Children. Everybody loves them, everyone seems to want at least one of their own. Or do they? Much less discussed is a subset of the human population who chooses to not have children of their own, ever. Those without children are often referred to as “childless”, but that term is best used for those who want children but for some reason or another were not successful in conceiving. For those who consciously choose to not have children, the proper term is “childfree”. As it just so happens, I am childfree: I don’t have kids, and I like it that way.
What’s that, you say? How could I not want to have kids of my own? There must be something seriously wrong with me, I must have been dropped on my head? I must be lazy and not want the responsibility? Say or think what you will, but I have an exhaustive list on exactly why I personally do not want kids. You may want to grab a cup of tea or bowl of ice cream, and maybe put on some background music: this will be a LONG read. Let’s get started, shall we?
- I enjoy my freedom/autonomy:
- This is the first and foremost reason. I love living on my own terms: doing when I want, how I want, when I want, with who I want. In my estimation, when you have kids, you lose that freedom: as a parent, your life now revolves around the child, it’s no longer YOUR life. You can no longer walk around your house nude eating cold pizza if you want: your life is now a watered down, PG-rated shell of what it used to be. You can no longer indulge in your hobbies and interests to the extent you once were able to. Any major dreams or ambitions you may have will likely have to be put on the back burner. More likely than not, you would likely have to grind away your time in two or more jobs just to keep afloat to support your family, effectively making you a slave for the next 18+ years with hardly any time to yourself. Although there are some exceptions, your sense of self-identitity will likely erode, becoming little more than a subservient drone in the name of the kids. You are nothing more than “mom” or “dad”. For me personally, this is far from a lifestyle conducive to happiness. No thanks.
2. I value my peace and quiet:
Let’s face it: kids are usually noisy as fuck, lacking empathy, consideration, or forethought: if your door is unlocked, they will open it, regardless of what you may be doing on the other side. If the door is locked, they will knock and bang on the door until you let them in, yelling all the while. Kids get into things: you’d better not have anything glass or fragile within reach, otherwise that shit’s gonna get smashed faster than a porn star in a gangbang. That’s just when they’re small and young. Don’t get me started on the teens: blasting music, moody/snarky behavior, and eating you out of house and home are the tip of the iceberg. I treasure my peace and quiet as well as my alone time: enduring all this for 18-25+ years would be extremely stressful and draining for me. I could very well end up like Frank from “F is for Family”, all angry and bitter.
3. Overpopulation:
As you may well know, the human population is well over 7 billion, rapidly approaching 8 billion. Depending on the area, the more people you have, the more thinly resources are spread, the lower the quality of life becomes per person in most cases. It has been well studied that more densely populated areas like large cities tend to have higher levels of crime, poverty, corruption, and political mismanagement. John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiments conducted on mice and rats are a microcosm of what seems to be happening to us now. Just look at China, India, and many large metropolitan areas in the United States. On top of this, consider the impact we’re having on the other species we share this planet with: the actions of us humans throughout history have been the single greatest cause of mass extinctions since the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous Period. Knowing all this, why would I want to bring another life into what could be an increasingly shitty situation? Things are getting increasingly tough for the people already here, and in my estimation, things will get worse before they get better, but that’s an entirely different topic, coming soon.
4. No desire to complicate my life:
As successful entrepreneur and YouTube personality Rich Cooper says, “men are masters of complicating their lives and then trying to justify why they do it”. From observing and listening to the situations of people with kids, I know this to be true. Having kids adds additional levels of complexity to one’s life: variables, stressors, and events beyond one’s control are increased exponentially, some of which are downright deleterious to one’s sanity and well-being and/or that of one’s children. I’m talking unexpected expenses, injuries, illnesses, bullying, etc. I’m a simple man and I live a simple, relatively low-stress life. I like that: it works for me. Why would I want to mess that up by having kids? I’d rather learn from others’ experiences, which enables me to make the decision to avoid that situation altogether.
