Childfree article spawns nasty Internet flame war ...

Baby Not on Board was proud to be featured in an Oakland Tribune article by Candace Murphy titled "In age where it's all about baby, the childfree are fighting back."

From the article:
Blame the stalker-like media coverage of Angelina Jolie's pregnancy. Blame the new generation of navel-gazing parents who act as if they've invented childbirth. Blame all those baby blogs. Because childfree adults are lashing back, refusing to drink the baby-making Kool-Aid and are aggressively asserting that they're not abnormal for not wanting to procreate.

For lack of more erudite words, these people are mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. And they don't care if they use the word hell in front of your kids, either.
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And talk about mad as hell ... the article was posted to Fark.com, setting off a big-time flame war. More than 1200 posts last checked, ranging from a horror story about a rainboot-wearing child who liked to carry around his own poop to a defensive parent posting actual a photograph of his (her?) child as if that was all we needed to be convinced. Thankfully, a lot of posts fell in between these two extremes. Unfortunately, some of the posts got waaaaay out of hand.For fark's sake, there's simply no excuse for telling people you hate their children and would rather see them die than be forced to endure them.
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This is not a war. It's a shift, a rocky transition. [Cue: Strauss a la 2001: A Space Odyssey.] Since the dawn of humankind, there's been one path: procreation. If you were fertile, you could pretty much count on making a baby or twelve. But now thanks to modern reproductive science, people have the option to take another path. Unsurprisingly some are choosing to take the alternate route. Yeah, it's a little weird. It's the first time in human history this has happened.

So, hey, we'll gladly respect your decision to have children if you'll respect our choice not to. If we can get to a point where it's something we can have a good laugh over, rather than get up in each others' grills, then that's real progress. I think one Fark poster expressed it best with this hilarious image and a simple plea: Can't we all get along?

Has New York gone ga-ga for goo-goos?

"When every restaurant and coffee bar doubles as a playroom, is there such a thing as adult space anymore?"

This is the provocative question posed in an essay published in this week's New York Magazine.

Enlightened parent Amy Sohn writes:
All over the city these days, not just in supermarkets but also in fancy restaurants, Chelsea galleries, French cafés, and even dive bars, families with children have taken over. Manhattan’s 26 percent increase in children under 5 from 2001 to 2004 is unthinkable to people like my parents, who had me in 1973, after moving to a middle-income apartment complex in Brooklyn built to keep people like them from fleeing. Today, New York has become so livable that families are the dominant culture. Bloomberg’s smoking ban and the boom in restaurant culture have led parents to take their kids out at night in such droves that few places are child-free. You can’t walk two blocks in Manhattan without hitting a Bugaboo Frog or a Subaru Forester with a roller shade. Creative Visions on Hudson Street is now Belly Dance Maternity. The Tunnel? Chelsea Mini-Storage. Childless adults in New York have become a persecuted minority. As Fran Lebowitz complained, “Of all the places in the world that should never have embraced this idea of safety and family values, it is New York. I mean, they have the whole rest of the country.”

Amen to that! Sohn goes on to talk about the smokefree bars and $100-per-night nannies that have contributed to the growing trend of parents taking their kids here, there, and everywhere in the Big Apple -- and ends on a nice note on the pleasures of leaving the sprogs at home.
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New "chick-lit" novel tackles the childfree issue

I haven't read Emily Giffin's new novel Baby Proof, so I can't attest to its merits, but the description certainly has me intrigued:
Giffin's third novel, Baby Proof (St. Martin's Press; June 13, 2006), is being touted as one of the biggest releases of the summer. It tells the story of Claudia Parr, a thirty-five-year-old book editor whose marriage to Ben seems ideal in almost every respect, particularly in their shared desire for a childfree life together. Theirs is a relationship focused on fun, freedom and possibility, rather than parenthood and the life-changing responsibilities that come with it.

All's well until Ben suddenly changes his mind and decides that he does want kids after all. This fundamental shift forces Claudia to reassess what is truly important to her and determine what she is willing to sacrifice in order to preserve the life she wants. It is a witty, heartfelt story of what happens to the perfect couple when they unexpectedly find themselves at odds over the baby issue, and explores whether there is such a thing as a deal-breaker when it comes to true love.
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True or False?

This from Dr. Joyce Brothers' column. Is the following true or false?
Couples who've made the decision not to have children rarely last, and when they do, the relationship is rarely happy.

Answer:
FALSE. Studies indicate that many childless couples are, in some senses, unusually happy and in enduring relationships, often because such couples tend to have common interests as well as economic advantages.
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And if you're thinking that having kids is on the rise (how can you not when all your friends seem to be popping them out with wild abandon?), then check this out:

You go to school, get a job, marry and then spend the best years of your adult life raising a family.

If so, you are part of a declining trend.

What was a typical lifestyle in the United States — when "Leave it to Beaver" was a prime-time hit — is becoming less common, and less rewarding, according to the annual report of The National Marriage Project, located at Rutgers University.

"Child rearing is no longer the defining experience of adult life," according to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the project and co-author with David Popenoe of the annual report on "The Social Health of Marriage in America."
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Read the whole report in all its vindicating glory here.

In other news, this was a neat essay on living in a childfree building:
A childless existence is common and expected of the gays, especially gay men. For all our talk about assimilation, this is still the one quality that separates us from almost every other aspect of humanity. Instead of children, we enjoy the extra spending money and decorate the house with expensive photography, take more trips to Belize and get dogs. It's a fact that makes me feel uncomfortably separate from the world. That's why I like living in our building. Because at least in our building, we're all people who haven't found the space in our lives (quite literally) for a child.
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Lastly, but not leastly, the folks over at Dual Income No Kids just emailed me the results from their last two surveys:

May Question: When in life did you realize you wanted to be ChildFree?
Number of responses: 572

Early on in my childhood. 31.9%
In my teens 18.1%
In my 20's (College or out of High School) 20.8%
As a swinging single 1.4%
After I met someone who felt like I did 2.8%
After I got married 25%

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June Question: How would you prefer people describe your "relationship" in conversation?
Number of responses: 414

ChildFree 14.3%
Dual Income No Kids 28.6%
ChildFree by Choice 21.4%
Double Income No Kids 0%
Married No Kids 14.3%
The couple who isn't having kids... 14.3%
Other 7.1%

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Go for broke. Have a kid.

This excerpt from the upcoming book "The Two-Income Trap" holds nothing back in discussing the financial perils of having children:

Our research eventually unearthed one stunning fact. The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.

Consider a few facts. Our study showed that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts. A divorced woman raising a youngster is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than her single friend who never had children.

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A BNOB shoutout to Katie Morgan, who responded brilliantly to Betsy Hart's meanspirited, anti-childfree column:

Ms. Hart is speaking from a biased view when she states that not having children is a "pretty good way to stunt the soul."

In past generations, people weren't really allowed to choose not to have children. In fact, even after birth control was invented, people still felt forced and pressured by society to have families.

I think it is wonderful that now people do have the choice.

Hopefully, fewer children born will be unwanted or resented because of our changing views.

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