I’m on my way to Nîmes to interview Corinne Maier, who has written a book
called No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children.The book is surprisingly
funny and is making me smile as I read it in the departure lounge at Luton
Airport, surrounded by a good many badly behaved, tiresome examples of why
this outspoken French writer might be on to something.
“Open your eyes,” she tells French women. “Your children will be baby-losers,
destined for unemployment, insecure or low-grade work . . . They will have a
life even less rigol-ote (fun) than yours, and that’s saying something. No,
your marvellous babies have no future, as every baby born in a developed
country is an ecological disaster for the whole planet.”
I’m only a few pages in and already I’ve clocked that this is war – war with
Europe’s most fecund country, which last year had a higher birthrate than
any of its neighbours – an announcement greeted like a sporting triumph by
the country’s media.
“Why was this a victory?” asks Maier. “Perhaps because it is the only thing
France has left to mount on a podium.” There’s no doubt about it. Maier,
whose book has been at the top of the French bestseller lists all summer, is
on a crusade to puncture France’s love affair with bébé.
“Children are there to stop you enjoying yourself. It’s a child’s hidden face.
Believe me, he will be very inventive in this area. He will be ill when you
(finally) arrange a night out, he will bug you when you celebrate your
birthday with your friends, he will hate it if you bring someone he’s never
met back for the night, and beyond that you won’t dare tread for fear of
traumatising him for life.” She goes on to list the things you will almost
certainly have to give up after having children. They include: a full
night’s sleep, a lie-in, deciding to go to the cinema on the spur of the
moment, staying out later than midnight (babysitters have to be relieved),
visiting a museum or exhibition (children start mucking about after five
mintues), taking your holiday anywhere other than destinations where there
is a beach and a kids’ club, taking a holiday during term-time and smoking
in front of your children, now deemed a “crime against humanity”.
As I climb the steps to the airpcraft, (last for a change because I haven’t
got my children with me to ensure “priority boarding”), I wonder what it
must be like for Maier’s two young teenage children. When we meet later at a
café next to the Roman temple in the centre of Nîmes – she’s on holiday near
by with her partner and the children – I ask if they have read the book.
“Oh no,” she says. “They’re not interested. They’re more interested in Harry
Potter.”
Do they ever ask about what’s in the book?
“Not really. But when they do really stupid things, I say to them ‘
voilà!That’s exactly the kind of thing that I have written about in my
book’.”
It’s a relief to hear this from Maier in person. Sitting drinking a cappuccino
in her tie-dye orange trousers, outsize ring and runaway black curly hair,
she seems rather less ferocious than the tone of her book. I imagine that
she is a very engaging mother, and it becomes harder to take her message
seriously – especially when you remember that this is a woman who has made
it her mission to wind up the French. Her last book, Bonjour Paresse (Hello
Laziness), was an exposé of France’s lax, workshy office culture. “The
French don’t work hard,” she says breezily. She is also a practising
psychoanalyst so I can only assume that she knows what she is doing with
regard to her own children.
Nevertheless, it is still shocking to read her declaration that there are
moments when she regrets having children – a taboo thought that few mothers
would dare to admit. “If I hadn’t had children, I would be touring the world
with the money I made with my books,” she writes. “Instead of that I am
forced to stay at home, to serve meals, to get up at 7am every day, to go
over idiotic lessons, and to put the washing machine on. All that for two
children who treat me like their maidservant. Certain days I regret having
had them – and I dare to say it.”
Maier’s concern is that no one is doing anything to temper the idealised view
of motherhood perpetuated by two equally potent forces in France: the State,
which wants lots of babies to pay for future pensions, and greedy capitalist
enterprises, which make a fortune selling baby clobber to gullible parents.
“I blame the State, which encourages a certain idea of the French family,
because this is a way of defending our national system,” she says. “Second,
I blame capitalism, which encourages people with its seductive advertising
because having babies creates big consumers who buy a lot, who need bigger
apartments, bigger cars, new washing machines . . . “The child has become so
vested with importance, such a huge burden requiring so many changes to
one’s way of life that having one has become inhumane, so my advice to
people is don’t have any,” says Maier.
People who do not have children are pitied, she laments, rather than viewed as
people who have chosen a positive and sensible alternative. Far better to
label them “child free” than “childless” she argues, as the latter term is
loaded and pejorative.
“Saying you think you can have a better life without children is these days
considered shocking,” she says. This was not the case 40 years ago when you
either had babies or you didn’t. Nowadays, women are pounded from all sides
by images in the media and advertising of gorgeously pregnant women and
happy smiley families.
So what are the 40 reasons for being a nepas’iste? (Maier explains that she
gave her book an English title as No Kid sounds punchier than Pas d’enfant.)
They range from the predictable (childbirth is torture, breast-feeding is
slavery), to the serious (the planet is already overpopulated, so the
pressure on women to breed is immoral), to the irreverent – and here’s where
Maier gets into the “inhumanity” of having children.
