Time Magazine and "The Childfree Life"

This week's Time cover story by Lauren Sandler equates "having it all" with "the childfree life." I am most interested in the reasons Sandler's sources give for not not having children. (*Note: her sources are mostly those who choose to not have children, not those who are unable to have children because of infertility or difficulty in finding a suitable partner.)

Here are the reasons Sandler includes:

• Laura Scott, a now 50-year-old woman, says she decided when she was 14 that she didn't want to have children because she didn't want to experience the hard work of motherhood she saw her own mother endure.
• Laura Carroll, author of The Baby Matrix, says "Childlessness is for someone who wants a child but doesn't have one. It's a lack. I'm not lacking anything." Laura Kipnis, a culture critic at Northwestern University, adds, "[it's not like] your life isn't going to be fulfilled without [children], like there's a natural absence that once you fill it with a child, the world makes sense." 
• Esmeralda Xochitl Flores, who cohabits with a man and his 15-year-old daughter, works late nights at a nonprofit, and apparently she doesn't see said daughter. Her boyfriend is OK with this because, he tells her, having a daughter in the house "shouldn't be a reason for you to be held back from things that matter to you." Even so, Flores admits, "I still struggle with it because I don't want to be seen as a mom." 
• Jena Starkes, a Web designer, says of motherhood: "If it's the hardest job in the world, I'm damn happy I don't have to do it. You're not supposed to say that, but it's true."
• Jenna Johnson of New York exults in the fact that an empty house allows her to "do all sorts of things: buy an unnecessary beautiful object, plan trips with our aging parents, sleep in, spend a day without speaking to a single person, send care packages to nieces and nephews, enroll in language classes, go out for drinks with a friend on the spur of the moment. I know all of this would be possible with kids, but it would certainly be more complicated. My plans — professionally, daily, long-term, even just for vacation — are free from all the contingencies that come with children."
• Leah Clouse and her husband, Paul, both work and have been married for four years. "They play a game each week," Sandler writes, "in which they look at their schedule and try to imagine how they could fit a child into it, with their work and their involvement in their church. 'It's insane already,' Leah says. 'I don't feel we can do what we do and be great parents — and for me, the emphasis would be on being great parents.'"
• Rachel Agee, who was brought up in a religious family in the south, laments the "oppressively family-centric" church she was raised in, adding: "I just knew I couldn't trade my freedom for it." 
• Andrea Reynolds of Nashville says of her childless life with her husband, ""We can do anything we want, so why wouldn't we?"

I relate to much of what these women say. Who doesn't want freedom to do whatever, whenever? Who doesn't want a less stressful, less demanding life? Certainly everyone desires this to some degree. Furthermore, who wants to deal with dirty diapers? Who wants to wake up at midnight, 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. to a screaming baby? No one, I assume. 

But life isn't always about taking the easy way out. We came here to be challenged and to learn to love — two things impossible for those who live only for themselves. I sorrow (not in a 'holier than thou' way, I hope) that someone would choose to forgo parenthood, for me one of life's most trying, refining and glorifying experiences.

I'll conclude with an astute observation on this subject from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He said "the retreat from child rearing" is a symptom of "a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place. Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made."