ADAM writes:

While waiting for my flight at an airport yesterday, I browsed through some magazines at a shop in the terminal. The cover of the current issue of Time magazine said “The Childfree Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children.” The cover photo showed an apparently carefree couple sunning themselves on the beach. I thumbed through the article and the one thing I noticed was that all the highlighted quotes were from women who were affirming the rightness of their not having children, as if they felt the constant need to justify their decision to others and to convince others to follow their lead. It seems that men had no say in the matter and that their views about family and children were not even worth considering. I did not have time to read the whole thing (and I wasn’t inclined to pay money for this nihilistic garbage), but in the parts that I skimmed I did not see any discussion of possible negative consequences to not having children, such as acute loneliness in old age, and the lack of a sense of purpose when one’s life’s work is devoted to seeking time off for pleasure, relaxation, entertainment, travel, and leisure instead (as opposed to the innate sense of purpose that comes from the necessity of providing for one’s family). Nor were any negative consequences for the society as a whole discussed.

I guess none of this is really news to readers of your site, but it was still striking to me to see the whole anti-human, nihilistic, hedonistic, and suicidal mentality of feminism laid out so succinctly and celebrated so uncritically in a single magazine article.

Laura writes:

This kind of article — and there are slews of them, with many variations on the general theme — is an inevitable result of female careerism, which is in itself a result of a deeper spiritual catastrophe and the arid sensibility of the modern automaton. It’s ironic because you would think once women swelled the ranks of professional journalists, they would promote femininity and family. But they don’t. They seek to destroy them. It is metaphysically and practically necessary that they seek to destroy them.

Becoming a journalist in a major publication is an awful lot of work, it’s gruelingly competitive, and so when women such as Lauren Sandler, the author of this piece, get to such a position they typically are in no mood to talk of the joys of family. They don’t have the time for anything but small families and don’t have the foggiest idea what it is to devote oneself to one’s home. It is no surprise that they glorify motherlessness, loneliness and the sterile careerist lifestyle. Women journalists and literary figures seek to destroy to justify their personal lives and they have immense power. Ordinary women follow them like lemmings. Of course, liberal male journalists are busy at destruction too, but their passion is not this personal realm and because women are often absorbed with their personal lives, there is the constant temptation to exploit them for journalistic profit by approaching it all in a novel and sensationalistic way. Childlessness! What a great story. Why didn’t people think of that before?

Sandler is the author of a book promoting one-child families. (What a great idea! You know, like they have in China.) Here is her photo, which is the image of a narcissist, gazing at her own reflection, mesmerized and in love. Is it any wonder she has only one child? She’s busy creating another narcissist and one is indeed enough.

Women will seek whatever acceptable form of community society offers them and right now it offers them an identity that revolves around career, the “total work” society that Josef Pieper described. So you see women who are passionately anti-maternal. I once overheard a woman in her thirties explaining to a man she had just met in a restaurant why she didn’t want children. She said the usual line, “I’ve never wanted children,” which may very well have been true, but then that’s normal in a world that never prepares women for motherhood or idealizes it (and besides wanting children is not at all necessary to having them.) Anyway, I sensed that she was really telling this man, “Look, I won’t be any trouble at all.” She was making the best of a way of life that was impossible to reverse.

Of course, not having children does have some benefits. But then getting drunk every night has benefits too. Spiritual suicide is often pleasurable, and the loneliness and emptiness that come in old age seem a long way off. So does hell.

— Comments —

Lauren Sandler writes:

I adore my daughter, and have a very happy home life to which I am quite devoted. I describe my life as such in my book. I don’t regard my path as one of spiritual suicide. Clearly you disagree. I wish you the best.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing. I’m sorry to be harsh, but you should consider changing your photo.

I’m sure you adore your daughter even though you don’t want more like her. The question is not ultimately one of happiness, but of using the gift of fertility which does not belong to ourselves alone.

