TODAY'S GREAT NEWS! MORE WOMEN ARE HAVING LESS KIDS!!

Here's the scoop, folks - read it and cheer!

According to a recent Pew Research study, more American women than ever now remain childless all their lives: 20 percent, compared with 10 percent 40 years ago.

Yes! Yes! YES!

If it isn't obvious to you why this is great news, you're probably not reading this blog in the first place. However, let me elaborate...

I have been working with adults and children as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist for 34 years. Plus, I've raised and am still raising children at the age of... well, nevermind. Here's what I know, bottom line - most people who have children don't have a clue about what parenting a child is like as a life choice, and even moreso, most parents have no idea whatsoever about what a child needs developmentally to grow up to be even remotely self-actualized.

This extraordinarily dysfunctional reality starts with the pathological reasons most people have children in the first place.

Check these stats out:

If you have a college degree of any kind, there's a 24 percent chance that you will never have a child; with a Ph.D., there's a 34 percent chance that you'll never have a child. But if you've never finished high school, there's only a 15 percent chance that you'll never have a child.

If you live in Utah, you're nearly twice as likely to conceive than you would be if you lived in New Hampshire.

If you're a teenage girl who is in a relationship with a gang member, you're nearly twice as likely to become pregnant than teenage girls who are not involved with gang members.

HELLO?!!?

In other words, if you're uneducated, young, right wing and desperate, you're significantly more likely to have kids! How great for our world is that?!

Now, I can hear all of my Park Slope breeder neighbors, streaming into bars and fine dining restaurants with their SUV Maclaren strollers, railing at me because they are none of the above. They are right. They come from the other, more insidious group of unqualified parents: the narcissists. Right, the self-referential, middle and upper-middle class pseudo-adults who have kids as an extension of their own inflated egos or to vicariously have another go at their own lost childhoods. These are the overindulgent parents who create the narcissistic offspring written about recently who grow up to have no empathy and who can, without conscience, become the hedge fund managers destroying our economy out of their own skewed sense of entitlement.

So, let's stand up and celebrate the women (and men) who are perhaps spending their lifetimes focusing on their own personal growth and development and fulfillment instead of acting out their dramas through their children. The world desperately needs this shift and we should all be encouraged at the trend.

Yes!