The actual heroes are those that haven’t got youngsters, writes CLARE FOGES

Autumn: season of social media awash with back-to-school portraits, kids on doorsteps wearing too-big blazers and too-shiny shoes. 

On school WhatsApp groups across the land parents congratulate each other on surviving rain-lashed weeks in Devon while completing the holiday homework and treating multiple cases of norovirus. 

‘We did it!’ goes the general tone of solidarity and mutual back-slapping.

Parents are often accused of smuggery, and these days there’s a new reason for feeling rather superior about our life choices: birth rates are plummeting across the Western world. 

A study published in The Lancet earlier this year warned of ‘staggering social change’ as a result.

Thus, having children is cast as not only a nice thing to do but an act of national service: lie back, sweethearts, and think of England’s demographic timebomb!

As birth rates skydive, panicky politicians around the world heap praise on child-bearers. 

Motherhood should be ‘the ultimate aspiration’ for girls, declares Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. Putin has brought back a Stalin-era reward for super-spawners, bestowing a million roubles on women who have ten babies.

While child-bearers are lauded for their fecundity, the child-free get a bad rap. Visiting Indonesia last week, Pope Francis despaired that unlike people in the host nation, who have ‘three, four or five children’, some in the West ‘prefer to only have a cat or a little dog’. 

It’s a running theme, as last year he blasted ‘selfish, egotistical’ Italians for being more interested in having pets than children. So says the father of, um, none.

Meanwhile in the United States, Donald Trump‘s Vice President pick J.D. Vance has also had a pop at ‘childless cat ladies’, selfishly enjoying their kitties when they should be down the labour ward, doing their bit for the Free World.

Perhaps as a mother of four I would be expected to nod along with the Pope and Vance, looking down from my lofty procreative perch on the footloose and feckless child-free who are prioritising foreign holidays and fancy cars over the important business of perpetuating the species.

Quite the contrary. I think it’s utter rot. It is not the child-rearing who tend to be the unspoken heroes or the selfless ones, but the child-free.

Parenthood might turn your heart to Play-Doh in your darlings’ hands, but nine times out of ten it also makes you selfish, or at least severely blinkered.

Before I had children, I used to think deeply about the problems ailing the nation: how to alleviate inner-city poverty, or fix the NHS, or fill holes in the UK defence budget. 

These days 95 per cent of my brain is taken up with such pressing issues as whether we have enough Babybels for the lunchboxes tomorrow.

Before children, I devotedly volunteered: in the Christmas soup kitchen, at a hospital radio station, in a charity shop. Now any spare minute is devoted not to the greater good but to the good of my household. This is perfectly natural but hardly laudable.

A recent incident underlined my child-bestowed selfishness. Pushing the double buggy along a busy road, I was shocked by a screech of brakes and cry of pain.

Twenty feet ahead, an injured cyclist crawled onto the pavement, not seriously wounded but bloodied and dazed. In the old days, I would be the first to surge forward, call the ambulance, root in my bag for a bottle of water for him and so on. 

But with other people on the pavement who could help – without children in tow – I swerved past, pushing on home to get the oven on in time for dinner.

Good mothers don’t always make Good Samaritans.

I still care about the world beyond my household but, frankly, motherhood has swallowed me whole, sapping much of the outward-facing energy I once had. I am too knackered to be of much service to society.

When you are deep in the trenches of parenthood, selfless instincts are trampled underfoot. 

While some may get back to ‘giving back’ when their children are older and easier, many will not. Children still require enormous amounts of time and energy into their teens, 20s, 30s…

So who’s picking up the slack when we parents are fretting about de-nitting our kids’ hair or dealing with their latest crisis? The much-maligned child-free.

Go to any library or charity shop or food bank and you can be pretty sure to find some of those ‘childless cat ladies’ that J.D. Vance sneers at. 

With perhaps more time and energy at their disposal than some peers with children, I would wager that the child-free play a disproportionately important role in keeping the nation’s show on the road.

One of the roles that many child-free play is that of chief carer to an elderly relative. While of course there are those who are run ragged by the twin tasks of caring for both children and elderly parents, in my experience it is often the grown-up children without offspring who do much of the caring.

When my late great aunt was living alone in her mid-90s, her main pillars of support were two child-free men in middle age, one a relative and one a friend. 

It was they who travelled hours to see her, not the relatives (including myself) who were absorbed in raising children.

So forget this binary nonsense that pits the child-free against the child-rearing. Yes, we as a society need people to have children and undertake the job of raising them. 

But we also rely on those who don’t have children, and whose energies are spent not within the home but in care homes, hospices, charities and community clubs, in millions of quietly compassionate actions every day.

Their role in society may not be gushed about the way that parents are, but their service is just as great.