At some point in everyone’s life the question “When are you going to settle down” changes into “when are you going to have kids?”. These innocent questions are soon replaced with a tectonic shift in the social weighting of personal success. People begin to derive social status through how many kids they have and how successful the little ones are. This culture of living vicariously through your kids is epitomized in the family stick figure bumper sticker. Where families make sure everyone around them knows just how big and great their families are.
Enter the childless couple sticker (above). Primal human pride, in this case, bragging about one’s family in order to make oneself look better to others(especially on your car) is the common pace which this sticker’s argument is based. The obvious rhetorical interpretation from the sticker is that instead of having kids, this couple decided to keep their money – worthy of a good chuckle. The logos of the argument is simply that not having kids is not something to be ashamed of, there are trade offs financially which more than warrant a fair bit of bragging.
What makes this bumper sticker so effective in conveying this logical appeal can be found in the underlying irony. Although I have been making lofty claims about pride motivating families to brag about the size of their families, a key feature of such bumper sticker is that it isn’t outwardly pompous. The typical stick figure family is generally irritating only towards people without children. The subtleness of this gut punch adds to how irritating those stickers are.
By literally putting a stack of money in place of a long line of children, the image indicates that, first, the children are what others have been bragging about and, secondly, raise the question-compared to a financial ease who’s really winning? This subtle irony adds a spice of humor to the message and makes the logos behind not having kids a very convincing argument.