If you’d asked 11-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you a mom. A Cool Mom. I’d have my first child — a boy — at 20; my second — a girl, of course — at 22. Cool Mom Amy picked her kids up from school every day, in all her Cool-Mom glory — big hair, neon miniskirt, legwarmers — with Capri Suns at the ready. She was the go-to chaperone at school dances and field trips, where kids soaked up her advice on fashion and friendships. Cool Mom Amy had a career, too. She was a musician, performing around the world. And she wasn’t just cool, she was fashionable and talented and sophisticated, too.

It all seemed reasonable enough. It was the ‘80s. Women were “having it all” all over the place. Why not me?

It didn’t occur to me that my globe-trotting lifestyle might not align well with chaperoning every school event, particularly in the age of intensive parenting. Or that I might be doing this alone, without a partner. Or if I had one, they might not be down for taking on the lion’s share of work needed to run a household while I traveled the world.

Could I have achieved the dream of world travel for work and Cool Mom parenting? Perhaps, but without incredible wealth, it seems unlikely. As Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter put it in her 2012 critique of the myth that women really could have it all, the idea is only really attainable for the “superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

At the time, I also hadn’t considered that I might grow up not wanting to be a mom or that non-motherhood was an option anyone could choose.

As I write in my book, “Childfree by Choice,” not having kids may be nothing new, but the notion that opting out of parenthood — for reasons perhaps as simple as “I don’t want to be a parent” — is a perfectly acceptable life choice, is only just beginning to gain traction.

The childfree movement emerged in the early 1970s, on the heels of the zero population growth and second-wave feminist movements, and with the publication of Ellen Peck’s controversial tome, “The Baby Trap.” Together with environmental activist (and parent) Shirley Radl, Peck founded the National Organization for Non-Parents (NON), an organization that historian Jenna Healey describes as dedicated to promoting childfree living as “both a socially respectable and politically responsible choice.”

Peck and other NON members faced incredible resistance to their ideas. In 1974, a friend of Dan Wakefield, who’d won NON’s Non-Father of the Year Award, said finding out about Dan’s honor was “like picking up the paper and reading one of your dearest friends has become a Nazi.” When Peck made an appearance on “The Tonight Show,” host Johnny Carson said he “thought the audience was going to lynch her.”