The Independent's sociological correspondent enquires why people do and don't have kids.

	In an age of individualism children are borne of choice	TODAY WE no longer know why we have children. Our reasons may be multiple or simple: to love and to be loved, a commitment to the idea of "family", memories of our own childhood, biological curiosity, passion, altruism, selfishness, boredom, vanity, no reason at all. Once it was clear. Children were borne out of duty, as workers and successors, or because their parents had no choice. In an age of individualism children are borne of choice, supposedly. And choice, or rather the rhetoric of choice, is the key to the undoing of the modern family. The idea of children as a personal asset, belonging to their individual parents, has undermined the premiss on which support systems for families were once built. Nowadays even the state views the family as a private vessel which must be left to sail, sink or steer into the rocks. Today, one of the most common reasons cited by a British woman for having children (in one pan-European survey) is a demonstration of love for one's partner. A child is created as a gift of love - a private matter between two people. Once children begin to be seen as private projects, the commitment from other people outside the immediate family triangle weakens. Society has gradually become divided into the "have" and "have-nots". Those with children, and those without. Children become a life-style preference. Those who wish to live "child-free" must not have the offspring of others inflicted upon them. So the new mother, grappling to cope with the newness, complexity and sheer size of her new task, is left alone. She hesitates to ask for help. Marie, a new mother herself, told me of the day she was invited to Sunday lunch with child-free friends. She desperately wanted to go but she could not take her 12-week-old baby. Her own mother declined to babysit and added: "This is what motherhood is. It was your decision to have a baby." Today parents prefer to buy help from strangers rather than ask their own friends and relatives.
	Children become a life-style preference. Those who wish to live child-free must not have the others' offspring inflicted upon them.	In other communities, both minority communities in countries like Britain and America, or in other parts of the world, parenting is a shared enterprise. In parts of Latin America a co-madre and a co-padre are appointed for every newborn child. Their job is to aid parents with the practical, rather than the spiritual or emotional aspects of parenting: education, childminding, financial help if necessary. African Americans and African Caribbeans parent in a similar style. The American feminist author Bell Hooks has written: Child rearing is a responsibility that can be shared with other child rearers, with people who do not live with children. This form of parenting is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the idea that parents, especially mothers, should be the only child rearers. Parents from minority communities often find themselves blamed and targeted as poor or defective mothers for sharing their responsibility.
	related links: No kids, thank you very much (July 8)	The unassailable belief that we have choice, that we are indeed sovereign in our own lives and that people must live only with the consequences of these freely made decisions has damaged the essentially co-operative spirit we share as human beings. Today we are being offered ever more reproductive "choice". Yet where will this choice lead us? Women who carry genetic abnormalities are offered tests on their unborn children and the choice of an abortion. Yet what of the woman who decides to keep a child with thalassaemia? Will she find herself alone with the consequences of her decision? For, after all, wasn't it her choice?