mental health; achieving your life’s goals; freedom of the soul; it is better for the environment and enables you to be a more useful member of the community.
Warning: People with children may regret their decision after reading this article. Please do not take it out on your children, it is not their fault, and they deserve the best from you – even when they do not. This article is for non-parents, and those considering options as they go through life.
The positives of living a childless life are vast and include emotional, financial, individual, hedonistic, indulgent, and peaceful reasons. Benefits include the avoidance of stress and ability to keep your soul whilst becoming a greater human yourself. The negatives of children are endless, so we will focus on the main aspects that include: compromising everything you do; living for dependents and not for yourself; constant financial struggles and the significant use of time spent on bringing children up when you could be enhancing your mindfulness and embarking on self-development in all aspects of life, relationship, career and health. It is not just the financial freedom it is about the time you have for yourself and the great things you can do with it.
Modern Australia is now a place where having children is a choice and people can decide to not have children. There is no biological imperative to continue humanity and take that responsibility on yourself. The world will continue to grow and breed without you. Soon you will be able to recreate yourself through DNA and cloning and will not need direct offspring to continue your legacy, you can just have versions of yourself or an AI version, which is your best most imaginative and capable self – better than any child of yours could be.
There are negatives to NOT having children and they will take up an inconsequential part of this article to provide an unbalanced view and to consider what you may be missing out on when you are old, have dementia and no one to look after you. If you are going to have children, please do an excellent job. The world needs more good people, not just more people. Having children is a serious decision that should be based on your commitment to put your children first and give them your absolute best to ensure you are contributing to the future. Do not go having children just because you were pissed and forgot to wear a condom and got guilted into it, or because you thought it would be cute to have a baby. Unfortunately, there are no qualifications required to be a parent, so it is an easy step if you want to.
A baby is only a baby for a short while the it is a child, a teenager, an adult, a future parent and forever a dependent and will often be as useless, unreliable and as needy as a one-month-old. Sure, babies are cute, but when they cry, keep you awake all night, poo on you and cannot be left alone for 5 minutes, the cuteness fades fast. Children are rarely useful, even when they are old enough to mow the lawn, they usually do a crap job and then still want to be paid for it. When they are old enough to take their siblings to do sport instead of you, they are still expensive, stressful, want fuel money and leave you awake worrying every time they go out. When they are adults, they think they know everything but still ask for money for university, a car, or to get married, and as soon as they get into any trouble, they need your help regardless of how many times they have failed to take your advice.
Children grow up as an all-expenses paid boarder that does the odd chore to return a pittance of what they cost but still demand their privacy, their own space and have an entitled need to have what they think they want with no idea of what a full-time job is and how much life really costs. You do not even get to choose the TV show you want to watch when you pay for the house, the internet and the streaming. Then when they finally leave home, you must help with furniture, a bond, dog sitting, university fees and will only come home when they want something, or their washing done. When they marry the person you did not like and it falls apart, you must pick up the pieces and cannot even enjoy an ‘I told you so’.
Society has at its core the family unit. Every good sitcom, every political party, every aspect of society, every religion, has family as the center of what a meaningful and purposeful life requires. This is pressure to follow the crowd and go through life like everyone else and do what is expected. Go to school, get a job, find a partner, have kids and be a good family. To have people around you who must be there and must come over for Christmas and birthdays for you to feel loved. Family is love without choice and something society grooms’ people to think is the correct life path. This false narrative is a product of evolution (and marketing ) and the requirement to have a unit to help you to survive. Family first, tribes of families create community, community creates belonging and purpose. This narrative and societal pressure to have a family as the only path is no longer your only choice despite how much your mother wants a grandchild.
Positive reasons to not have kids.
Financial Freedom. Being aDINK makes you upper middle class as opposed to lower middle class with just the basic requirements of budgeting and common-sense fiscal management. It does not take an accountant to extrapolate the expenses of one child over 20 years, or even 2 or 4, to see the vast amount of savings to be made by being childless. Compound interest and investments would play an obvious role in ensuring you live better every day, but you will also retire with far more $ and have many great holidays in between. Enough to have professional careers and a nice retirement village as opposed to depending on your children to look after you, which they will only do if there is a sizable estate to motivate them to care. You also don’t really want your kids to waste their lives looking after you in your declining years as it lacks dignity and holds back their own lives. It is a good deed and good thing but I would rather the money to pay a professional carer in a nice retirement village.
