Families of Two: the childfree a decade later

Mailonline has an interesting article by Lucy Cavendish, “I love my kids, but I admit it-I’m happier on my own!”  She talks about how she loves her kids but has to admit her moments of “genuine bliss” do not revolve around being a mother. 

As you might expect,  she got an array of comments, from criticizing her for admitting this, to “of course you need a break from the kids!,” to speculating she regrets having kids, and more, some sympathetic, some harsh.  

She speaks to how the book, Bluebird: Women And The New Psychology of Happiness confirms she is not alone.  When author Ariel Gore asked mothers to keep track of their moments of genuine bliss, they mostly had to do with…. (more…)

I am reading When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by New York Times columnist and author Gail Collins. While interesting and informative about the history of women during this time period, covering politics, popular culture, economics, sex, work, and family, I am disappointed that there is no discussion of – you can guess– the emergence and rise in numbers of women who decide to have no children.  No mention or discussion relating to how in 1975..

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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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