By the way, you say you are happy. Have you considered that you may be causing great unhappiness to others by publicly promoting relative childlessness? I don’t know any single old person who wouldn’t like to have a few more siblings alive. Indeed, one of the worst things an old person can suffer is the death of a sibling.

I also know of no one in a nursing home who hates it when his children visit or do little errands. You are very innocent or willfully naive.

I won’t even bother to speak to you of demographic collapse. Though I haven’t read your book, I suspect your focus is too self-centered to encompass the economic and cultural consequences of demographic decline. I wish you the best too. I hope you realize that you are utterly mistaken.

Lisa writes:

I enjoy your site and check in regularly. Not that I always agree with you, but I appreciate the honesty and intelligence you bring to any subject you approach.

The Time magazine cover is sad. It’s curious that you should have this image on your page today because this very appeal to an empty consumerist, thoroughly self-absorbed sort of lifestyle is exactly what I was ruminating on yesterday.

I was prompted to do so after being on Facebook and having Ellen Degeneres pop up as a page to “like”; and with that came the info of how many of my Facebook connections have already done so. Not people I would have thought do. I don’t watch television and hardly keep up with popular culture at all, so I cannot understand and therefore cannot explain the lady’s appeal. (I also don’t understand George Takei’s immense appeal either.)

I say that even though my husband and I did not have children. We did not set out to be childless, which sounds so depressing as a goal in life, it was more the result of having to recover in adulthood from terrible family backgrounds and otherwise to face one crisis after another during our prime reproductive years.

Then again, I know plenty of people my age with children, and while they’re all glad they had them and I am glad for them, they are not happy folk. I’m also sorry to say I don’t think they’ve done such a great job as parents; the children are not particularly well brought-up and I can’t see them doing or being more than their parents in mid-life, if that. What with the deficiencies of the parents and the complete degradation of the culture, the kids are turning out as, well, self-absorbed brats.

Perhaps it is because people approach having families with the same kind of narcissism as we see on display in the Time magazine cover. Is it really an improvement over thinking everything revolves around you to conceive that everything reduces to your own little domestic sphere? I don’t see how we create and recreate civilization from either starting point, do you? And I don’t mean that as any sort of slight of the home and the family.

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going here except to say that what I perceive is that it’s not having or not having children that is the problem, it is rather the spiritual and moral emptiness of people whatever they do. With the idle automatons lying on the beach, we aren’t being shown people who don’t have children but who are committed nonetheless to something larger than themselves and who thereby leave legacies such as Lawrence Auster or Katherine Hepburn have.

 Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

I’ve never advocated reducing everything to one’s “own little domestic sphere” and I take that somewhat as a slight against what a domestic sphere is, which is nothing less than the place where life is nurtured and created and where people develop their interior lives and prepare themselves for everything beyond the home.

The fact that there are many bad parents does not make childbearing itself bad. The solution to foolish parents is not childlessness and demographic decline but better parents. Many children are spoiled precisely because they have no or few siblings. Small family life encourages selfishness. (I say that as the mother of only two.)

You write:

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going here except to say that what I perceive is that it’s not having or not having children that is the problem, it is rather the spiritual and moral emptiness of people whatever they do.

I acknowledged in my response to Adam the deeper spiritual problem, however not having children also causes spiritual and moral emptiness. When we have children we don’t just create other human beings, who are intrinsically good, but we re-create ourselves. Children are the fire that molds our characters, like the sculptor’s torch that shapes metal into something noble and uplifting. And many people decline to have children, or decline to have many children, out of a horror of suffering. (I’m not referring to you.) The point isn’t to make us happier, but to glorify God, make this sorry world a much better place and help us advance in virtue, wisdom and love. That doesn’t mean everyone should marry and have children. But all married people have the duty to have children and are betraying the common good when they are deliberately childless or limit their fertility. (I realize that many good people are led into this way of life.)

Renee writes:

Your post made me think of an incident from my college years, which I could not understand at the time. I took a writing class and one student wrote about his parents lives before he was born and how cool they seemed as young American students living in Europe. He lamented that they ever had children as they would have been better, and more interesting people, without them. It was not said in jest, but with pity.

