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"  I like a house party as much as the next guy. But this one? Not so much. The dress code appears to be bibs and blankets. People are drinking warm milk, which they can barely keep down. And it&amp;#039;s hard to get a conversation going. I\u00A0tried chatting to the host just now \u2014 let&amp;#039;s call him Leo \u2014 but he barely said a word. Mostly he just held my finger.\u00A0 Leo turned one today. Hence the party \u2014 a swarm of mums and babies giving it the full coochie-coo. It&amp;#039;s not my usual Saturday afternoon, but his parents are friends and we haven&amp;#039;t seen them in ages. We used to play tennis together and drink Scotch in this very apartment. But then Leo moved in, cancelled tennis and now our single malt tasting room is literally crawling with his closest friends. They&amp;#039;ve filled the place with strollers, bottles and Fisher-Price whatevers. And the music these kids are into, it&amp;#039;s just the same song on repeat. I get it \u2014 the wheels on the bus are going round. They&amp;#039;re wheels. Being childless, it&amp;#039;s hard not to feel like an interloper at these things. You don&amp;#039;t show up at a BYOB event without bringing your own baby, and yet here we are, my wife and I, looking a bit lost and wondering if it&amp;#039;s too soon to make an exit. We serve no purpose here, that&amp;#039;s the trouble. This is the realm of women with papooses and leaking breasts, grandmothers playing peekaboo, and dads who hover like the Secret Service, ready to catch or grab at a moment&amp;#039;s notice. Us childless friends from a former life get spun out, as though by centrifuge, to the fringes of the party, the farthest orbits of irrelevance. We bring nothing to the discussion of nannies and pre-school, and no one&amp;#039;s interested in the TV shows we&amp;#039;ve just binge-watched with all our glorious spare time. So we stand on the sidelines, observing the parents across a gulf, perplexed that such a distance should have opened up so quickly. When I\u00A0watch friends disappear into parenthood, I often feel marooned, as though they&amp;#039;ve pulled away in a boat and left me on shore. But parties like this remind me\u00A0that, in fact, I&amp;#039;m the one on the boat.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Want to hold him?&amp;quot; This always happens: a well-meaning parent tries to throw us a line before it&amp;#039;s too late. In this case, it&amp;#039;s Leo&amp;#039;s uncle, someone I&amp;#039;ve met a few times but don&amp;#039;t know that well. He hands me his baby boy, we&amp;#039;ll call him Jackson, who starts pawing my face. It&amp;#039;s a matter of time, now. &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you and Mrs B make a\u00A0baby?&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Best thing I ever did.&amp;quot; And there it is. The casual approach. Rather than tiptoe up to the question as if it might go off at any minute, just toss it out there like it&amp;#039;s nothing. Did you see the game last night? Ever thought of having a\u00A0child? I could pause at this point, look at my shoes and concoct some awful story about &amp;quot;the third miscarriage&amp;quot;. But why make it a production? Much better to just whip out my phone, show him pictures of the dogs and say, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve already got our hands full with these two.&amp;quot; Keep it breezy. He&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;Aww cute, is that a Boston terrier?&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;Her name&amp;#039;s Onion,&amp;quot; and he&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;Why Onion?&amp;quot; and the whole topic is safely averted.\u00A0 But this guy won&amp;#039;t let go. He&amp;#039;s on this question like Onion on a chew toy. &amp;quot;No, I mean human babies,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Like\u00A0Jackson.&amp;quot;\u00A0 &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just trying to keep my pre-baby figure,&amp;quot; I tell him.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Seriously though, you must have a\u00A0reason? Is it medical? I mean, you could always adopt...