Archived Post on the True Costs of Childrearing - 7/4/06

More on the Decision to Remain Childfree

I've been receiving a lot of mail lately from people who are leaning towards remaining childfree but are having problems finding voices in support of the childfree path. I wrote about some of the metaphysical issues involved with the choice of having kids or not having kids in my past article, Is Having Children a Necessary Part of the Spiritual Path - The Choice to Remain Childfree

I wanted to share an archived post I wrote on June 28, 2004 at alternative news site RumorMill News about the true costs of childrearing. Again, this is simply my perspective on the issue, but I think it's important to put this out there since nobody in the holistic health/metaphysical circles is talking about this.

The True Costs of Childrearing

*originally posted at RumorMillNews.com

I'm one of those blissfully happy childfree by choice people. Readers may have come across that term before, but it's more likely that they haven't.

Childfree is not the same as childless. Childfree refers to someone who, for whatever reasons, consciously chooses not to have children. Childless is someone who doesn't have kids but wants to, someone who might suffer from infertility.

Childfree by choice people are used to bearing the brunt of criticisms like "You're so selfish!" and "You're obviously a heartless, nasty person!"

And many childfree people are.

There are also many childfree people whose hearts and souls absolutely BLEED when they see what childrearing has become in this country, where highly sensitive "indigo" children (part of the next wave, evolutionally speaking, for humanity spiritually) are vaccinated and filled with toxins so that most of them have ADD or experience other terrible problems before they leave elementary school. Parents are threatened with arrest or having custody of their children taken away if they object to these poisons.

Many childfree people also are real people watchers. Myself, I was a full-time counselor for about ten years. People never came to me because of problems with kids, and yet 75% of the parents I counselled were, quite honestly, miserable BECAUSE they had kids. And they were in complete denial about it. I don't mean to say that that kids themselves were in any way to blame. I mean to say that the poor parents had been so heavily conditioned into certain self-sacrifical, self-deluded, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes, that they jumped into the whole parenthood thing without a CLUE. And that lack of awareness and education really ruined their lives. (And the lives of the children they brought into this world, who deserved to have more self-aware parents.)

The main thing parents are dealing with is poverty. And for single parents, of course, it's much worse. Why do we NEVER hear the more recent statistics that state that the cost of raising a child to adulthood these days is around $175,000. That's without the kid going to private school or the more exclusive types of universities (like Princeton, whose tuition now runs about $30,000 a year, I believe.)

That amounts to some - what? $250,000 before taxes are taken out? Per child? That's just not something to enter into without preparation, a stable relationship with a partner, and/or independent financial means, which aren't just desirable, they're NECESSARY in this day and age.

Most people are still paying off college tuition loans into their 30's, not to mention the cost of buying and maintaining a car and paying for their own housing. Where I live in central New Jersey, a tiny, one-bedroom apartment is running over $1000 a month, excluding utilities.

I'm sure readers are aware of these things, I just mention them to sort of go, "Hello, McFly! Would-be parents, wake up! If you're going to have kids, be responsible. Be aware of these things."

Single moms are the highest group, demographically, of the poor. (Poor being defined, I believe, as having income of less than $18,000 a year.) And I won't even go into the cost of daycare, so if you're trying to work, you lose half your income to daycare costs. In the U.S, anyway.

My heart BLED for the parents I'd see coming to me in my office. They didn't know what they had gotten themselves into. They had been indoctrinated into the mindset that, "The only purpose of marriage is to have children. It's our duty." So many of them, right after marriage, began having kids, like it was some automatic thing. Getting into mortgages and commitments they really couldn't handle.

The ensuing pressures, both financially and personally, led to very high divorce rates among these parents. And people were busy trying to identify their problems as OTHER things. "I'm stressed out because I'm overweight." "My life is out of balance because I don't enjoy my job." "I'd be happier if I had a soulmate in my life." Deal with the issue at hand, people. Raising and having kids is an extremely, horrifically hard job in this society, not because having kids is inherently bad, but because society is so out of whack.