What a horrible thought. I said as much in class. Several students were very eager to chime in that they felt things the same way as this student.

At the time I was bewildered, and had no response. I simply could not understand this attitude. Parenting now is seen, not as a duty, or something fulfulling in and of itself, but a hobby; a side project to what life is really about. Is it then any wonder that some children born into this world will see themselves as thier parent’s barrier to happiness?

Laura writes:

This is just mindless nihilism and mental midgetry. By nihilism, I mean a void which causes a human being to destroy, impulsively and without even understanding why. The ultimate expression of this is, I guess, wishing one didn’t even exist.

These remarks also, I believe, came from the unconscious realization by these students that they were completely unprepared for adulthood and parenthood themselves. They wanted to justify their own extended childhoods.

Lisa responds:

Thanks for your reply.

“I’ve never advocated reducing everything to one’s “own little domestic sphere” ….”

No, I didn’t say you did. I was talking about what I’ve seen. [Laura writes: Thank you for the clarification.]

Likewise, I hear people say having children changes you, just as you go on to do. But I don’t see much evidence in these times it does.

 Laura writes:

Do you know anyone with seven children who was not changed for the better?

Of course, you are right though. Parenthood does not always improve a person. As you say, what one believes is more important.

Lisa writes:

Do I know anyone with seven children whose life was not changed for the better?

As a matter of fact I did. My grandmother had as many children and subsequently had numerous health problems that caused her to live out her life (decades) as an invalid. A not very well-cared-for invalid, I would add. How many folks in the nursing home photo have children?

Laura writes:

Thank you for responding, but you misquoted me and the difference is important.

I said,

Do you know anyone with seven children who was not changed for the better?

And what I meant was, do you know anyone with seven children whose character was not changed for the better? People who have many children or even a couple often suffer more than they would have without children. But I have rarely met anyone with many children who did not seem to have benefited in character. I said “rarely,” but of course some people remain selfish and unpleasant even after many years of being parents to a large family.

As for the nursing home, one is much less likely to end up alone in a nursing home hallway if one has children to care for one at home or visit. That’s just a fact.

Mary writes:

Time, The Atlantic, et al don’t run pieces such as this one because they are meaningful and edifying – they run them because they are provocative, and in fact Ms. Sandler and her ilk have formed careers writing such pieces. But are these women qualified?

Highly successful, in-demand, attractive extroverts like Lauren Sandler have no pathway by which to measure the interior life and domestic aspirations of the average woman. They have no real-life contact with such women. Ms. Sandler’s elite career, which most likely followed attendance at a prestigious college, removes her from common experience (although she would probably beg to differ). On her website, Ms. Sandler tells us she is an only child and has chosen to have only one of her own. She says she feels she is carrying the torch for 60’s feminists: what they did for sex, she wants to do for family.

So someone who has no siblings is writing a piece in a major magazine about why siblings are optional; a woman who has one child of her own is telling us one is plenty. American families are the smallest they have ever been – contraception and abortion allow virtually complete control over family size – and yet we are supposed to be moved by this woman’s revelations. Sandler most likely has no idea of the damage she does: using a powerful medium she is influencing families to making decisions with irreversible and potentially devastating consequences – for families and for the country itself.

Laura writes:

Excellent points.

You write:

Time, The Atlantic, et. al. don’t run pieces such as this one because they are meaningful and edifying – they run them because they are provocative, and in fact Ms. Sandler and her ilk have formed careers writing such pieces. But are these women qualified?

I agree that they often strive to be provocative and to disturb, however in this case I think it would have been more provocative and disturbing to run a piece about the unhappiness and cultural decline causes by childlessness. I think they are pandering to their audience.

I noticed that Ms. Sandler has an image of the Marxist curmudgeon and home wrecker Betty Friedan on her site. Does anyone really want to be like Betty Friedan?