&amp;quot;\u00A0 It&amp;#039;s not that he means to be rude. He just doesn&amp;#039;t realise \u2014 and neither did the cab driver, the insurance broker, the FedEx guy or any of the others \u2014 that this question has tendrils in every corner of a\u00A0man&amp;#039;s life. He&amp;#039;s putting me on the analyst&amp;#039;s couch next to a box of Kleenex. This is the thread that if you yank it, the whole coat unravels and leaves me standing there naked for all to see. Which is not a good look. Especially at a baby&amp;#039;s birthday party. Non-parents are pariahs. The stereotypes aren&amp;#039;t kind. Women are careerist and cold and traitors to their nature. Men are feckless and immature and traitors to their nature. Last year, Meghan Daum edited a collection of essays on the topic, titled Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed, which more or less covers it. Though one might add &amp;quot;Greedy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Incapable of Nurture&amp;quot;. Also &amp;quot;Mildly Sociopathic&amp;quot;, because how else would you describe someone who hates children? (For the record, I don&amp;#039;t hate children. Kittens and bunny rabbits can go fuck themselves, but children I&amp;#039;ve always liked. Except the ones on planes.)\u00A0 I never thought I&amp;#039;d be this guy, the weird guy at the party without kids. But then, I\u00A0never thought I&amp;#039;d be the other guy, either. I just didn&amp;#039;t think, which explains a lot. I suspect that for many men, fatherhood is a distant train on the horizon that eventually pulls into the platform, either by accident or design. But it never loomed for me. Growing up, I didn&amp;#039;t see myself as a father, or as anything else for that matter \u2014 I\u00A0had no vision of the kind of adult I\u00A0might become. All I knew was that I\u00A0didn&amp;#039;t want to be like the adults I\u00A0saw every day: my parents. Not because they&amp;#039;re bad people \u2014 they&amp;#039;re not \u2014 but because they were unhappy. We all were. They&amp;#039;d had an arranged marriage. It\u00A0was an extraordinary gamble. Within the space of 14 days, my father met my mother, married her and then, to compound the upheaval, they moved from West Bengal to south London in the Seventies, where strikes were crippling the country and the National Front was on the rise. They&amp;#039;d each lived through hardship before, especially my mother \u2014 who&amp;#039;d had to break pencils in half to share with her siblings for school, the kind of shoeless poverty of the Third World. But there were no friends or family around this time, they were in it alone, a couple of immigrants with ripe accents in a strange country that didn&amp;#039;t always want them. And to cap it all, they didn&amp;#039;t get along.\u00A0 In the hierarchy of reasons why I&amp;#039;ve decided to remain childless, my childhood is always up there. I wasn&amp;#039;t abused or neglected; I was privileged. My parents sublimated their strife into sacrifice and gave me a blue ribbon education, complete with clarinet lessons. But it was a joyless experience. That may sound like the smallest of First World violins after everything my parents went through, but these are the memories I have, the wounded impressions of a boy, mythologised over time. In our home, children weren&amp;#039;t a delight but a battleground. And childhood wasn&amp;#039;t this pasture of innocence and discovery, but rather a grim staging ground for an even grimmer future to come. If there were a triptych, it would open with my father scowling in front of the television, followed by my mother seething in the kitchen, and then me in my room, dreaming of escape, each of us profoundly alone.\u00A0 It occurred to me, with a child&amp;#039;s logic, that if I had not been born, my parents might have divorced and led happier lives apart, so this was my fault, in a way. I spent 18 years marinating in their resentment of each other, and then mine of them, a sauce that only thickened with time. I&amp;#039;ve always seen my childhood and my childlessness as umbilically connected. But that&amp;#039;s not typical. For many, an unhappy childhood is as much a motive to have kids as a deterrent. Rather than avoid family life, I might easily have resolved to create the happy family I never had. Conversely, plenty of childless people come from perfectly happy homes. Everyone reaches this decision by their own path. No two snowflakes are alike.