I cannot tell you how depressing it was to try to reach the kids who would often accompany their parents (or single parent) to counseling sessions. Today's children are almost all empaths, true psychic sponges who absorb EVERYTHING from their environment. The time mom caught daddy with his new girlfriend in bed together upstairs, and the three year old child silently observed the goings-on in the background? HAVE NO DOUBT that a few years later this child will be venting about the immense trauma that this experienced caused him (or her,) the permanent and devastating scars to self-esteem, ability to handle future relationships, etc. Hearing mom and dad fight every day over money, feeling like you are somehow the cause because it's happening right in front of you? These kids CAN'T shake this stuff off. They don't have the equipment. They personalize and internalize this stuff instantly, and they'll soon be acting out in ways that reflect the trauma they've experienced.

Take the five year old daughter of two parents who enjoyed screaming at the top of their lungs every day and never had any restraint about it. By the time this daughter headed off to first grade, she went through an evaluation. The parents were just angry that their daughter wasn't "performing" on tests very well. The evaluation proved that she was suffering from deep post-traumatic stress disorder that caused her official "IQ" to go down over 100 points in just one year! That year, the parents had been fighting their worst, most emotionally violent battles, and the poor thing soaked it all up. She is now developmentally disabled from that unrelenting year of being in a "war zone" created by her parents.

And then there's another young girl I knew whose parents did the right "religious" thing and stayed together, in spite of their drug addictions, their physical abuse towards each other....they still considered themselves to be wonderful "Christians" because they remained married. The girl's mom later committed suicide when the girl was just 13. Dad went into a nursing home, incapable of taking care of himself due to the advanced stages of drug abuse taking their toll. The girl is now 15 and pregnant with her first child. She had no ballast, nobody to turn to when she was little, and so as soon as she came of age sexually she clung onto the first guy who showed her some affection. And now another damaged generation will be brought forth. She's another highly sensitive person who is completely non-verbal and shut down now. The damage has been done.

We have too many children in the world now who aren't being loved, who are the cast-offs of this society, the unwanted, unglamorous foster kids, the older ones nobody wants to adopt. Many people who choose to remain childfree have witnessed the very worst behavior that humanity has to offer....and, unfortunately, have seen much of it enacted by parents. Abortion is terrible, and it should never be viewed as just another form of birth control, treated in a casual way, like "Everybody is doing it."

But mindless breeding, I'm sorry to say, is also terrible. And it's an epidemic. We have a world population of almost 7 billion people, huge percentages of which do not have fresh water, food, or access to birth control. (Thank you, George Bush, for cutting family planning services to so many centers overseas who were the only place for financially impoverished women to have access to birth control. Does the woman starving in Zaire really need ten kids, George? I guess so. And be sure to blame her for wanting to express her sexual desires, because we all know abstinence is so easy, and if you can't abstain, it's just due to a lack of character. This is just how I interpret the current administration's heartless take on fertility issues for women. He did cut the budget for these services about a week after assuming office, which many women found unconscionable at best.)

Suffice it to say that we all, every one of us, need to be more aware, more responsible, and more conscious of children's needs and parents' needs. And as communities, we need to reach out to the lost kids, the ones without love. These next generations coming up have the potential to be some of our greatest spiritual teachers and guides, and they deserve our support. Whether childfree, childless, or a parent, we all must become more educated about the complexities, the difficulties, and the solutions that can be created surrounding family planning.

Some of the most wonderful times I get to spend as a childfree person are when parents around me need a break and I can enter into dialogue with kids as a teacher, a friend, a "big sister," attending to those little emotional needs that a busy parent might easily miss in the daily press of carpooling, getting the kids dressed and fed, etc. Childfree people often love children. They just choose to express that love in a different way.

Related article: Is Having Children a Necessary Part of the Spiritual Path - The Choice to Remain Childfree