Alex writes:

When the ruling ideology states that the meaning of life is absolute freedom to pursue pleasure, children get in the way of realizing the meaning of life. Thus the logically inevitable consequence of adopting this ideology by a social group is the eventual extinction of that group through failure to reproduce.

The group this ideology, liberalism, targets is, of course, whites. Not surprisingly, all propaganda of breeding oneself out of existence targets whites. For example, the only non-white in this propaganda-by-celebrity-example piece (Eva Mendes is probably fully or mostly Spanish) is Oprah Winfrey – the idol of white women.

The demographic collapse Laura mentions is only among whites, as intended.

Laura writes:

Yes, it is racial extermination. When whites have lost moral legitimacy, they logically no longer have the imperative to perpetuate themselves. In fact, it’s wrong to perpetuate themselves.

Earl writes:

I find many couples with few or no children often making a cost-benefit analysis when considering or rationalizing the number of children they have. Of course one should be prepared for children- spiritually, mentally, and physically, and of course most of this preparation comes from your own upbringing, but to make a cost benefit analysis re: children is missing the point that children are not just another material investment like a car, or any other property for that matter.

It is telling that when Lauren Sandler chose to respond to two lengthy comments posing several topics of concern, she only took the time to address the one topic pertaining to happiness, and her own personal happiness at that. She doesn’t mention her child’s happiness, nor her husband’s (if she has permitted one) nor does she mention the reported unhappiness of women (as compared to men) under the modern careerist paradigm. Her short response was entirely centered around “my” and “I”.

It is fun to see these people respond. The last writer/artist you spotlighted (women in music) took much more time to respond, yet she still just couldn’t get it in the end. We truly are speaking a different language.

 Laura writes:

We are speaking a different language. That’s such an important point. Ultimately, we are addressing those who want to learn this language.

Lisa responds to Laura:

Yes, I’m sorry, I saw later I had misread your question, although I’m not sure it changes anything with respect to the situation I described. I just related a situation in which having seven children didn’t improve my grandmother’s quality of life at the end. And, more to the point of the discussion, I see children now being raised to be so selfish it won’t change anything with regard to their parents’ quality of life at the end either.

I’m not really disagreeing with you. It’s that I think a whole world’s gone missing … and you don’t create or recreate civilization by stringing together at work or soccer games a bunch of inward-looking one- or two- child households.

Laura writes:

These are people who are rejecting children too.

Bill R. writes:

I thought your reply to Adam was an excellent and scathing indictment of the philosophy Miss Sandler has apparently promoted in her Time piece. However, you did not owe her an apology for being harsh. If the harshness existed, it existed in the truth you articulated so well but which is independent of you. Untruth, on the other hand, is not independent of us. Every lie belongs to the liar. If anyone owes anyone an apology is it Miss Sandler for the damage she has done in propagating her lie to gullible and naïve women who look up to people like her and, unfortunately, take much guidance from them. Let me add, however, this mitigating circumstance in Miss Sandler’s favor: She doesn’t own all of her lie; an entire culture that was well on its way before she was even born has come to her aid in fashioning and polishing it.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

You are right about the apology. I don’t enjoy attacking someone, but it must be done. After all, she launched the hostilities. With homosexual “marriage,” millions have had their marriages redefined. And Ms. Sandler has basically told those who have more than one child that the sacrifices they make are not particularly valuable.

Teresa writes:

Lisa wrote: “With the idle automatons lying on the beach, we aren’t being shown people who don’t have children but who are committed nonetheless to something larger than themselves and who thereby leave legacies such as Lawrence Auster or Katherine Hepburn have.”

There are many of us who, for one reason or another, have not married and are yet living lives committed to something larger than ourselves. You won’t read about us in periodicals, see us on TV, find us on the internet, bump into us in casinos, spot us on cruises, or lolling on beaches. You will find us, though, quietly and without fanfare caring for our elderly parents or other family members until they pass away … often, at great material cost (both physical and financial).

You will, also, find us in nursing homes visiting those who have no one who visits them; many of those having children of their own who never visit.