\u00A0 I learned this from hanging out on the Childless by Choice Project Facebook page. It&amp;#039;s a small group, with around 1,000 or so members, about four-fifths of whom are women, which is typical of the non-parent subculture. And they&amp;#039;re a\u00A0feisty lot, defiant and defensive, as though a stand is being taken, and parents and non-parents are somehow at odds, each sniping at the other: you&amp;#039;re selfish! No, you&amp;#039;re selfish! Popular posts often show children or parents in a negative light \u2014 a story about a delinquent mother, say, or a\u00A0video of\u00A0a\u00A0toddler throwing a tantrum in a restaurant (sample caption: &amp;quot;Your child should be in commercials\u2026 for Trojan&amp;quot;). Parents are called &amp;quot;breeders&amp;quot;, a term of contempt. And non-parents are described as &amp;quot;child-free&amp;quot; which they prefer to &amp;quot;childless&amp;quot;, since it denotes liberty rather than lack, while placing children in the same syntactic class as gluten, smoke and STDs. There are frequent complaints about being asked &amp;quot;the question&amp;quot;. And several posts simply gloat about the child-free lifestyle \u2014 the full night&amp;#039;s sleep, the impulsive travel and a home that hasn&amp;#039;t been entirely colonised by Dora the Explorer.\u00A0 &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s human nature to rationalise,&amp;quot; says Laura Scott, the page&amp;#039;s founder. A\u00A0life coach from Florida, she wrote a book in 2009 titled Two is Enough. &amp;quot;Parents go to the nth degree to rationalise their decision to have children, even though it can be very challenging. And child-free people do the same.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s true. Ever since I moved to the\u00A0Eastside of Los Angeles, I haven&amp;#039;t stopped slagging off the Westside (the side with all the douchebags). We naturally re-sell ourselves on our past decisions, and the bigger the decision, the harder the sell. But it has given this community, and so much of what&amp;#039;s written about childlessness, a\u00A0tone\u00A0of retort and counterargument. And\u00A0the empathic gap between parents and non-parents only seems to widen. Scott says her members are just reacting to the stigma of childlessness, which is a serious issue, especially for women. But the antipathy towards children is real. Scott, for instance, is a perfectly pleasant woman who genuinely doesn&amp;#039;t want to hold your baby. &amp;quot;Anyone under the age of 12,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I just don&amp;#039;t have an affinity for.&amp;quot; And more dyspeptic voices are easily found. &amp;quot;I call them small mammals,&amp;quot; says Paul, a scientist from Oxford, in his fifties. &amp;quot;They don&amp;#039;t give me or my wife any warm feelings. Parents make these nebulous statements about the deep positive stuff that children bring into your life, but that&amp;#039;s all bullshit \u2014 justification after the fact. Mind you, I&amp;#039;m highly educated, so I&amp;#039;m able to reflect on these things. I don&amp;#039;t like to talk to anyone until they&amp;#039;ve got a\u00A0college\u00A0degree!&amp;quot;\u00A0 I struggle with this, having been a\u00A0child once myself. I still am in many ways. I thought we all were. Ted Hughes described our inner child as &amp;quot;that little creature sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits&amp;quot;. I&amp;#039;ve always found those little creatures quite charming. They&amp;#039;re silly and curious, they like a giggle \u2014 these are fine qualities at any age. In fact, I&amp;#039;ll go out on a limb here, and I don&amp;#039;t care if I take heat for this: I believe children are the future. We should teach them well and let them lead the way.\u00A0 And yet the likes of Paul and Laura are not as aberrant as they might sound. Birth rates are dropping throughout the developed world. The &amp;quot;little creature&amp;quot; is falling out of favour. And for the first time ever, there&amp;#039;s actually a sound moral argument to be made for not procreating: the planet needs a breather and going childless is as green as it gets. I could leave a stretch Hummer idling in my drive all day while I\u00A0burn tyres in my backyard, and I&amp;#039;d still do less damage than your average dad.