La Vie Childfree

Francine Russo, journalist and author of  They’re Your Parents Too: How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents’ Aging Witout Driving Each Other Crazy recently did the informative piece, “When the Other Sibling Cares for the Aging Parent.” As her aging father and younger sister took care of her diabetic mother, she says, “I had no idea that I was entering a new developmental crisis in the life of my original family…All the old stuff came back and ambushed me: sibling rivalry, old resentments, yearning for my parents’ love, the guilt-laden ways we talked to each other – only worse.”

During the last year of her mother’s life, her sister never asked her to do anything, and she didn’t volunteer. She got the dig from her sister — “You’re not around.”  She writes that she’d deflected those digs all of her life, and she kept doing it then.

But this especially caught my eye–she had the defense for not helping out that “while my sister was childless by choice, I was widowed, a working mom with two kids and a life in New York.”

That got me thinking — do childless siblings have more expectations from family to care for aging parents? 

Continue reading “Caring for our aging parents” »

I have just returned from a trip with dear girlfriends. What a treasure to have close girlfriends! Mine are a combination of childfree women and moms.  On the heels of the trip, I’m inspired to say a few words about friendships that do not have children in common. 

One of the most common things that childfree people talk to me about is how their relationships with their friends change when their friends become parents. All of the sudden they don’t have a big thing in common, and both sides let it affect the friendship. 

One reason–Parents often assume that because their childfree friends have chosen not to have kids of their own, they can’t and/or don’t want to have a meaningful role in their friends’ lives anymore and the lives of their kids. Our decision not to have kids just means we have chosen not to make children the focus of our lives; this does not mean we don’t want to participate with our friends lives and the lives of their children!

Another reason—

Continue reading “The Art of Childfree and Parent Friendships” »

Check out Lori Bradley’s recent piece on Bella Online’s Married No Kids Site.  She interviews a childfree colleague, who talks about his decision, relations with friends, workplace issues and more.

The piece brought to mind things I’ve learned from childfree men in developing Families of Two to date. When I’ve asked men about why they chose not to have children, I’ve been surprised at how many tell a similar story.  From an early age they saw their parents’ struggles (their father’s in particular) — having enough money to raise the kids, working two jobs, never home, etc. that they decided then this was not the kind of life they wanted for themselves when they grew up.  

While we might think that with couples the woman more often than not drives the decision about having children or not, I was surprised to learn that ..

Continue reading “Hearing from Childfree Men” »

Tiffany Lee Brown’s story in my January 30 post got me thinking…She described herself as “biologically childfree.” She is a parent, yet considered herself childfree (I use this in the past tense because she is now pregnant). Cambridge dictionary online defines it as “people who choose not to have children.”  “Have children” in this definition does tend to imply having them biologically.

Wikipedia defines it as a “term used to describe individuals who neither have children nor desire to have children.”  In other words, they don’t want kids and don’t want their own.

But are people truly childfree if they say no to having their own, yet are playing the role of parent? Are they really childfree, say, if they are helping to raise children that came with their spouse? 

Continue reading “Biologically Childfree vs Childfree” »