Had seen this piece over a Reason Magazine linked a couple of places yesterday, and it resonated. I happen to know, for whatever reason, quite a few couples who don’t have kids and who don’t plan on having kids. One couple, in their 50s, never really tried - nor tried not to. “It just didn’t happen,” she said, “so something is obviously wrong with one of us.”

But now they’ve got their beach condo and take a lot of vacations overseas. When you don’t have to spend money on kids, you can spend it on yourself. Which is almost exactly why two other couples I know don’t and won’t have kids. The one live here in Lancaster; they got married relatively late in life (mid 30s), and he’s got season tickets to the Eagles and Flyers and Phillies; has had them for quite some time, and doesn’t want to give them up. He really values them, and knows that if he and his wife were to have kids, he might not have the money, and certainly wouldn’t have all the time, to go to all the games. It makes his wife sad, I think - she’d like to have kids.

And on the flip side, a guy I was very good friends in high school now has this jet-setting job and lives over in Asia as a product manager for some company. Makes a ton of money; jets all over the place. But the reason they don’t have kids is mostly his wife - she simply was not interested. He was, but sort of buried it beneath his work. He tells me he’s happy. Sometimes, I believe him.

Which brings me back to the Reason piece, by Ronald Bailey, which notes that “demographic winter” is coming, because so many couples are choosing not to have families. It’s happening all around the world, mostly - as you might guess - in developed, relatively affluent countries. The conservative Heritage Foundation thinks this augurs economic collapse; Bailey demurs. But why is it, he wonders, that people are having fewer kids?

And the answer he comes up with is basically that the fewer kids you have, the happier you are:

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that’s just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don’t really enjoy rearing children.

“Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people’s overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact,” reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. In addition, the more children a person has the less happy they are. According to Gilbert, researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids. “Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework,” asserts Gilbert in his bestselling, Stumbling on Happiness (2006).

That, he notes, is not what most parents say when asked. And it’s certainly not what I’d say were I asked - though raising kids can indeed be one of the most arduous tasks around. Diapers, sick infants at 3 a.m., tantrums, worrying about what they learn from their peers or how much time they spend in front of the video game - and we’re only through six and a half years. As my mother says, when they’re little their problems are little. The bigger they get…

And yet. What I always come back to is, what happens to these folks I know, these childless couples, when they pass age 40, when 5o fades into the rear-view mirror; when 60 and then 70 and maybe 80 encroach. You’ve got one another; maybe, maybe you’ve got siblings - though if they have kids, they’ll be busy with them, won’t they? We measure happiness in terms of material progress now; and without kids, make no mistake, you may make a heck of a lot more material progress. You’re freer - to take off and spend the weekend in the mountains, leave at a moment’s notice.

But at age 80, when it’s just you and your spouse - or maybe just you - how much does that really mean?

You’ll have the memories. But who comes ’round to see that you’re OK? Who calls and maybe handles some of the finances. If you need to be taken care of, who does that? The nephew? Good luck with that.

But beyond that, at that age, the childless may sit back and reflect on their vacations, their Eagles tickets. Whereas I might reflect on the Valentine’s Day card my son made for me, in which he wrote, “I am sure you love me.” Or how my 16-month-old little girl has learned to dance, just a little, when we turn the music on. The joy of those little moments has a lot more staying power than margaritas in Cozumel. But I suppose if you never have kids, you never know the difference.