When you have kids you have to pay for food, a larger house, school fees and an inordinate amount of presents that you could otherwise invest or spend on yourself. Your children would even get to see a counsellor before you and always receive medical priority over yourself.
Climate change. Population is the greatest risk to the planet. Yes, humans are ruining the planet, but it is not the pollution of one person, it is the collective masses and growth of humanity that is slowly killing the planet. No matter how you cut it, a family of four does far more damage to the ozone layer than a couple. Over time, kids will have more kids and your one little family will forever contribute more to ruining the environment than a couple that exists once and dies off peacefully. Australians may contribute more per person than most countries to climate change, but it is really about the masses of countries like China and India and our effect is negligible and irrelevant if those countries do not take it seriously. Chinese no longer have a one child policy, and Indians breed exponentially so the only way we can contribute is to have less children, because many countries and religions continue to act like contraception wasn’t invented.
When you do not have kids you are saving the environment. No matter how long your showers are, how much food you eat, what type of car you drive or how many international flights you go on. DINK families are doing less harm to the environment than any family with kids.
Ability to travel. Travelling is a luxury. You need time and money to do it. You must have a budget. It costs about the same for a family of four to go to Sea World and spend 7 nights at a Gold Coast caravan park as it does for a couple to go to a ‘no kids’ 5-star resort for seven nights on Hamilton Island. Every holiday for about 16 years requires you to bring your kids, pay for everything for them, look after them and do loads of activities with them that suit them more than you. You must go to water slides, petting zoos, superhero parties, friends’ birthdays, and camping trips whilst DINKs are flying to 5-star resorts, trekking in Europe, shows in Vegas and flying business class while you sit in the cheap seats.
Travelling without kids can be ruined if you go places with families, but you soon learn there is a world of DINKs and places and things to do that you never even get to look at because you must consider the kids first. A dirty weekend away when you can get a babysitter is not a holiday, it is a sanity break. For DINKs, this is life, every day, without needing to get a babysitter to live your own life.
You do not compromise your own goals and self-development.
Sleep. Children make sleeping routinely hard. All the horrible stories of babies waking up all night and being needed all day are true. Just avoid this and enjoy an uneventful, restful sleep every day because you can. Even when your kids are teenagers you will stay up late worrying about what they are doing and if your teenage daughter is out getting pregnant or taking drugs, or both. No kids means daily and routinely blissful sleep.
Avoidance of kid’s parties/movies and family events. Other people’s kids are awful. Even people with kids know this. When you do not have kids while all your friends do, you start the long road of being excluded from all their kids’ birthday parties. As your friends’ kids age and your friends now only hang out with other parents, you are soon excluded from the family events because it is weird to have friends without kids hanging around at kids’ parties. This is amazingly liberating. Your friends change as they have kids, and you do not really want to hang out with them anyway. They talk about their kids, winge about not having a life and talk incessantly about how great little Johnny is when you know he is really a smart-arse little shit.
You do not have to play the Wiggles on repeat, and you do not have to go to PG movies to look for the ‘adult’ jokes mixed in to keep you awake. You can choose your own movies; you can sit in peace and order as many choc tops as you want. You can drive your sports car and walk peacefully to the movies without being distracted by every store and lining up for popcorn and little movie toys. Better yet, you can afford a big screen stereo and amazing home theatre and stay home and enjoy sport, movies and porn anytime.
Stress and worry and an early grave for you.
Stress is a major killer. The stress of how your children live and will turn out is a massive health problem for every parent. Will my kids be OK? How will they cope at school? Will climate change ruin their future? Will they get hurt at tennis or have any friends? What school should they go to? What gender will they want to be? Will they get molested if I send them to a religious school? How much will counselling cost me for them to grow up strong or can I just accept my kids for what they are and not what I want them to be? But they have so much potential, maybe I can get them to play golf and live vicariously through them, fulfilling all my inadequacies and using up all my counselling budget on their own problems when they are bullied on Snap Chat? Will my child be a doctor or a serial killer (or a serial killer Doctor)? Will the naked photos my son posts of himself dancing ruin his chances of getting a decent job when he is 16? So many things to worry about, and more every day as children become less resilient to cope with their own lives. How will you cope with yours and have anything left to help?