\u00A0 But the eco-argument is seldom the real reason for going childless. At best, it&amp;#039;s a shield against the critics. My reasons, like everyone else&amp;#039;s, are personal. That&amp;#039;s not to say that broader trends haven&amp;#039;t been an influence \u2014 they have. Only it wasn&amp;#039;t environmentalism in my case,\u00A0it was self-actualisation. The psychologist Abraham Maslow explained human motivation via a pyramid \u2014 his famous &amp;quot;hierarchy of needs&amp;quot;. At the bottom are basics like food and water. Then as you move up the pyramid, through safety, relationships and social standing, you reach the apex \u2014 self-actualisation \u2014 the drive to fulfill our creative potential and be all that we can be. This is the narrative of our times. We may be the first generation for whom parenthood is an option and not an expectation. Rather than produce the next generation for tribe, faith or country \u2014 groupings that are losing their hold \u2014 our first loyalty is to ourselves, to pursue happiness and maximise our lives. The opportunities are unprecedented. We live longer than ever; the world&amp;#039;s knowledge is at our fingertips. This is the age of the life hack, the bucket list and &amp;quot;having it all&amp;quot;, that greedy phrase. So the question becomes, will a child enhance that ride, or derail it? This may not be as indulgent as it sounds. If I haven&amp;#039;t found happiness myself, how can I pass it on to a child? As the in-flight safety demonstration says: &amp;quot;Make sure that your mask is properly fitted before helping someone else.&amp;quot; We\u00A0know that the best parents are happy parents; that happiness, like misery, is a\u00A0communicable condition. I learned this much as a child.\u00A0 And there&amp;#039;s something irresistible about seeing life as full of potential. It&amp;#039;s the essence of youth. Non-parents bristle at the Peter Pan stereotype, but I want to be young, more so now than ever. The graph of happiness over a lifetime is a U-curve and the forties are in the middle, the sag of the sofa \u2014 this is the part where you realise your life hasn&amp;#039;t gone according to plan, or that it has, and it still hasn&amp;#039;t fixed what ails you. That&amp;#039;s where I live \u2014 the American Beauty years, a river in Egypt. I listen to house music on the treadmill.\u00A0I know all the words to &amp;quot;Hotline Bling&amp;quot;. I\u00A0take comfort in the delusion that my clay hasn&amp;#039;t set yet, and that my possibilities in this life are many. Parents are beholden and encumbered. All children are anchor babies in a\u00A0certain sense. But I&amp;#039;m free to wander as I\u00A0please, or so I like to think.\u00A0 Will Self once said that until you have children, you are essentially a fictional character. You can always write yourself a\u00A0plot twist, change your name, change your life. But children put an end to all that \u2014 they require parents to be pillars of consistency, so that they can be the ones who change. The life of possibilities is now theirs. I&amp;#039;ve never quite shaken off the sense that a child might be the death of hope for me. There&amp;#039;s a teenage terror of closing doors that were once open, whether we went through them or not. Children bring with them a mortal reminder; all being well, they&amp;#039;ll put you in the ground, those kids. And permanence terrifies me. I don&amp;#039;t even have a tattoo. I&amp;#039;m also not much of a pillar. Stability was never a strong suit. When I met my wife, more than a decade ago, I&amp;#039;d just moved to LA from London, and bounced from one chaotic start-up to the next. Hardly a candidate for fatherhood. But my wife didn&amp;#039;t mind. She&amp;#039;s never felt the urge to squeeze a cantaloupe through a\u00A0straw. And I, too, lack the drive to force my genes into the world. I don&amp;#039;t need that illusion of continuity. Sex is one thing, but babies? Why create a half-me, when I\u00A0can barely face the full me in the mirror each\u00A0morning?\u00A0 Besides, when we first discussed it, we had no room for a child, quite literally. We were practically living in a studio \u2014 not so much at the top of Maslow&amp;#039;s pyramid as dragging the boulders into place for the foundation. Why plan an heir when all they&amp;#039;d inherit was air? We&amp;#039;d both made a late start in a dicey line of work \u2014 she writes scripts, I write articles. And we were free agents, living that wobbly life of feast, then famine, then more famine, then OK, that&amp;#039;s enough famine, I&amp;#039;m not kidding, it&amp;#039;s getting cold in here. Freelancing has its moments, especially in LA where the ability to say &amp;quot;fuck it&amp;quot; and drive to the beach is really quite something. But instability is hard. Life takes on a lurching rhythm. To bring a child into our home would be like chucking a baby onto a\u00A0passing\u00A0rollercoaster.