When I have leisure time, it's often like my friends and relatives who have kids try setting it up as the perfect opportunity for me to babysit for them so that they can go have some leisure time themselves. Now, being requested to babysit doesn't bother me (I generally like kids), but the assumption that my time is not valuable enough to me because I don't have kids... well, it abounds. It's as if my lack of kids means any time I spend not at work is automatically idle time that must be filled with kids. Meanwhile, any leisure time spent by a parent is automatically well-deserved free time*.
My free time is perfectly valuable to me. My lack of kids does not make it petty idle time any more than your free time is petty idle time.
But there's more to it than just "free time = free time." You have to also recognize that, tiresome or not, having kids in this society is a choice, with very few exceptions. If you didn't want kids, you could have used birth control, had an abortion, or given the baby away. The only reasonable excuse for having and keeping kids is because you either wanted them or have some religious motivation--also a choice in our culture--for having them.
Likewise, not having kids was my choice, and there was a reason I made that choice, and that's that I want to occupy my time with other things: Intellectual pursuits, my career, relationships, activism, animal care, and hobbies all occupy my time. The time I spend outside of work is not "idle." It is filled with things that are very important to me.
"Well, I had a lot of things I loved doing, too, but now that I have kids..."
Yeah, I know that, we all know that, and you knew that before you had kids. There are even jokes about it. Jokes that are actually kind of sad.
But OK, like I already said, I don't mind babysitting... or housesitting, or dogsitting, or anything else... provided my own needs and preferences fall into the situation. Like, expecting that it's OK for me to be paid in "food and board" without recognizing that your pantry is full of Cheetos and other things I can't eat, and also that I already have a house that I rather enjoy sleeping in. If you're not the kind of person who will readily help me move if I ask, in which case there is the agreement that we are just going to help when we need each other, that just doesn't fly.
It also doesn't fly when you whine to your other friends and relatives that I decided to, say, go on a birding trip I had planned in advance rather than babysit your kids at the last minute because I "had nothing to do."
I do have things to do. They just don't involve kids.
*I know that due to stereotypes about certain kinds of parents this isn't always the case, such as low-income single mothers who are derided as "lazy," but in the context of my friends and relatives and their perceptions of themselves it is.
