Why It's Important to Make Space for the Childless and Childfree
The basis of my Medium Day 2024 talk
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This story was adapted from my session "Making Space For the Childless and Childfree" at Medium Day 2024; if you missed it, you can watch it here.
Perhaps the most common question I get asked when people find out I am a voracious reader, writer, and speaker of the childless and childfree life is, “Why?”
And my answer is simple.
I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did.
I’m someone who has never wanted children, and while I call myself childfree, I don’t feel it’s a choice; it’s simply who I am. And yet my ex-mother-in-law begged me, begged me, relentlessly to have a baby.
I endured several years of feeling deep shame, anxiety, and loneliness and thinking I was abnormal. I wanted to want children so I could fit in and be like everyone else. But my authentic self knew this was not for me.
At the same time, many of my friends were having children and didn’t quite understand my situation. In those days there weren’t the same resources for the childfree and childless as there are today.
I felt desperately isolated.
My experiences lit a spark in me to help reduce the stigma of the childfree and childless.
So, I’ve been talking, listening, reading, and writing about all the different flavours of life without children. While I approach this from my place of being childfree by choice, I try to be as inclusive as possible of those for whom it wasn’t a choice.
And by the way, recognising the validity and nuance of a life without children takes nothing away from recognising the validity and nuance of a life with them. It is not a parent versus non-parent equitability pie.
Life without children is complex, and murky and not as straight forward as one may think. Everyone without children has their own story.
My biggest learning to date is this.
All of us — everyone on this planet — just want to feel like we belong, that we are loved and included. And yet so many of us feel misunderstood.
I know parenting comes with many challenges and a roller coaster of emotions. And new parents especially describe an aching loneliness. I can’t pretend to understand this first-hand, but I can be a non-judgemental listening ear for my friends with kids.
Similarly, I don’t know what it’s like to deeply want children and not be able to have them, then have to navigate the prickly world of childlessess and its enduring grief, but I can hold space for this and be an ally.
There’s a misconception that parents know what it’s like to be childfree or childless. But life before children is very different to living a life intentionally childfree or unintentionally childless.
So I can’t help but feel we are all doing what we can with our own quota of joy, suffering and confusion in this thing called life. We are all hankering to be understood, while not always doing our best at trying to understand.
I think we can all do better.
Non-parents are a marginalised group
Bear with me, because when I say people without children are a marginalised group, sometimes I get push back, but here’s why I say this.
People without children make up almost a quarter of adult society, yet we are often othered, invisibled, infantilised and excluded.
We are treated like other minority groups, and yet we are not a protected demographic. Certainly, we are rarely, if ever, accounted for in diversity, equity and inclusion policy.
Anyone following American politics will be aware of recent comments about people without children not having a stake in the future and a call for us to have less say in democracy while paying higher taxes. Even the Pope has a history of branding people without children as selfish.
This discourse is nothing new. But when comments like this come from the top, they trickle through society and create biases, stereotypes, hostility and division.
Such generalised attacks on people without children fail to recognise and acknowledge with respect and sensitivity all the myriad of reasons people don’t have children.
This is pronatalism at its ugliest.
Like all the problematic isms, pronatalism is building an increasing “us and them”. It’s a little more sinister than just encouraging births.
We understand that those who are racist or sexist carry a belief in a superior race or gender, and this influences the harmful things they say and do.
In the same manner, pronatalists carry the belief that someone who has reproduced is superior to someone who hasn’t. Perpetuating the message that non-parents are inferior. This leads to little frictions toward people without children.
And this is why I’m here.
This is why Life Without Children exists. It is a safe place to read and write about all the emotions and experiences of life without children.
Let’s talk about identity
How people without children identify differs, and I am certainly not the gatekeeper of semantics.
In general, childfree is the term used for those of us choosing not to have children and for those who want children but can’t have them, they often prefer the term childless as this best represents the associated grief.
The use of the terms childless and childfree are not interchangeable.
Yet the media has an icky way of using them interchangeably, squashing all the lived experiences of a life without children into one label, which only serves to collapse the identities of how and why we got here and invalidate, ignore and dismiss the complexity of our lives.
Suggesting that someone who identifies as childless is childfree has toxic positivity vibes to it. And suggesting that someone who is childfree is childless feels reductive.
Language matters.
So why do we need to talk about not having children?
It seems this year is the year we have reclaimed the childless cat lady trope. Thanks JD Vance.