Having kids increases the chances of you having a breakdown before you even see your kids grow up and the chances they are good people that will make their way through life are worse than 50-50. Then they will have kids and you will be a grandparent and it all happens again.
Less than 50% of marriages work out successfully and statistically you are likely to have to reorganize your kids’ lifes around a new arrangement, a new parent, a new house, a new school and some type of sharing arrangement with someone you hate. This is stress for you and for your children that can be easily avoided before it begins. Fix this problem upstream, do not have kids. There are unbelievably bad odds, that it will all turn out ok for anyone. Even with 50% of couples staying married, they are not all happy and kids are integral to every problem a family has.
All this stress is avoided in one condom and using the pill. A small price to pay for a better life. More sleep, more time and less anxiety to focus on your own life and the ability to achieve as a power couple at whatever you want to set your mind to.
Legacy
Inheritance is great for your kids as it gives them help in life, but it is a myth. It does not foster a work ethic, does not teach self-reliance and just enables bludging, dependence and a need that when not fulfilled requires counselling. The third generation of a self-made millionaires are always messed up spoiled kids who do not know the core values of their grandparents and do not deserve the inheritance or appreciate it. When you work your way up the ladder, out of poverty or earn something great through your choices and work ethic, anyone you pass that on to or give it to will never appreciate it. Children of first-generation migrants will never understand or appreciate the sacrifice their parents made to live in Australia or the arduous work they had to endure to build a life. An inheritance or legacy passed on via family is rarely appreciated by those that had it easier after you because of you. By giving so much to your life and your family you have inadvertently misled your children that life is easy and good, and they will be weaker and less able to achieve themselves because they will have it easier than you. You want your kids to have it better than you, but the irony is, anything given is not appreciated as something earned. Your kids will be better if you give them nothing and teach them to earn everything.
Having no kids means you spend everything you have earned on you and give what you have left to someone or an organisation that truly deserves it. You help people now and can decide who will appreciate what you have achieved and not just be expected to give it to people who inherit it through no other achievement than a biological link. A university, a park or just a bench in your name will last longer than the money you give to people who did not earn it themselves.
You could be so much more – save the world and cure cancer. Give back more.
When you calculate the amount of time you can spend studying or watching documentaries instead of being a parent, you realise you could study for about five doctorates and become an expert in many things. You can then use this knowledge to save the world, earn gazillions or just find peace on a mountain because you have time to walk and ponder the meaning of life without kids nagging at you to feed them.
The time you use when you do not have kids could be used for so many good things. Your purpose and meaning in life are far more consequential than a life spent bringing more environment ruining mouths to feed into the world. You could start a charity, help the poor and the homeless, or invent another device to save time. You could work on your golf game before you retire and be far better at everything you want to do because you can be. You are required to manage yourself and compromise is only made between two adults sharing life and not consideration for how their children will turn out.
You can set a goal and work towards it without worrying about preschool times, school fees, how much university will cost, tutoring, bullying, child abusers, kids parties and what presents your kids are getting for Xmas. You can focus on you and your partner’s needs as priorities. How satisfying is that! A life setting your own goals, following your own dreams, and having the time to prioritize your needs. No nights spent panicking about your child swallowing a small toy, hurting them self at badminton, getting poisoned, smashing your car or getting picked on for being a nerd.
Time.
Time is the most precious of life gifts. How do you want to spend it? When you have kids, ‘your’ time is spent giving every waking moment to your kids before you. For at least the first 15 years, (5475 days), you cannot go on a holiday, go out for dinner, buy the car you want or even pick the TV shows you want to watch, without considering your children’s needs first. This might sound selfish, but it is the children’s needs that are selfish, it is not selfish to want to make your own choices and be independent.
Conclusion. You get one life and one chance to choose how to live your life. With or without kids, you will die one day. Your last moments may be alone but when you are dead you are dead forever and no amount of legacy will mean anything to you. The worms will not care, so my advice is to live your life as best you can. If you think kids will enhance your reason for living, go for it. Just consider there are options, that although more selfish and less accepted by society, will ensure your life is the best you can make it.