\u00A0 We&amp;#039;re a steadier ship today, no doubt. And adoption hasn&amp;#039;t been entirely ruled out; it&amp;#039;s got &amp;quot;option&amp;quot; in the name, after all. But we view it the way a wingsuit daredevil judges the weather before leaping off a\u00A0mountain \u2014 conditions need to be perfect. Can we afford nannies and sitters and private school and soccer camp? And will we have time to play catch and watch endless reruns of Barney &amp;amp;amp; Friends, because it&amp;#039;s just not right to let the help raise your children... And every time, we end up in full agreement that one of us will have to be the stay-at-home parent. At which point, it goes quiet, and I usually receive an email that can&amp;#039;t wait. &amp;quot;Sorry, dear, can we do this later? Only Banana Republic is offering 40 per cent off \u2026&amp;quot; Then comes the harder question: Could I give a child a happy life? Childlessness is often framed as selfishness, but there&amp;#039;s no arguing with the Philip Larkin poem: &amp;quot;They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.&amp;quot; It happened to me, to some extent, and it&amp;#039;s not a tradition I want to continue. As I get older, I find it easier to come to terms with the harm I&amp;#039;ve suffered, rather than the harm I&amp;#039;ve inflicted. Increasingly, the Hippocratic oath seems the wisest course \u2014 first do no harm. I think I&amp;#039;d make a decent uncle, as uncles get to go home afterwards. But fatherhood is 24/7, good days and bad. And a child doesn&amp;#039;t need my bad days. A\u00A0child needs a pillar with a sunny disposition. I know what effect unhappy parents can have, and I&amp;#039;ll admit I&amp;#039;m no Labrador pup most mornings, either. I&amp;#039;ve done my time on a therapist&amp;#039;s couch. I&amp;#039;ve heard him say, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s your mother talking.&amp;quot; So I\u00A0worry that my baggage will go once more around the carousel, and that one day, my child might be on a similar couch talking about me.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Oh, don&amp;#039;t worry, we all fuck them up!&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s what other dads tell me. They&amp;#039;re so cavalier and I like that about them. A\u00A0spot of psychological damage is par for the course, and anyway, the age of therapy has made for better parenting. We know better now. One generation improves upon the next, like iPhones.\u00A0 Only I&amp;#039;m not so sure. As I reach my middle years \u2014 the age my parents were when I was a child \u2014 I find I share many of their design flaws, more so than improvements. I have my father&amp;#039;s gestures, his way of sitting and clearing his throat; I have my mother&amp;#039;s weak ankles, her anxiety. Either by nature or nurture, I&amp;#039;m less free of them than I once hoped. Would I really be a better parent, or do I flatter myself? There was a cover of Time\u00A0in 2013 with the headline: &amp;quot;The Child-free Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children&amp;quot;, and it featured a smug couple on a beach living the high life (I think they came from the Westside of Los Angeles). This is a common perception of the childless \u2014 as people who surveyed the options and chose self-gratification, a life without responsibilities. And it leaves me cold. I\u00A0made no such choice. And I\u00A0can&amp;#039;t imagine advocating for childlessness that way, I&amp;#039;m far too conflicted about it. In fact, I\u00A0struggle to understand people who aren&amp;#039;t. Some men get vasectomies in their early twenties, they&amp;#039;re so certain, and decades later, they claim to have no regrets. But my life isn&amp;#039;t like that, all planned out and regret-free. It tumbles along and I blunder through, making choices that can&amp;#039;t be unchosen, this is true, but childlessness wasn&amp;#039;t one of them. It was a consequence, a side effect, not a\u00A0goal. Though I try to deny it, life is a winnowing of options in the end as we become the product of our decisions, whether we meant it or not. And in this way, the reasons for not having children have accumulated through the years, like snow against a barn door. Leave it long enough and it just won&amp;#039;t open any more.