The “Delinking” of Marriage and Parenthood
Yesterday I was in the dentist’s chair, practically inverted, while the hygienist used instruments banned by the Geneva Convention to chip away at my plaque. For some reason, dental professionals find it necessary to engage you in conversation while their fingers, polishers, and sharp, pointy things are in your mouth.
It was at this awkward moment when she asked if I had kids. All I could muster was an empathetic and tortured “no.” She laughed and said “lucky” and proceeded to tell me how difficult a time she and her new husband were having as they attempted to blend their families. She had an eight-year-old girl and he had a fifteen-year-old boy. Each child had grown up with different rules and the new stepparents had to figure out how to disapline them.
She was articulating what many of us non-parents have observed: that marriages can sometimes be more complicated, or at risk of strife, when children are present. But, wait, haven’t we been told that children are the glue that holds marriages together? Is that not the conventional thinking?
Apparently, not anymore.
Pew Research Center recently reported that, according to their nationally representative survey of 2,020 Americans, just four-in-ten (41%) say that children are very important to a successful marriage, compared with 65% of the public who felt this way as recently as 1990.
The Pew Research Center survey echoes what my Childless by Choice Project survey, as well as Vincent Ciaccio’s survey, of childfree adults have found—that children are not always perceived as integral to the success of a marriage.
As Ben Arnoldy observed in his recent article in the Christian Science Monitor online:
- Among married couples in Ciaccio’s survey, 62 percent said they were concerned children would undermine their relationship with their spouse.
- Preserving spousal companionship ranked high in another survey of 171 child-free individuals that was conducted by Laura Scott, who is working on a documentary about being childless by choice.
Indeed, in my survey, marital satisfaction or satisfaction with “our life, our relationship, as it is” was the top most compelling motive for my respondents. Over 80 percent of the survey respondents (for whom this motive applied) rated this motive statement 4 or 5 on a scale from 0 to 5.
In my observations, this is not typically a case of choosing between a happy marriage and children but, more accurately, a case of loving what you have and feeling no urge to change the status quo by adding a child to the mix. The motives to remain childfree may by influenced by any number of things: environmental concerns, lack of desire, lifestyle or economic considerations, state of the world, early childhood, whatever.
What the voluntary childfree by choice partners share is the feeling that, for them, “two is enough.”
Copyright Laura S. Scott. Published 1 August 2007 in Features.
Reader comments
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I agree completely. I am happily married and to me, that is a family. I believe that we would have a good marriage if we had kids as well, but I am liking it being just us.
permalink — 13 August 2007, 00:11