5. Mental Illness in my family:
Within my immediate and extended family, there have been cases of schizophrenia and depression. I have struggled with depression myself, or so I believed: in my case, it may have been because I grew up surrounded by assholes, who knows? In any case, there is a chance I could pass that on to my child. I’ve seen the results of this: the child growing up to struggle with becoming a functional adult: living with the parent(s) well into their 20s and even 30s. In the case of schizophrenia, the voices could very well compel the person to become a danger to self and others, and I’ve heard about at least one close call where the sick individual had to be institutionalized to avoid harm to others. This is a sad situation where not only parents/siblings are potentially at risk, but the sick person’s quality of life suffers. Knowing there’s a chance this could happen in my case should I have a child scares the hell out of me. It’s not a chance I am willing to take.
6. I associate having kids with struggle, diffculty, and chaos:
Now, this perspective likely is the result in my not having enough good examples in my life growing up. This is not to say, however, that my mom didn’t do her best to raise me and my brothers, because she did a damn good job raising us despite the circumstances. I do remember those circumstances though, even though I must have been no older than 9-10 at the time: I remember us having to go through at least two homeless shelters within one year. I remember standing beside her in the welfare line at least once. Even at that young age, I really felt for my mom struggling as she had. I was also aware that she had me when she was a 21 year old college student and had to drop out to raise me. Logically, I know it wasn’t my fault my mom didn’t finish college and I tell myself as much, but sometimes another part of me feels that if I had never been born, she would have gotten further in her life and career at a faster rate. Fortunately, however, my logical side helps dispel my negative feelings and I feel grateful for being here.
I know I just dropped some heavy stuff there, so here’s a different scenario I observed that’s less emotionally charged but will gross you out: As a young child, we would often be taken to a relative’s house to play with their kids. For the most part, I did have fun, but I also observed some things: the household we visited had somewhere between 5-7 kids, and so the place was always a mess; there were food stains in the kitchens; there were lots of cockroaches and flies everywhere; the other kids were sometimes loud, unruly, and badly behaved; yelling and constant bickering was normal; and most memorable, the toilet more often than not was unflushed with several brown floaters greeting me whenever I lifted the toilet seat to pee, and oftentimes the lid was already raised. Now take a few moments to picture what I described, you’re welcome. I remember thinking, “so this must be what it’s like to have lots of kids”. So yeah, I was very much put off from wanting kids of my own before I even hit my teenage years.
7. Risk of dealing with the family court system:
In the event a falling out occurs with the child’s mother (a very high occurence these days in Americn culture), there is a good chance the situation could become acrimonious and I’d be subjected to the family court system, which has proven time and time again to be hostile toward men in most cases. The system would automatically pin me as a deadbeat villain because of my gender and I’d likely have to pay child support. Now I’m not opposed to the idea of fathers financially providing for their children (news flash, they should!), but oftentimes the courts force the fathers to pay much more than is necessary to provide for the child’s needs, and there is currently no way to ensure that money is actually used to tend to the children’s needs. On top of that, if aren’t a particularly high earner, the payments taken out of your check can have a negative impact on your quality of life, forcing you to slave away at additional jobs just to stay afloat. And if you fall behind on your payments, they can throw your ass in jail, which goes on your record, which negatively impacts your ability to earn money to support yourself and your children.
On top of that, you’d be denied access to your children, or only get granted visitation rights a couple times a month. This leaves the children to be raised in an unbalanced single mother home, and the outcomes of such households are not very good in a statistical sense.
The high profile case of basketball player PJ Washington having to supposedly pay IG model Brittany Renner 200K a month in child support is an extreme case, but a cautionary tale nonetheless. A case that hits closer to home for me is the case of one of my best friends: long story short, he got the wrong woman pregnant, she got knocked up with twins, they didn’t get along and she kicked him out, then wanted him to come back. When he refused to return to that toxic situation, she got vindictive, sued him for child support, and he ended up having to pay over $800 a month (not including court and state fees, totaling 55% of his paycheck) whilst being alienated from seeing his kids. When he was allowed to see them a couple years later it was because the kids were getting out of control and acting out in school because they missed their dad. All the while, he was forced to work 4 jobs simultaneously to make sure he was able to meet those payments and to survive. Through our conversations, I learned there were times where he felt like a shell of the man he was, that he wasn’t able to raise and teach his sons like he’d hoped, and his mind was in a really dark place at least once. He’s relatively okay now, but he is still out there grinding like crazy to support his first two kids as well as his newest child with his current partner. I really feel for his situation and it further cemented my stance for not having kids of my own.
