Childfree news roundup

I'm off to a four-day yoga retreat, one of many things I wonder if I'd be able to do if I had children. Before I go, I wanted to post a round-up of interesting childfree news items.

From the other side, Clueless Dad writes an essay titled: Introducing your infant to your childless, baby-hating friends. He might start with a new, more unparent-friendly title, like "Introducing your infant to your childfree, baby-eschewing friends." He actually has some good advice that I hope parents will follow, or risk becoming Parent Zombies from Planet Zygote, which BNOB provides ample advice on how to ditch.

Let's all welcome Shuan Shuan the female panda to the Childfree Club! The panda was loaned out to breed with Ling Ling, a male panda, but has returned to her home zoo childfree and happier for it, no doubt.

Without preschools, playgrounds, and other amenities, New Orleans will remain a childfree city for the forseeable future. That may be enough to get some of us to the French Quarter, where we can spend some of our ample disposable income on childfree tourist activities.

According to this article, childfree couples in the U.K. are being offered larger home loans for the obvious reason that dependents are expensive.

Stroller terror!

There's an excellent article in yesterday's New York Times by Stephanie Rosenbloom on how the childless are being terrorized by parents pushing those oversized strollers.

She writes:
Pricey, supersize baby strollers like the Bugaboo and the Silver Cross - nicknamed Hummers - have been derided as symbols of yuppie extravagance. (They cost upward of about $700.) But some critics now say that size is not the only problem. What's worse, they say, is the way some parents use them to bulldoze their way through public places.

"I liken it to the SUV experience," said Elizabeth Khalil, 28, a lawyer in Washington. "It's just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because you can."

Critics - many of them people without children - rarely raise the issue with their friends who are parents. But they voice their complaints in conversations with one another and in online chat rooms. And many are beginning to suspect that the new big strollers are the latest fissure in a long-standing divide between parents and nonparents, a disagreement that usually goes unspoken, over who has made the right choice in life.

Read the full story.

Essay exploring deeper implications of remaining childfree

In this essay for the Guardian, Lionel Shriver describes her role as the Anti-Mom. Shriver's latest novel was a tale of motherhood gone awry that drew fire for being anti-family, letters of appreciation from mothers of horrible children, and support from childfree readers who felt the book validated their decision. Yet this piece is not a self-affirmation, but an exploration of the guilt and ambivalence Shriver now feels, at age 48, for forgoing parenting. An interesting and thoughtful read. Here's a nibble:

Rather than economics, the engine driving Europe's "birth dearth" is existential.

To be almost ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not 'Did I serve family, God and country?' but 'Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?' We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

Baby Not on Board to be part of San Francisco's LitQuake

I'm happy to announce that I'll be reading from Baby Not on Board along with several other Chronicle Books authors at San Francisco's annual LitQuake pub crawl on October 15. The event, called "Get in Bed With Chronicle Books," will be held at Den, a tres child-unfriendly furniture store in the Mission District. Also reading are Cameron Tuttle of The Bad Girl's Guides, Julianne Balmain of Office Kama Sutra fame, and Jennifer Axen, author of The Stripper's Guide to Looking Great Naked.

Fighting words!

The wife of Germany's Chancellor Schröder (yes, that's really her in the picture) attacked her husband's opponent Angela Merkel for remaining childfree.

The London Telegraph reports:
The life of Angela Merkel "is not such that she can represent the experiences of the majority of women," Doris Schröder-Köpf told Die Zeit. "They are busy trying to juggle a family and a career, or deciding whether to spend a few years at home after having a baby or wondering how best to bring up their children. This is not Angela Merkel's world," she said.

As a woman, I would much rather have a leader who was busy trying to juggle the problems of the country than constantly waffling between changing a diaper or negotiating a peace treaty.
And, while we're at it, if you have to have had the struggles she describes to adequately represent women, then wouldn't her husband also be unqualified? Perhaps Mrs. Schröder-Köpf should stick to playing with digital cameras.

Big tax breaks for DINKS down under

This just in from Australia: DINKs (Double Income No Kids) couples are the big beneficiaries of new tax reforms down under--reforms that were supposed to benefit DIWKs (Double Income With Kids). See full story.