Indians are a highly nosy lot.
We have strong opinions about why a woman is self centred because she is without an offspring; we even quickly presume that something is not alright with the man and gasp in complete disbelief when the hapless couple reiter ates it was a choice, not circumstance, that has kept them childless.
The X Factor lists five positives of not starting a family.
Impromptu plans
Remember that midnight house party where you and your friends suddenly decided to drive down to the closest hill-station for the weekend? Dressed in pyjamas and chappals, you took to the road without a care, focused on making the most of an unwinding trip. Yes, now try doing that when you've got a toddler asleep, waiting for you to return.
A child takes the spontaneity out of life for the first many years, by which time you start adding those grey hairs and slowing down in your tracks anyway. Forget about a holiday; even an impromptu plan to sit by the seaside with your spouse and enjoy your drink needs to be timed between your kid's food and sleep time.
You need to consider who will watch over your child just so you can step out for an hour with your spouse. Taking your child with you'll will only be counter-productive anyway.
Intimacy intact
A baby takes so much time and attention that spouses must already have a great friendship and work well together before the baby arrives. It is a certainty that one spouse will disagree with the other about decisions on how to care for the child. It is likely that one spouse will resent the lost time with the other. A marriage with some difficulties will get much worse when a baby is crying and the parents are sleep deprived.
And it all starts with so much pain. Ask a woman about her delivery and she'll tell you that the minute she saw her child, all her anxiety and pain faded away. Ask the husband who accompanied her in the labour room, and he will seem like a triumphant warrior but the sight of child birth can change the way he looks at his wife. Men can be rather graphic and a delivery can make their pleasure door be nothing more than simply a birth canal...if you get the drift...
And having kids wake you up in the middle of the night can be the perfect deterrent to a decent sex life. The lack of children gives a couple time for itself, to focus on their problems without distractions and to simply enjoy intimacy for a much longer time to come.
Selfish? Hell no!
The idea that remaining childfree makes one selfish, or the perception that it does, is rather illogical. A strong argument can be made that having kids is selfish. Some people have kids to support their own egos, in the hopes of unconditional love, or literally to have someone take care of them as they grow old. How many times have we come across parents who have almost no time for their children or read of celebrities at the brink of divorce having kids in the hopes of salvaging a deteriorating marriage?
It takes more than a lifetime supply of protection to avoid having a child. Particularly when either one of the partners wants a kid more than the other. After all, the job doesn't really end after the delivery, does it?
Time for a career
How many women have been booed for choos ing a career over a family? After all, tradition and culture would have us believe that it is the mother's job to take a backseat and let the father do precious little apart from signing cheques so that he can focus on his career.
But not anymore. Highly educated women, who have toiled through their careers to shatter glass ceilings, are weighing both personal and career options before making the choice not to have children. Some people have jobs that make them travel a lot and some others who work from home don't have it all that easy, either.
Children take up a good amount of time, and rightly so. But the choice to pursue a career over children rests with the couple alone, not the relatives.
Breathing space
People without children can easily pack up and move. They can be without work or change careers. They can break up with their partners and find new ones.
Children, while often flexible, must be accounted for in all major life changes. In fact, they demand that the world not change around them so fast while their own understanding of the world grows and changes at the same time. And before you realise it, all your decisions are hardly about you but about those around you. It doesn't end there.
Your partner might insist on purchasing a tea pot as a souvenir from your trip, or watching 'Andaz Apna Apna' on demand, but he would never go rigid at Mothercare, screaming for a pack of crayons while his head spins 360 degrees, not even on his worst day. And you have to pull out your last ounce of patience to gently reprimand him when all you're thinking is what got into you that you had to bring him out in the first place!
Children push buttons like no other human would.
Disclaimer: The X-Factor loves children but also loves that people have a choice.