She lavishes scorn on the “stupid” holiday destinations that adults choose
once they have saddled themselves with children – such as Disneyland Paris,
a “village of animated idiots populated by underpaid people dressed as
ducks”. “No, I’ve never been to Disney and I’ve told my children that I will
never take them,” Maier says. She did, however, venture once to Marineland
in Antibes. “ Épouvantable,” she sighs, shaking her head. “Horrendous.”
Maier, an only child, remembers holidays that were geared to her parents’
wishes rather than hers. “We have to stop doing so much for our children,”
she says. “We do so much more for them than our parents did . . . trying to
do the best, the most, the maximum is ridiculous, because it probably does
not bring happiness to the child.”
Maier likes to quote Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst who promoted a theory
in the first half of the last century that children needed a “good enough”
mother. More than that would be too much.
“The good mother has to not care a bit, and that’s what’s difficult. Not
caring a bit is to accept that your child is not perfect,” says Maier. As if
on cue, a mother walks by our table, followed by a small boy, perhaps aged
3, making the kind of ear-splitting noise that only a small child can.
“See what I mean,” says Maier.
For those of us who always assumed that France got it right where we in
Britain got it wrong on children – subsidised childcare that we could only
dream of, and an absolute expectation, backed by state support, that women
will return to work – it comes as a surprise to hear Maier describe her
less-than-rosy picture.
And behind the jokes, cynicism and adolescent-style rants, she makes some
serious points. All this assistance and encouragement from the French State
isn’t actually getting French women anywhere. Child benefit increases
steeply with each extra child after the first two and the income tax system
is weighted heavily in favour of people with children.
So yes, France has a high birth rate, but its women are, on the whole,
consigned to middle-ranking, relatively low-paid jobs, far less likely to
occupy senior positions than their British and American counterparts. “If 80
per cent of mothers work, only 30 per cent are promoted to positions of
responsibility. A bit better than Germany and certainly than Italy, but not
as good as the UK and way below the US,” she writes. This is a shame for
women, Maier believes, as the higher you go in an organisation, the less
likely you are to have “idiots above you”.
Then there are the green arguments. Maier believes that the rich West is
producing too many children, thereby accelerating the depletion of the
world’s resources. “It’s not that there are too many people,” she writes,
“but too many rich people. No one needs our children, because we and they
are the spoilt kids of a planet that is on a collision course. To have a
child in Europe or America is immoral – more scarce resources wasted on a
way of life that is ever more voracious, capricious, hungry for fuel and
destructive of the environment.” So would Maier tell a “childfree” friend
who was contemplating motherhood to resist? “No, I wouldn’t as it’s not my
place to interfere in other people’s business,” she says.
She would, though, want them to hear the counter-arguments to having children,
and there’s no mistaking the rallying cry with which her book ends.
“You too can choose to say no. Nepas’istes of all countries, my brothers and
sisters in arms, stay disunited, sceptical and, if possible, without
descendants.”
On my flight back I sit next to a man with a little girl aged about 18 months.
Over the next two hours he doles out sponge fingers, followed by a bottle of
juice, plays a repetitive game with the window blind, facilitates a round of
beep-o with the people sitting behind, attempts to read a colourful picture
book – but she prefers to throw it on the floor – gets nervous when she
investigates the contents of my handbag (although at this stage I am willing
to do anything to help the poor man) and is ticked off by the Ryanair staff
when the child – now screeching and wailing – wriggles free of her seatbelt.
I wonder about giving him my copy of No Kid. But who knows when he would find
time to read it. And in any case, for him it’s too late.
YOU CAN WAVE GOODBYE TO ALL THIS ... 20 REASONS NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN
— Childbirth is torture
— You will become a mobile feeding bottle
— You will struggle to continue having fun yourself
— You will lose touch with your friends
— You will have to learn a language of idiots to communicate with your
children
— Your children will kill your desire
— Children sound the death knell of the couple
— Having children is conformist
— Children are expensive
— You will be duped into thinking that there is such a thing as a perfect
child
— You will inevitably be disappointed by your own child
— You will be expected to be a mother before you are a professional and a
woman
— Families are a nightmare
— Children will put the seal on your childhood dreams
— You can’t stop yourself wanting complete happiness for your progeny
— Staying at home to look after children is breathtakingly dull
— You have to choose between motherhood and professional success
— When a child appears, the father disappears
— There are already too many children on the planet Children are dangerous.
They will take you to court without a second thought
THE BIRTHRATE IN EUROPE
Live births per 1,000 inhabitants in Europe in 2006
France: 13.1
UK: 12.4
Spain: 10.8
Czech Republic: 10.3
Greece: 10
Hungary: 9.9
Poland: 9.8
Latvia: 9.7
Austria: 9.4
Germany: 8.2
No Kid: Quarante raisons de ne pas avoir d’enfant, by Corinne Maier, is
published by Michalon, €14 (£9.50)
