Married and Childfree - An Alternative Lifestyle?

Monday, Jun. 15, 2009 Posted: 8:37:57PM HKT

Our world today is a crazy, messed up place, and those considering bringing a new life into it should weight the facts carefully and hence 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 seems to be offering critical guidance to the childlessness question. Christian couples should ask themselves, “Could we be equally useful to the Lord if we had children,/i>?” Christians need to trust that God's ultimate love triumphs over the terrors of history and that he will keep our children and us in his hands through thick and thin.

Paul contests the notion that Christians should have large families to help “Christianize the world” in 1 Corinthians 7:25-35. What we need to contest are the motivations to, or not to have children. The church must be willing not only to oppose the decision to remain childfree for the wrong reasons, but also the means by which population growth is controlled. The question is not “to have or not to have children,” but what are the motivations for having children, and what are the motivations to remain childfree?

In the article “Singapore Declining Birth Rate” Sunday, 10 December 2006, the writer states: “After 41 years of Nation building, we have arrived at a situation where it becomes too expensive to have even one child, then we need to question our priorities in life and the way we organise ourselves. Is our national education system any good at all in producing better prospects for its citizens when it doesn’t allow them to earn enough to even start a one child family? What do we mean by a better life? Is a double-income couple a desirable development for the long term? Are the pressures on performance at work putting undue pressure that inhibits procreation, in spite of the government’s best effort and generous incentives?

It boils down to a matter of priorities in life, does it not? We tend to live more for ourselves than anything else these days. Technology has given us the ‘My’ generation - MyDocuments, MySpace, MySQL, MyFiles, My*Everything*, except people don’t want MyBaby. We want that car and that condo and that annual vacation (more won’t harm) and that maid (whatever for when you don’t have kids?) and ad nauseum. We want everything, and before we can attain all these material goodies, we have no money nor time for a baby. People say that in Singapore, it costs upwards of $10,000 for a child, and I am not referring to adoption. But these same people think nothing of shelling out $60,000 for that car, even though the lifetime value of a child and a car are so vastly different, at least in Singapore.”

More people than ever before are choosing not to have children, and a new study in Japan provides some concrete numbers to support this growing phenomenon. Almost 25% of the young couples surveyed replied that they had no plans to start a family – that’s one in four! Also, more women than men said they don’t want kids – 20.6% of men, and 25.7% of women.

The ministry of the church is very different today from what it was just a generation ago. I have heard parents of grown-up children saying that they wouldn’t want to be raising children in today’s culture. Morally speaking, the epidemic in this regard has nothing to do with those married couples who desire children but for some reason are unable to have them, but with those who are fully capable of having children but reject this intrusion in their lifestyle for wrong and selfish reasons. The church should encourage couples to have children unless they know God’s plan for them is otherwise and to teach that the biblical formula for a Christian family reminds us of our responsibility to raise boys to be husbands and fathers and girls to be wives and mothers. The great Christian historian Christopher Dawson called raising the next generation humanity's greatest and most important cultural task. It's also one of the most rewarding.

The Rev Tan Cheng Huat is the Senior Pastor of True Way Presbyterian Church.

Section Photo: D'Wedding Singapore