CHILD-FREE people are often told they’ll regret their choice by parents who seem to regret theirs. Here are the things they say that actually apply to them.
‘You’ll regret not having kids’
People who are stressed, exhausted, poor and surviving off the half-chewed leftovers from their kids’ plates because they haven’t got time to cook a meal love telling those who don’t want kids they’ll regret it. It’s not too much of a stretch to suspect they’re talking about themselves.
‘Who will look after you when you’re old?’
Whether you have children or not, the odds are you’ll end up miserable and lonely in an old people’s home, and there’s no guarantee your kids will be arsed to visit you. Also we’ve moved on from subsistence farming, so you won’t be dependent on your offspring stockpiling potatoes to survive the winter. Unless something goes horribly wrong with pensions.
‘You’re selfish’
Are childless people really the selfish ones? Or is it those who pump out miniature versions of themselves to absorb the earth’s dwindling resources? And that’s before you mention other parental selfishness, such as wanting to bask in the glory of them being a pro footballer or a doctor, until the pressure makes them drop out and become a hippy traveller called ‘Leaf’.
‘You’ll never know true happiness’
A tad extreme, and a weird definition of ‘happiness’: constant noise, loss of freedom, endless expense and a lifetime of worry that you’ve produced an emotionally unstable mess of a human who’ll will be living in your house when they’re 42. Childless people, however, can drink lager in the bath instead of going to parents’ evening. That’s true happiness.
‘Your relationship won’t go the distance’
Some desperate people claim children are the glue that holds a relationship together for a lifetime, but when you see two frazzled parents in Tesco bickering over whether a kid can have a Freddo, the reverse is clearly true. A cat is much easier and they don’t have a tantrum in the frozen aisle. As far as you know.
