Families of Two: the childfree a decade later

I came across an interesting utube video by “ochinaocatosunflower“  on the childfree movement. She wanted to do her utube video because while she see news stories on childfree, but not on utube.  She describes some myths with the childfree.  One is “You are incomplete as a woman if  you don’t have kids.”  She says their is a religious component to this, namely, the idea that “you have a god given right to have children.”  For her she has no god given right, as she is an atheist.

That got me thinking–are childfree more likely to be atheist than those who have children?  Past research does indicate trends that the childfree are less religious, but I have not seen current research on this, and no research on childfree 20 somethings in this regard. In my interviews for Families of  Two, religious affiliation ran the gamut; some described themselves as religious, others less so, but I did not meet any that described them selves as atheists. 

Ochinaocatosunflower also makes a great point about the myth of childfree …

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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? 

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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—

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