We do this because we are committed and in love with someone and something larger than ourselves: Our Lord and His Church w/Her centuries’ old Teachings; and, not because we’re special.

By the way, Katherine Hepburn, in my opinion, was committed only to herself.

Laura writes:

Totally agree regarding Miss Hepburn. Mr. Auster would not appreciate the comparison.

Lisa writes:

Perhaps Miss Hepburn would return the favor. I don’t know. Katherine Hepburn, like it or not, is emblematic of Old Hollywood.

Laura writes:

Yes, I’m sure she would not appreciate being linked with Auster. : – )

AUGUST 10

Mary writes:

Hepburn was a bit of an enigma. She never married and had no children but from what I understand was totally devoted to Spencer Tracy. There is a famous interview Barbara Walters had with her in which Hepburn stated that a woman should decide between a career and marriage and that one can’t have both. She said that if she were a man she wouldn’t want to marry a career woman. She also astonished Walters by stating that women should be extremely careful about whom they go to bed with.

Bill R. writes:

Notice the Newspeak in this magazine article? The Time article is called “The Childfree Life.” As Laura had it in the title to this topic, the proper word is “childless.” That’s factually what the condition is. But so anxious are these liberals for the moral approval to effortlessly accompany the idea that they pick a word that has that moral approval already embedded in it. You don’t even really need an argument anymore; this is being childfree, don’t you know? Why, that’s freedom, that’s a gain! This is something you’re getting; it’s not anything you’re losing. Childless, now, that’s a loss. Who wants loss? These liberals are not even content with simply arguing that it’s a good loss. They want that goodness in the descriptive word itself by eradicating from it any connotation of loss at all.

This is to be understood only as something to celebrate, mind you, like finding out you’re “cancer free.” Of course, they don’t want to hint that they’re regarding children like cancer, because then the masses, for whom this garbage is created and produced, might get a damn good hint as to what the real agenda is of these elites.

And I have to take my hat off to Alex for reminding us of that real agenda; this is about making the white race extinct by destroying the will of white people to reproduce. Like the homosexual rights movement (that for obvious reasons also works in the service of that goal), feminism is a relative side-show compared to the issue of race in this country, both being spin-off movements from the civil rights era. But on a deeper level, feminism is really as much if not more about race than sex or sex roles, not only because of the reason Alex pointed out, that this stuff is aimed at white women, but because white women are the only ones really listening to this academic pap anyway (and we’re supposed to be one of the smarter races; obviously smart is more than just IQ). And here’s where the Newspeak comes in: One of the principles of Newspeak as Orwell described it was, as I recall, the notion that if you can destroy the word used to express and communicate an idea, you will eventually destroy the idea itself because you will have eliminated the means by which people reinforce, reaffirm, and validate that idea. So in classic Newspeak fashion, what we have here with Miss Sandler and her Time article is another example of the effort, I think, to destroy the very word, “childless,” because it implies the idea that that condition is at least sad, if not bad, in order to replace it with another, “childfree,” which is an awkward phrase, not commonly used to describe the condition, but strikes the right chord for these liberals, implying, morally, the very opposite idea for the same factual condition, that it is liberating, a gain, a form, no less, of one of our culture’s most exalted values — freedom. A clearer case of Newspeak having been enlisted in the service of racial extermination it would be hard to imagine.

Also, is it any accident that that’s a very obviously very white couple lying on that beach in their decadent, affluent, childless contentment? In another day and age it might not have had any racial significance, but in ours, with a liberal media constantly bending over backwards to include racial minorities in news and magazine photographs and advertisements, etc., that’s not possible. At some point along the way the issue came up as to what race the models would be for this cover photo and someone made that decision and they made it for a reason. They’re white because the elites hope that Time’s readers will be seduced by the superficial appearance of success exuded by the couple (indeed, it looks like nothing so much as an advertisement for an expensive beach resort); they’re happy, attractive, fresh, healthy, relaxed, the overlapped arms suggesting sexual anticipation; in a moment they’ll be kissing and heading back to their room for a joyful but well-protected-against-that roll in the hotel hay. They’re white because the elites who made the decision to depict a white couple know something they hope the white masses will be too foolish or too racially guilt-ridden or both to see; that the cover does not depict two winners, but, in fact, two total losers, a dying breed who’ve bred nothing and live for nothing but themselves and today, and are on their way out.

