Take Me To Your Tweeple

I’m feeling like the aliens shown above because I’ve just created my first Twitter account CbyCproject and I feel like I am on a different planet.

The Childless by Choice Project social media outreach began with the Childless by Choice Project website, a Squidoo lens, a blog (first as a contributor of Purple Women & Friends and now this blog), then the Facebook Page for Two Is Enough, and now Twitter.

I was reluctant to sign up for Twitter at first because I really didn’t have the time and I didn’t know how I might use it. Then a month ago I signed up for a class on social media at a writer’s conference and began to understand where twitter fits in an outreach program. I realized this was another way to connect with other childfree folks and to continue to learn and share.

There is no possible way one book or one documentary can encompass all there is to know about the childless by choice demographic. We are not one homogeneous blob. So I like to go beyond my survey respondents and the participants of the Childless by Choice Project and hear from childless and childfree people from all over.

I was recently contacted by a woman from Argentina. She found me through Unscripted, the ezine for the childfree, after an online search and she wondered if there was a Spanish language version of Two is Enough or the documentary. Unfortunately no, not yet. However she reminded me that childfree people exist in every corner of the world and in every corner of the web.

If you are a twitter user please tweet me at CbyCproject and let’s start a conversation.

Flickr Photo courtesy of State Library and Archives of Florida

Ted Olsen, Conservative Lawyer, Fights to Overturn California’s Gay Marriage Ban

Yes, you read it right. Ted Olsen, the same guy who got George W. Bush into the White House by arguing for Bush in Bush v. Gore in the Supreme Court went to district court last month (Perry v. Schwarzenegger) to argue that California’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

Why would he do that? One, because he thinks he can win and two, he thinks marriage is a good thing, for individuals and for the community. Gay or straight.

Here’s what he wrote in his article for Newsweek, published prior to the trial, titled The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage:

What, then, are the justifications for California's decision in Proposition 8 to withdraw access to the institution of marriage for some of its citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation? The reasons I have heard are not very persuasive.

The explanation mentioned most often is tradition. But simply because something has always been done a certain way does not mean that it must always remain that way. Otherwise we would still have segregated schools and debtors' prisons.

The second argument I often hear is that traditional marriage furthers the state's interest in procreation—and that opening marriage to same-sex couples would dilute, diminish, and devalue this goal. But that is plainly not the case. Preventing lesbians and gays from marrying does not cause more heterosexuals to marry and conceive more children. Likewise, allowing gays and lesbians to marry someone of the same sex will not discourage heterosexuals from marrying a person of the opposite sex. How, then, would allowing same-sex marriages reduce the number of children that heterosexual couples conceive?

This procreation argument cannot be taken seriously. We do not inquire whether heterosexual couples intend to bear children, or have the capacity to have children, before we allow them to marry. We permit marriage by the elderly, by prison inmates, and by persons who have no intention of having children.

Thank you Mr. Olsen for acknowledging the childfree marriage and our right to be married under the law. I know you are not fighting on behalf of voluntarily childless couples but if you and your very capable co-counsel David Boies succeed in your efforts to overturn Prop 8, you will have gone a long way towards challenging the antiquated idea that couples who are unable or unwilling to procreate should not have the right to legal marriage and to enjoy the benefits of that institution. If intentionally childfree or infertile heterosexual couples can marry, why not gay couples? Children don't make a marriage, committed partners do.

Closing arguments have yet to be presented. However, I will be following up on this trial in this blog. If you would like to read the transcripts from this hearing click here.

The Personality Theory: Results So Far

Thanks for posting your type here. We also invited the Two is Enough Facebook fans and The Childfree Life (TCFL) goodreads.com book club to do the Carl Jung and Isabel Myers-Briggs topology personality test and post their types and out of the 45 people who did so by January 20 we had a whopping 16 INTJs.

This is significant because INTJs are rare, said to represent only 1 percent of the general population but represented 34 percent of this childfree population. The next types in line were ISTJ (representing 11 %) and INFJ (representing 11 %) and ISFJ (representing 9%) and ENTJ (representing 9%). Note all the Judgers here.

Of course, this was not a representative or scientific survey by any stretch. However, the results do beg real research on this theory.

Any doctorate students out there willing to take this on?

Testing the Personality Theory

In Two Is Enough I suggested that certain personality types may be more likely to remain childless by choice. My theory is that Introverts and those that are Myers-Briggs Thinker and Judger types might be more predisposed or inclined to challenge the assumption of parenthood and embrace a childfree life.

The members of Goodreads.com The Childfree Life book club are testing this theory in the discussion thread and are posting their types. The majority who have posted their types after taking a Carl Jung and Isabel Myers-Briggs topology personality test are reporting they are T/J’s (Thinkers/Judgers) and most are introverts as defined by this test.

How about you? Are you childless by choice? If so, click on the link above and take a few minutes to do the test and post your type here. We’ll see if the theory proves out.

You’d be Such a Great Parent

Two is Enough is the featured book in The Childfree Life (TCFL) goodreads.com book club this month and next. I am joining in the discussions when I can and in one discussion on the chapter on assumptions two women had commented that people always said they would be a good parent. One is a teacher and she wrote "Parent as a noun is common...it is the parent as a verb that is the hard part."

She was a sought-after babysitter when she was young but always though she’d make a better mentor or teacher than a parent.

I really identified with these comments. I wanted to be a teacher when I was a kid and the kids I babysat always requested that I be asked to baby sit again, but I never wanted to be a parent. So I posted this comment:

We get the "You'd be such great parents" or "Oh you guys are they type of people who should have kids" too.

I'm sure we could manage to be successful parents IF WE WANTED TO.

The WANT is what is missing.

A Special Gift From a Friend

I received the following email recently from a woman:

Yeah! A friend of mine recently gave me Two is Enough for my 35th birthday. How wonderful to know that there are other couples (and many of them) like us out there that do not want children. We are not "selfish" "broken" or "wrong" for not having children, we simply just do not have the desire/need to have children in order to lead a fulfilling life. I have had two relationships break up because I did not want kids and been questioned and criticized by friends and family who truly believe I should have kids because they just can't wrap their heads around me not wanting children.

I though, what a nice friend! This friend obviously understood that no one should be made to feel broken or wrong for expressing a desire to remain happily without children. I imagine she saw Jennifer as she was—a good person and friend who needed a bit of support and validation for making a choice that many people around her did not understand.

Optimism Unwarranted for Past President of the National Organization for Non-Parents

Last month I got this email message from Marie Bernardy, who once served as President of NON/NAOP, one of the first childfree groups in the United States:

Hi Laura -

I was just forwarded an AOL article about your book on childfree couples. My husband and I were members of the National Organization for Non-Parents in the 1970s and 1980s; both of us served as president of the organization. Below is a wikipedia reference, in case you haven't run across it, which gives some details on the history of the "childfree movement."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree

I had my tubes tied at 23; my husband had a vasectomy at 24. We've been married 35 blissful, childfree years. I feel sad that so much of what we worked for so many years ago (education, acceptance, insurance equity, etc.) is still a problem for so many. Physicians are still reluctant to perform sterilizations, families continue to pressure for grandchildren, friends with kids ostracize those without.

Keep up the good work.

Marie was right. People like her have been working for decades to promote understanding and acceptance for the choice to remain childfree, yet not much has changed. She told me that NON/NAOP shut its doors in 1982, because of lack of funding the “thinking that the concept of being childfree was well entrenched” and that other organizations like Planned Parenthood and ETR would continue to provide materials that would invite people to consider the childfree life as a viable option. Marie now says “We were probably more optimistic than was warranted.”