Who needs BNOB when there's Time Magazine?

From last week's Time Magazine essay by Daniel Gilbert, "Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?":

Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.

Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television.
[LINK]

In response to the Time article, journalist Betsy Hart admits that she's happiest when her children are asleep, but then goes on to say happiness isn't the point:

Web sites and books for people who choose to never have children (versus those many folks who would desperately like to have them but can't) have boomed and a new term was coined for the phenomenon in the 1990s: "childfree." Again and again, these resources celebrate people, especially married couples, who say they just want to live life on their own terms, and do what they want to do when they want to do it.

Yeah. Whoopee.

In the end, that's a pretty good way to stunt a soul _ and it's no accident it's a growing American trend.

Betsy assumes that by living "life our their own terms" and doing "what they want to do when they want to do it" that childfree people are a bunch of vapid, self-serving assholes who relentlessly pursue pleasure and have never had to sacrifice for anyone or anything. I have two words for that: ugly stereotype. Maybe in Betsy's world the only path to a mature soul is to make yourself unhappy, to sacrifice your life for another's. Not being a Puritan myself, I find that there are other ways to nourish one's soul -- volunteering, being a great Aunt, spending time in nature, writing ... all things I'd have less time for if my sole aim in life was to make someone other than myself happy.
[LINK]

And over in Slate, Dear Prudence columnist Emily Yoffe recently suggested to a childfree woman, who wrote in asking how she should tell her friends and family of her decision not to procreate, that perhaps she might want to reconsider and then was shocked -- shocked! -- when childfree people responded negatively. She writes:
You would think my reply was the equivalent of running around the streets with a turkey baster full of sperm, impregnating happy childless women.

What I didn't say in the column was that I understood exactly how the young woman felt. In my 30s, I, too, was comfortably committed to being childless. I, too, had never felt the maternal imperative everyone promised me I would. I, too, looked at my friends with children and concluded, "No, thanks!" Then my circumstances changed when I fell in love with a man who wanted kids. I had to decide whether to let him go, or marry him and agree to have a child.

You know where this is going. She went on to have a baby ... No, Emily, you do not understand how the young woman felt. You caved to pressure, and have gone on to become one of the nosy masses who feel the need to now apply that same pressure to others. You made a personal choice; it's not right for everyone.
People who decide not to have children and mean it are sick and tired of being told by friends, family, colleagues, and now even advice columnists that their choice is somehow flawed and in need of reexamination. It should not come as a surprise that they get upset about it every now and then.
[LINK]