“That is, they are not going to make me a grandmother! How dare you take that privilege away from me?” was the strongest complaint that Mariana (34) and Claudio (38) received when they told their parents that they had decided not to have children. “Getting out of what the rest of society expects you to do is not easy, but you have to be firm. It is our life, not theirs”, they told almost in unison.
Receive a university degree, get married, have children and dedicate the rest of your life to their care. In the middle, buy a car and a house. Once a year, take two weeks of family vacation. These are just some of the mandates with which several generations grew up and that, as society progresses, are increasingly questioned.
In the 1980s, the first “rebels” began to appear. In those years, the term “dink” was popularized to define dating couples or married couples who decided, together, not to have children. Leaving the status quo made them suffer criticism and questioning, all revolving around the supposed selfishness that was behind that decision. Dink refers to couples with double income, without children (Double Income No Kids). The novelty, 40 years after the appearance of the term, is that the “dinks” are becoming more and more.
Defining the prototype that fits this target, Psychology graduate Noelia Benedetto explained: “The most representative profile is of people between 25 and 45 years old who are linked monogamously (not necessarily heterosexual), are professionals, have double participation in the labor market, so their quality of life tends to be somewhat higher than average.
But the description adds other characteristics: “They privilege the bond of a couple, professional development, friendships and also individual spaces, financial stability, and the freedom without restrictions that not having anyone who depends on them gives them, both in care as in the reproduction of daily life, to be able to work, occupy their leisure spaces, travel and spend on whatever they want”.
Growing tendency
It is not new that the birth rate has decreased throughout the world, but significantly in Latin America. A report by the Reuters agency states that 3.4% of households in Mexico, 4.5% in Brazil and 14% in the United States had opted for a life without children.
“It is proven that the desire for no children and/or the postponement has been increasing. The postponement, more than once, ends in the impossibility of gestating because when they decide to do so, the woman is close to 40 and has to go to treatment, often without success”, state some specialist.
Insisting on the importance of the context: “It is impossible to separate this phenomenon from the cultural, from the difficulties of reality, war, poverty, emigration that surround us, major obstacles to building economic stability or job development. A complicated and difficult world surrounds us that does not stop influencing the non-desire to bring children into this world.
When asked if this phenomenon is something that patients bring to the office, experts say that they bring it “when there are disagreements between the two or they fear that this postponement will have difficulties at the time of decision. It is a fact that weighs and can happen in both sexes equally, not only in women.
And continued: “These couples think about sleepless nights, about how much they should connect with the demands that parenthood demands. What I perceive is not necessarily a negative exaggeration, but realism in what it will mean to have a child. I believe that those who decide not to have children do so to rescue or preserve the bond of the couple”.
Culture value
Although it is a growing phenomenon, Benedetto said that culture does not stop valuing “mapaternity” for a moment and invests a large amount of material and symbolic resources so that the myth does not diminish. “Currently neither maternity nor paternity are compulsory: that is changing. The new generations are transforming these roles at the same time that they are fighting for the conquest and access to rights and gender equality”, added the psychologist.
As for the reasons behind the decision, there can be several. “Everyone’s time is capital, and each person chooses (within what they can) how to invest it. Distributing schedules between work, partner, leisure and parenting can be something undesirable for a sector of the population. There are those who are not willing to give up their recreational spaces or even their professional commitments for the care tasks that having children implies,” they explained.
Shuffling the number of arguments: “There are those who do not want or do not know if they can respond to long-standing commitments that imply so much dependence and dedication, because ‘parenting’ takes a lot of time, or because they want to invest that time in other projects that are not compatible with childhood, for example, living traveling like a globetrotter”.
Agreeing almost entirely with the psychologist, Mariana and Claudio added that neither of them ever had the supposed “instinct” that moves those who want to procreate. In this regard, Claudio deepened: “I see my friends with children and I think: ‘It’s good that I’m not them’. I see them dependent on another human being and I can’t even imagine being in that place. I never had any doubts about this, there was no such instinct in my life and marrying Mariana, who thinks the same as me, removed any possibility of ‘dreaming’ of being a father.
Along the same lines, Mariana added: “I never played mom when I was a girl. My mother told me all her life that she wanted grandchildren, and it was even a problem at one point. Luckily now I think she’s resigned herself, she doesn’t insist anymore, I think he understood that it’s really not going to happen.
Both are fans of airplanes and, of course, of being on them. “We don’t even have pets because they are also a responsibility that you have to think about if you want to go on a trip. We both love to travel and our life pretty much revolves around that. Imagine, if we don’t want dogs or cats, much less children”, explained Claudio.
There is no such instinct
Currently there is a part of the population that has access to glimpse more options where “non-maternity” is one of them.“The argument of the paternal or maternal instinct that related it to something innate is no longer appealed to, where people who renounced it were accused of being selfish or stigmatized. There is no such thing as instinct: being permeated by culture there is nothing that can be called instinctive in human life. To consider a behavior as instinctive, it has to be automatic, irresistible, not require training, occur in all members of the species and, furthermore, be unmodifiable”.
“Co-parenthood is a personal option before bonding or conjugal, which means that people must ask themselves if they want to exercise it and if they will be able to respond to the requirements that, from an ethics of care, it implies,” he said.
To close, experts stressed: “It is important to bear in mind that the decision not to have children must be shared and not imposed by one of the parties, or obsequiously accepted by another so as not to dissolve that bond. That is to say, that it be consensual and consented from a certain level of conviction. Every person who wants to have children should have them, the question is why should someone who doesn’t want to have them?.
