Ladies! Want to know where to meet childfree men?

The answer is, apparently, Germany. Check it out:

In its study, the Robert Bosch Foundation found that "men are scared to start families," said Ingrid Hamm, managing director of the foundation. The study says one in four men in Germany do not want children, whereas one in seven women prefer to remain childless. In Eastern Germany, that rate is lower, with one in 10 women expressing the wish to remain childless.
[LINK]

In L.A., you can meet up with likeminded singles clubs, parks, and other venues that cater to dogs -- or canine child substitutes as we here at BNOB like to call them.

If the dog park is like a playground, with dogs standing in for children, then the freestyle dog dancing class at Jump Start Dog Sports in Yorba Linda is like Little League, or perhaps more aptly, a junior figure skating class. ... Kathy Morris, who founded Jump Start 10 years ago, has seen enrollment in agility, freestyle dancing and other dog enrichment classes skyrocket because of the increase in childless people who treat their dogs as members of the family.
[LINK]

Having kids is bliss -- NOT! (A BNOB news roundup)

This just in from Australia:

Having a child adds 40 hours a week to the workload of a previously childless woman.

On average, she reduces her paid employment by 10 hours a week while increasing her housework by four hours and she spends 44 hours a week doing childcare.

She loses eight hours sleep a week, spends 16 fewer hours on personal care, spends 10 hours less on socialising and has her leisure time cut in half.

She will spend just an hour a day without her baby present.

Quick! Someone call a surgeon. I feel a need to be sterilized.
[LINK]

From another recent study:

Women who had been homemakers for all or most of their lives and had not held down a job were most likely to report poor health, followed by single mothers and childless women.
[LINK]

I hadn't realized that one of my favorite fiction writers, the wonderful Haruki Murakami, is childfree, until I read this:

Childless, like his characters, Murakami is free to pursue his daily regime of writing, translating and fitness. After rising at 6am, he writes for about six hours, broken by an hour-long jog or swim. His evenings are spent listening to jazz and translating American novels into Japanese. As a translator, Murakami has introduced the Japanese reading public to more than 40 works by the likes of Truman Capote, John Irving, Tim O'Brien and Grace Paley.

Sounds ideal to me!
[LINK]

Childfree, not quite by choice

For father's day, an interesting essay by a man who always wanted to be a father but kept on falling for women who adamently didn't want kids. Very odd, considering how hard it is for childfree singles to find like-minded dates.
[LINK]

While many like to call childfree people "selfish," the truth is not having kids provides you with more time to give back to society. I enjoyed reading about one unparent who's doing just that.

Harris is the closest thing to a father some of the children who frequent the Eastside club will ever have, so he takes his job seriously. He gives children his home phone number, and advises the older ones about dating and college.

He's childless in the biological sense. Yet he figures he's currently mentoring "maybe 20 or 30" young people whom he calls or visits at least once a week. He's been doing it for years, first as a volunteer at the club, and later as a staff member. Some of his kids, as he calls them, are grown now. A few, such as Kirby Cole, have come back as mentors themselves.

[LINK]

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]