Furthermore, has anyone mentioned the hideous implication in the article’s subtitle? “When having it all means not having children.” So children are no longer even any part of all? If you can have it all without having children, that means children are nothing. And in this case they’re worse than nothing because not having children is a necessary prerequisite to having it all, ergo, children are not only not any part of all, they’re a positive hindrance to it. And that is exactly what the elites want children to be to white people; a hindrance to “having it all” so that in time what whites will, in fact, have is nothing, for they will have ceased to exist.

For what it’s worth, my hunch is that Miss Sandler isn’t fully aware of her complicity in this racial agenda. To the highest elites on the Left, who understand and propagate the exterminationist racial agenda behind feminism, I would say she is rated as above the masses but below the highest of the elites, somenthing like a modern Left equivalent of one of Lenin’s “useful idiots.” She obviously really believes in the feminist pap she was taught as a primary cause; I don’t think she appreciates its secondary role as a weapon in the deeper and more important (to the Left) racial agenda, although I’m sure it wouldn’t cause her any sleepless nights and she almost certainly would agree with it anyway since white liberals have no racial self-awareness (except in the masochistic sense).  On the other hand, maybe she is fully aware of the racial agenda but figures there are plenty of warriors on her side fighting on that front and she makes her best contribution to the cause where she is.

But whether she is fully aware of it or not, what Miss Sandler is doing is not merely promoting childlessness and the near-barrenness of women (in the name of their enrichment no less!); she’s promoting white childlessness and the barrenness of her race.  This is a reminder of the two-fold sin of our modern liberal culture; it is both the true purveyor of sexism and the true purveyor of racism.

Buck writes:

In a post by Lauren Sandler, dated almost a year ago, she writes:

This month, the Center for Disease Control reported that birth rates had dropped again, for the fourth year in a row, bottoming out under 4 million babies born for the first time since 1998. Commentators immediately rushed to their laptop, ringing the alarm bells to fault the economy for our flaccid national desire to procreate. To be sure, low fertility accompanies a weak economy without fail. But to blame the markets for what happens in our bedrooms misses a radical reshaping of our worldview. It’s not just the economy, it’s liberation. The pursuit of happiness has emerged as our new national ideology, trumping the age-old belief that parental duty is the very definition, of adulthood. Some think it’s the height of selfishness; I say it’s progress.

She goes on to drag out Maslow’s self-actualization and to discuss the “existential costs” of children; missing out on “what it means to pursue romantic love, to work on a screenplay, to go (to) rock shows and Central American beaches—not to mention to choose a career, not just a job.”

I posted the link to this entry in a comment at her site sometime this morning. I had hoped that she might have more to say, that she would engage you in a substantive discussion. Disappointing.

Minbee66 writes:

You are so right about the egotism of the childless married and one-child families. After having difficulty conceiving, my daughter is leaving her 17-month-old son for 10 hours a day four days a week with a “nanny.” My daughter tells me she is looking for a three-day-a-week job closer to home, but she informed me two weeks ago she is interviewing for a five-day a week position 15 minutes from home! Does this make sense?

Laura writes:

I know women who badly wanted children, but once they got a taste of life at home, they fled in panic. It’s sad. They just were entirely unprepared for it and didn’t know that it takes some time to adjust. And when all your friends are doing something different, it can be very hard to resist.

August 12, 2013

Ibitsaam writes:

An unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy is that a single child is left with the sole responsibility of taking care of two sets of grandparents and one set of parents in their old age without the support (financial/logistic/physical/moral) of siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins. It is cruel towards THE CHILD to willfully impose this future burden on him/her.