8. No guarantee of positive outcome:
No matter how well you try to raise your child, there is no guarantee he/she will grow up to become a functional, decent person: a daughter can still grow up to become a neurotic, entitled shrew who thinks nothing of finessing decent suitors out of their time and money while gravitating toward drug dealers, scammers and gangbangers; a son could become obnoxious, belligerent, fall in with the wrong crowd or even commit unthinkable acts of cruelty. Sadly, in the black community, many of our youths seem inexorably drawn to the culture of the streets, gangs, and prisons and it happens with frightening regularity. It is often said that children will often become influenced more by their peers in schools and the streets than by their parents. There’s also the chance they could get bullied and go through what I endured, possibly succumbing to the torment which in this day and age extends beyond the schools into social media. Or they could become the bullies themselves, which would be a completely different dilemma. I don’t think I need to speak more on the possible outcome of mental illness since I talked about that above. What if they are disabled and are unable to have an optimal quality of life? There are so many things to worry about I’d become a paranoid worrywart, and that wouldn’t be good for raising kids either.
9. The world is getting worse by the year:
American culture has been rather crappy over the years, and it only seems to be getting worse: rude, entitled people with no respect or consideration for others who also happen to be rather vain, solipsistic, and superficial with little to no regard for character or integrity; intersexual dynamics between men and women are increasingly skewed and contentious; increasing sentiments of intolerance, cancel culture, and anti-intellectualism; increases in violent crime rate; and a sharp increase in inflation rates which will lead to higher prices and cost of living, leading to more struggle, crime, while decreasing the quality of life for the majority of us. Do I really want to bring someone into such a world? At this point, I think you already know the answer.
10. Too many horror stories of misery/drama:
Over the years, I have heard many horror stories of people having kids (often with the wrong partners): men deal with unfair family laws, vindictive mothers looking to drain the fathers for everything they can whilst alienating the kids away from him and influencing the kids to hate the fathers (the ones who actually want to take responsibility for his kids), and paternity fraud, to name a few. The women have their struggles as well: getting abandoned by irresponsible deadbeat fathers; having to drop out of school, college, etc. to care for the kids, and barely having time for life outside of their kids. They often end up tired, stressed and bitter. I have heard accounts of relationships souring when kids are brought into the picture: sex between the couple decreases, hormones causes moody behavior and flaring tempers, which can cause relationships to rapidly devolve into constant arguments, bickering, and other unhealthy behaviors. I’ve seen enough of these things to know in my heart of hearts that I wanted to avoid that fate like the plague. I’ve always been a highly cautious person who tends to make logical decisions by weighing the pros/rewards versus the risks/cons. For me, the cons of having kids far outweigh the pros. For anyone living their life strategically and logically, making any decision that is high risk, low reward would be foolhardy.
11. Lack of interest:
simply put, I lack interest in children and want little to nothing to do with them. It would be comparable to a lion’s interest in eating hay. This doesn’t mean I am unkind to children I encounter (i.e. visits with family members): I get along just fine with well behaved children and have been told that I am good with them, but as soon as the interaction is over, I’m going about my life, which other than the exception mentioned above, has no place for kids. In my estimation, they are of no benefit to me, only potential risk, annoyance, and liability. I don’t go out of my way to deal with them in any capacity. Kids just ain’t my jam. Enough said.
12. The “Legacy” fallacy:
“But Koraxx, don’t you wanna leave little Koraxxes behind? Don’t you wanna leave a legacy??” This is where I have to call bullshit: I never believed for an instant that one leaves a legacy merely by having children. Just about anyone can do that, and it’s not an achievement in the slightest. Best case scenario, a child will grow up to be an average Joe or Jane who never puts a dent in the universe. Worst case scenario, the child grows into an insufferable asshole who makes the world in their vicinity a living hell. This may sound unpleasant or even mean, but that’s the truth. I hate to be the bearer of bitter truths, but the chance of a child growing up into the next Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, or Barack Obama is less than 0.00001 percent.
