It’s not mums who deserve medals. The real heroes are those who don’t have children, writes CLARE FOGES

Fall: the time when social media is flooded with photos of the start of the school year, kids standing on the doorstep in oversized blazers and overly shiny shoes.

In school WhatsApp groups across the country, parents are congratulating each other on surviving the rainy weeks in Devon, all while completing their holiday homework and treating multiple cases of norovirus.

“We did it!”, it sounds in the general tone of solidarity and mutual pats on the back.

Parents are often accused of complacency and today there is a new reason to feel superior about the choices we make in our lives: birth rates are plummeting in the Western world.

A study published in The Lancet earlier this year warned of “massive societal changes” as a result.

Thus, having children is seen not only as a nice thing to do, but also as an act of national service: sit back, darlings, and contemplate England’s demographic time bomb!

As birth rates soar, panicked politicians around the world are praising women who have children.

Motherhood should be “the ultimate ambition” for girls, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has declared. Putin has brought back a Stalin-era reward for super-spawners, offering a million rubles to women who have 10 babies.

While childbearers are praised for their fertility, childless ones get a bad name. When Pope Francis visited Indonesia last week, he despaired that unlike people in the host country, who have “three, four or five children,” some in the West “prefer only a cat or a small dog.”

It’s a recurring theme, as last year he criticised “selfish, egotistical” Italians for being more interested in pets than children, according to the father of, er, none.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has also criticized “childless cat ladies.” They selfishly enjoy their cats when they should be in the maternity ward, doing their bit for the Free World.

Perhaps you would expect me, as a mother of four, to agree with the Pope and Vance, and from my exalted, procreative perch to look down on the promiscuous and reckless childless who prioritize foreign vacations and expensive cars over the more important business of preserving the species.

On the contrary. I think it is pure garbage. It is not the educators who are the unspoken heroes or the selfless, but the childless.

Parenthood may make you want to throw Play-Doh in the hands of your loved ones, but nine times out of ten it also makes you selfish, or at the very least, seriously narrow-minded.

Before I had children, I had been thinking long and hard about the country’s problems: how could we tackle inner-city poverty, fix the NHS, or plug the holes in Britain’s defence budget?

These days, 95 percent of my brain is occupied with pressing issues, like whether we’ll have enough Babybels for tomorrow’s lunch boxes.

Before I had children I was a dedicated volunteer: at a Christmas soup kitchen, at a hospital radio station, in a charity shop. Now I spend every spare minute not for the greater good but for the welfare of my household. This is perfectly natural, but hardly commendable.

A recent incident underscored my child-given selfishness. As I was pushing the double stroller down a busy road, I was startled by a squeal of brakes and a cry of pain.

Twenty feet away, an injured cyclist crawled onto the sidewalk, not seriously injured but bloodied and dazed. I used to be the first to rush forward, call the ambulance, dig in my bag for a bottle of water for him, and so on.

But with other people on the sidewalk who could help – without kids in tow – I managed to get past them on my way home to get the oven on in time for dinner.

Good mothers are not always good Samaritans.

I still care about the world outside my household, but honestly, motherhood has consumed me and sucked away much of the outward energy I once had. I am too exhausted to be of much use to society anymore.

When you’re in the midst of parenthood, selfless instincts get trampled on.

While some may “give back” when their children are older and more lenient, many will not. Children still require a tremendous amount of time and energy in their teens, 20s, 30s…

So who will take on the role when we as parents worry about delousing our children’s hair or dealing with their latest crisis? The much-discussed childless one.

Go to any library, thrift store, or food bank and you can be pretty sure you’ll encounter some of those “childless cat ladies” that JD Vance so derisively refers to.

Because they may have more time and energy at their disposal than some of their peers with children, I would wager that the childless population plays a disproportionately important role in the country’s survival.

One of the roles that many childless children play is that of primary caregiver for an elderly relative. While there are of course those who become exhausted by the dual task of caring for both children and elderly parents, in my experience it is often the adult children without offspring who do the bulk of the caregiving.

When my late great-uncle lived alone in her mid-nineties, her main supports were two middle-aged, childless men, a relative, and a friend.

It was they who traveled for hours to see her, not the family members (including myself) who were so busy raising the children.

So forget this binary nonsense that pits the childless against the child-rearing. Yes, we as a society need people who have children and take it upon themselves to raise them.

But we also depend on people who do not have children, and whose energies are not invested in the home but in nursing homes, hospices, charities and community groups, where millions of silent, compassionate actions are taken every day.

Their role in society may not be as highly regarded as that of parents, but their commitment is at least as great.