\u00A0 Lately \u2014 this shows you how conflicted I am \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve been thinking that parenting might actually be the best path to self-actualisation. Surely, it builds our better natures to be depended on, to experience that epic bond? Parents learn to be responsible, playful, forgiving of spillage, less caught up with surfaces in general, given that most surfaces will be covered in ketchup eventually. Besides, I\u00A0like doing kid stuff. The childless life can feel a bit desiccated at times. Lego and potato-painting beats sipping Chardonnay and talking about real estate. Why lie on a beach like that Time magazine couple when you can build sandcastles and play Frisbee? (Not that grown adults should play Frisbee with each other. There are some things you need a child to get away\u00A0with.) We were driving home a while back \u2014 my wife, the dogs and I \u2014 when the traffic narrowed to one lane, slowing to a crawl. And from every direction children flooded into the street, all dressed in Halloween costumes. For five long minutes they streamed between the cars with their parents, all these adorable little Batmen and Tinkerbells. It was some sort of community get-together with jelly and ice cream, and kids running around with lightsabers. And it was such a life-affirming scene, I\u00A0felt the sadness in my chest. The path not taken has seldom looked so picturesque.\u00A0 These poignant moments, they happen all the time. Families are inescapable \u2014 in malls, on billboards, on television. From my desk at home, I hear a primary school at the bottom of the hill, the sound of recess, yelping and chasing and playing. And it puts me on that boat again, drifting away from shore, feeling left behind. When I expressed this to Paul, the Oxford scientist, he scoffed. &amp;quot;I find it sad,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Why do people have to join the herd? Why can&amp;#039;t they create their own individual identity as I&amp;#039;ve always done?&amp;quot; Granted, Paul might not be the best person to talk to if you&amp;#039;re feeling vulnerable. But it&amp;#039;s a\u00A0fair point. I scorned the herd as a younger man, but now I wonder. Matters of identity and purpose aren&amp;#039;t so straightforward for a childless freelancer in Los Angeles, the\u00A0international capital of the untethered. It&amp;#039;s always a nice day for an existential crisis out here, and us childless have all that extra time in which to ponder.\u00A0 So as we left the Halloween pastoral, the usual questions churned. Who am I\u00A0doing this for? Why do I exist? What use is all my self-actualisation, my insight and experience, if I\u00A0can&amp;#039;t dump it all onto a\u00A0small child?\u00A0 We went home that night and hugged our dogs extra tight. We didn&amp;#039;t dress them up as zombies, but maybe next year. Maybe that&amp;#039;s what happens to people like us. The childless often call other things &amp;quot;babies&amp;quot; and there&amp;#039;s no question, those dogs, Onion and Cujo, are our furry surrogates \u2014 our furrogates. We all, even Paul, need small creatures to cuddle, a bit of\u00A0coochie-coo in our lives. And dogs won&amp;#039;t end up on a therapist&amp;#039;s couch (they know they&amp;#039;re not meant to be on the couch anyway.) Some of them can even play Frisbee. It&amp;#039;s also true that they won&amp;#039;t visit us\u00A0as\u00A0we crumble away in a rest home. They won&amp;#039;t say &amp;quot;daddy&amp;quot; or graduate or give us grandchildren. But it&amp;#039;s best not to dwell\u00A0on\u00A0such things. This is our life and we must embrace it. Be grateful, do not hanker \u2014 that&amp;#039;s what the wise ones say. While I&amp;#039;ll miss out on the joys of Halloween, I\u00A0can at\u00A0least try to self-actualise and, through my work, create &amp;quot;book babies&amp;quot;, an idea I&amp;#039;ve\u00A0always liked. After all, childlessness offers what\u00A0books require: acres of time and silence. Only it&amp;#039;s never quite silent for me. There&amp;#039;s always the sound of recess. \u00A0 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/news/a9969/fatherhood-not-for-me/>