I don’t usually venture far into the “childfree” community because the anti-children rhetoric makes me grit my teeth, but when I came across this 10-minute video on Facebook today, I decided to ditch my planned post and share this with you because, well, wow.
If you have time, watch it and come back.
In this video, “Childfree Kimberly” aka Kimberly Fisher shares “Why You Should Get Married and Not Have Kids.” She offers a list of advantages to having a childfree marriage. They include: privacy, quality time with your partner, no requirement to “stay together for the kids” but a chance to choose every day to stay together, freedom to grow together rather than fall into separate mom and dad roles, spontaneous dates to do fun things together, and no child getting in the middle of your marriage.
Here’s the thing. She’s right. All of these points sound like great advantages to not having children. Kids do interrupt your privacy and make it hard to spend quality time together. They are a consideration in everything you do, whether it’s going out to dinner or deciding to split up. They’re also expensive, messy, and frequently annoying. When children enter the picture, your relationship changes and not always in a good way.
We could argue the other side, the advantages of having children, the magic of creating a human being, the joy of having a big family, the satisfaction of carrying family genes and traditions into the next generation, the companionship of grown sons and daughters, help in old age, etc. We would be right about that, too.
Many parents would say that raising children is difficult but rewarding, that you feel a love like you’ve never felt before. Kids can also break your heart. People who never wanted children might say, “Who needs all this drama?”
I wanted to share this video at Childless by Marriage because it may help us understand why our partners are unwilling to have children with us, especially if they have already gone through it with someone else. They want the privacy, freedom, and connection uninterrupted by little ones screaming, “Mommy!” or “Daddy!” It makes sense, but what if you can’t imagine life without the little ones? What if you want all that drama? It’s certainly something for you and your partner to talk about.
If you are physically unable to have children, maybe this video will offer some consolation.
Let’s talk about it here, too. What is your response to this video? Would you show it to your partner? What would he/she say? If you were to make a list of reasons why you should get married and HAVE children, what would it include? I’m so glad you all are here to talk about this stuff.
For more on Kimberly, visit her Instagram site: https://www.instagram.com/kimberlyfisher.cf/ or her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChildfreeKimberly
Childless by Marriage 
She makes too many assumptions for me to really believe her argument. For example, she argues that childless couples get to ‘grow together’ and parents don’t. Much too simplistic. Childless couples could grow together, perhaps more so when they are young-ish, but could just as easily spend their additional leisure time taking up seperate hobbies, interests and activities that interest them but not their partners. And parents can ‘grow together’ before thay are parents, or when parenting is done, if they really can not manage it whilst they are parents.
I would question the Google research result she uses at the start that marriage satisfaction rates fall more for couples with children compared to those without. I suspect second (or third) marriages are included in the “marriages without children” group, and people entering those marriages are more likely to already have children and be less likely to expect to have children from their marriages. Additionally, they are more likely to be a little older and perhaps under less life pressures such as from work, careers, big mortgages and to be more able to enjoy leisure time and holidays together.
And, she is only 6 years into a marriage, that is not long in the grand scheme of things. And (lastly) she seems to struggle to keep looking at the camera while she talks, so, I get the feeling she is not as confident in her argument as she would like us to believe.
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God bless Kimberly for saying what many women up to 40% now according to statistics believed all along… we don’t need children…. we don’t want children …we don’t want to sacrifice our bodies and our souls to raise children …we want to live…it’s our life… life is short …we want to enjoy it. Nothing wrong with that. Let the breeders breed …but not every woman wants to be a breeder.
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What Childfree Kimberly doesn’t say is that marriages without children are more likely to end in divorce than those with children.
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Yes, it’s great for kids when their parents forgo divorce “for the children” and teach them what an unhappy/unhealthy relationship looks like.
What Childburdened Emilia doesn’t say is that children don’t magically fix a broken marriage. And there’s much less emotional fallout from divorces without children involved.
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I’m certainly not saying that parents who are fighting like cats and dogs should stay together “for the children,” just that the reality is that marriages without children are more likely to end in divorce than those with them. Nor am I saying that children will “fix” a broken marriage (and I think having a child to try to save or even improve a marriage is a stupid idea) or that divorce is a bad thing per se. Also, you don’t know my parental and/or marital status.
Actually, one person who said you were less likely to divorce if you have kids was not a “child-burdened” individual but rather a woman named “Lulu” who posted on a now-defunct childfree board called Childfree-ez. In one string, one poster asked whether anyone noticed how marriages with children often broke down. Lulu, whose husband had deserted her and gone on to father children with another woman, said, “Stats bear out that you’re less likely to divorce if you have kids.” Lulu went on to say that feelings were “mercurial and finicky.” One day your DH is the love of your life and you can’t imagine leaving him for Brad Pitt. Then he says something hurtful to you and you wish you’d never met the SOB. Lulu ended by saying that “kids temper the manic up and downs of marriage.”
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