If one truly wants to leave a legacy of some sort, I highly recommend to anyone out there to create something of value that will leave an impression or positive impact on the world for years, possibly even future generations. It can be a book that inspires creativity, imagination, and changes lives. It can be a new technology or an improvement to an existing technology that makes people’s lives a little easier. Perhaps a YouTube video or a blog that helps enhance the lives of others, inspiring them to become better people. The possibilities are out there. It may sound challenging, but if one is successful, it can be equally fulfilling and far more beneficial to the world at large.
13. Don’t want to deal with other people’s children:
Part of the parent territory will inevitably be having to deal with other kids and their parents. Perhaps for the most part, the other children will be tolerable and be of little to no problem. That’s thinking optimistically, of course. Realistically, however, you are likely to eventually encounter one or more poorly behaved little shits who will be strongly offended by your child’s existence and will make your child’s life hell because of it. This could potentially escalate to the point where you as a parent may have to step in and confront the bully’s parents, who will likely demonstrate that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and now you’re in a bad situation dealing with a shitty parent who refuses to take accountability for their failures as a parent. This not only applies to your child’s school but also summer camp and any other social activity involving multiple children. Kids can be very cruel to each other, spanning all ages from preschool well into high school. If I had a hat, I’d take it off to the parents willing to march themselves (and their kids) into this slaughterhouse. No thanks, I’m good.
14. (Even if I wanted them) Not properly equipped for the task:
Most people are woefully unaware of how expensive childcare is: in the United States, it costs a minimum of $250,000 per child to raise them from birth to college age. And with inflation coupled with the extended times kids are staying home with parents (sometimes well into their 20s and even 30s), that cost is estimated to rise even higher.
Okay, suppose I actually did want kids: First and foremost, I would only feel comfortable doing so if I made more than enough income to fully fund the child’s care while still having the time and resources to live comfortably and still enjoy the other things I enjoy in life while raising my offspring. I would not be content with raising just another ordinary child: I’d do everything in my power to enable them to become exceptional. I’d have them learning some kind of music instrument as early as five years old. I’d enroll them in martial arts classes to help them learn discipline, confidence, and the ability to physically defend themselves if it ever came to that. I would expose them to arts, technology, and sciences to help them gain knowledge, appreciation and admiration for the natural and technological worlds. I would incorporate physical fitness into their lives as early as possible as well as build their mind. And I sure as hell would not want my kid going to public school: it’s more or less a cesspool, especially inner city schools. I would also choose to live in a good neighborhood as far from the riffraff as possible. Additionally, I would have had to mastered the art and science of entrepreneurship and working for oneself so that I can impart that knowledge to my kid so that they would already possess a powerful skillset that could benefit the their entire lives without necessarily having to go to college to become a corporate drone.
Yes, if I wanted kids, I would be far from ready to make this happen: I am too poorly equipped financially or mentally for that level of challenge. And as a firm believer of chaos theory and Murphy’s Law, I would also have to be prepared for the strong possibility that something could go wrong somewhere along the way. No, I would rather not take that chance and enjoy my time on this world to the fullest extent possible. The world will be just fine if I decide to be childfree.
So there you have it: the FULL story behind my decision to not have children. Some may say that my decision is selfish, and perhaps it is. But ask yourselves: is it more selfish to decide to not have kids or to have kids for selfish reasons? I’ve heard all kinds of reasons including but not limited to: to have someone to love you unconditionally; to have someone to take care of you when you grow old; to get money from the government via welfare, etc, etc.
Not only is it unfair to bring another life in the world to serve one’s selfish desires, there’s no guarantee one’s children will actually fulfill their purpose to you: for all you know, your kids could grow to hate you for one reason or another and eventually throw your selfish ass in an old folks home when you get old and forget you ever existed. Life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.
Are you childfree? If so, what are your reasons? Are you still firm on having kids of your own, or did you start to think differently after having read this? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading!
Kind Regards,
~Koraxx
Mind of Koraxx 