I have one, and only one, firm and sincere desire about what quality my grandchildren should possess: non-existence. Don't get me wrong: I don't want everyone to give up parenthood. Mine is not a misanthropic wish for the slow self-extinction of the species. It is simply a desire that more people should remain childless than currently do.

The issue for me is not overpopulation. Families having two or fewer children simply aren't a problem. Nor is it that oft-repeated but ridiculous desire not to bring children into such a dangerous and doomed world. If you really thought the planet was in such a bad state that it is better not to even be alive on it, then you would do yourself a favour and head for the exit right away. (But please don't. My point is that you're just wrong to think things are that bad.)

The issue for me is rather one about the possible forms of the good life. I just cannot understand why it is that the vast majority of people seem to think breeding is a vital component of a flourishing existence.

I think I can explain by puzzlement by simply asking you to think about what we know family life is typically like. In my experience, more people find it fraught than unambiguously positive. Most people have difficult relationships with at least one parent, and I don't think I know anyone who visits either or both as often as they could, if they really wanted to. Many parents are haunted by the fact that they are not as close to their children as they hoped or imagined they would be.

Given that, you might think that people were at least ambivalent about whether starting their own family is worth it. Yet almost everyone seems to assume that it is obviously a wonderful thing to do. You'd have thought there was no alternative, but of course there is.

And here's where I think the problem really lies. It's not that I think family life is so awful no one in their right mind would want it; it's that child-free life can be so good that I'm annoyed it is almost always presented as second-best, cold and empty. "Who will be there for you when you're old?" people say. (Contradicting themselves, these same people will often chide the childless for being selfish.) Have they not noticed that hardly any elderly parent lives with their children these days? If I am to end up in a home, I think I'd rather do so without the pain of realising that my family don't want to look after me. But it is part of the hopeless optimism of everyone who starts a family that their children won't allow this to happen.

Of course I can see that parenthood has unique rewards that the childless miss out on. But a child-free life also has unique rewards that you miss when you start a family. For instance, the freedom to read a book or to have an adult conversation uninterrupted is not trivial, and any hands-on parent seriously compromises their ability to express this important capacity. The only way to combine parenthood with anything like the full pursuit of adult interests is to farm out the majority of childcare, which is of course precisely what so many "great men" of the past did, and which many men and women do today. That is not wrong, but it illustrates the key point that parenthood requires trade-offs: it does not trump all other goods.

The goods of the childless life reflect something very important about the good life for everyone. Humans have the capacity to rise above the biological imperative to reproduce. That we do not place the highest value on passing on our genes is part of what makes us different and, yes, in some sense superior to our fellow animals. Yet society does not celebrate our freedom to do this. Reproducing is still seen as the healthy norm, "failing" to do as an aberration. If many more of us do not have grandchildren, then perhaps we will make it clearer that sexual reproduction may be the meaning of animal life, but it sure ain't the best or only reason for humans to get up in the morning: refreshed, after a night uninterrupted by the cries of little angels.