But the primary reason I feel we need to talk about being childfree and childless is to help others know they are not alone, to validate the lifetime grief of the childless, and the intentional and often deeply reflected upon choices of the childfree.
And until not having children is accepted, respected and integrated into the melting pot of society, I will continue writing and talking about it.
In fact, for me, talking and writing about being childfree has been an instrumental part of my healing journey. Because of my own experiences, I was angry, hurting and lonely. It felt like no one was listening to me as I endured years of gaslighting with comments such as “Oh, you will change your mind” or “You’ll regret that.”
Imagine we said that in response to pregnancy announcements or to someone who said they wanted children.
This assumption that everyone wants children and everyone can have them is perhaps at the root of all misinformation.
In a great story by my friend and fellow Medium writer Charlie Brown, Charlie explores what the world would look like if not having kids was the cultural norm.
Having children is the default setting for adulting, and when we stray from this for any reason, we have our purpose, happiness, fulfilment and love questioned. Heck, we have our sanity questioned with labels such as crazy cat lady.
I’ve had several people tell me they feel sad for me and that they didn’t believe I was happy since I didn’t have or want children. I find this patronising and deeply condescending.
These types of comments position having children as the one and only way to experience a meaningful life. It assumes that everyone is the same and lacks the imagination to consider all the incredible ways life can be meaningful outside of children.
If you can sit with your own discomfort of another’s childlessness or their choice to be childfree and not try and change them or fix them, you are a great ally.
Because we all find meaning in different ways.
Often, the childfree have found their meaning. And while those who are childless may experience a trickier journey to meaning, they will get there.
There is hope and optimism even for those who are living a life without children that they didn’t choose.
And it’s so important that we as a society recognise the different paths of a life without children.
Ideally, if someone learns that I am childfree, I would love for them to say, “Good on you for knowing your own mind.” Don’t pity me or catastrophise my life.
And in response to someone who is childless, a bit of empathy goes a long way, how about, “That must be hard. I hope you have other things that bring you joy.”
How do we bring about change? Perhaps we start with the world’s children
Can you remember how you were spoken to about children when you were a child yourself?
So often, sentences would start with “when you have children…” Not if, but when.
This type of wording assumes both that children will want to have children and that they will be able to. Imagine we changed our phraseology to “If you want to and you are able to …”
If we educate little girls that having children is a choice with no guarantees, we may prevent a huge amount of shame, anxiety, and heartache in their later years.
I believe we have a lot to learn from the LGBTQIA+ community. By banding together and showing allyship between parents, the childless and the childfree, we can do better to be inclusive of all the different ways we are human.
We can do better. We must do better.
Ultimately, what I always say is this.
If someone wants children and will be a good parent, I hope things work out for them. But if someone doesn’t want children, then I forever hope this choice will be respected and accepted. And please, please, can we recognise and validate the grief of the childless.
In Tony Stubblebine’s Be Part of a Better Internet story, he says Medium is here to “promote deeper understanding, not misunderstanding or division” and this is what I want to do with Life Without Children.
I want to help raise awareness of all the different flavours of life without children, how we got here, the challenges, the joys, the hurts and the beauty.
If you are childless or childfree, know you are not alone.
This story was adapted from my session Making Space For the Childless and Childfree at Medium Day 2024, if you missed my session, you can watch it here.
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Happily childfree here, and I’m so grateful to have a big Chosen Family of other childfree people in our lives. I got a bit of grief from my mother when I was younger, but have been lucky to have a lot of support from my circle,
Excellent article, thank you.💕
Thanks for your tireless work to make childfree people like me feel seen. I've lived my whole adult life being shamed, particularly by my own mother, for not having children. Having children is an "order" In our old tradition and it's considered a breach of "filial piety" if you disobey. It got so ridiculous that even after my menopause, my mom was still nagging me about having a child, and shamed me for not fulfilling the full potential of a woman. Today, you will find a new generation of women in China disobeying their parents by refusing to marry and bear children (for economic reasons as well as for their awakened individual freedom). Huge fights ensue 😱. Anyway, I can see this childfree/childless discussion explode exponentially and globally.
I really love this passage:
"All of us — everyone on this planet — just want to feel like we belong, that we are loved and included. And yet so many of us feel misunderstood."
It mirrors 💯 how I feel (especially being a minority in every aspect of my life!) Thank you once again for this powerful essay.