Need a Kid to Leave a Lasting Legacy? Not if You are Dolly Parton!

People assume that if you are not a parent you are not a contributing member of society. Yet, I regularly see news reports of childfree people making a profound difference in their communities. A recent example is the generous help singer/songwriter/entrepreneur Dolly Parton offered families who had lost their homes in the devastating wildfires in her home state of Tennessee.

When I interviewed couples for my book Two is Enough: A Couples Guide to Living Childless by Choice, I noted a similar desire to help people and all living things. Scratch the stigmatized veneer of a childfree person and you will find a volunteer, philanthropist, pet rescuer, mentor, coach, activist, or advocate.

Childfree people may not be nurturing their biological children but they are finding ways to make a difference in their worlds using the time, energy, and resources they are grateful to have; they are finding ways to share these resources with others.

Think back on your own life and recall all those who have helped you--teachers, coaches, youth ministers, mentors, neighbors and relatives. I suspect there is a childless or childfree person among them. Just like parents, we want to leave a legacy, but our legacy justs looks a little different.

What legacy are you creating?

How the Childfree Plan for End of Life

What are you going to do when you get old? As much as I hate this question, I love how creative the childfree have been in their response to this. Not by words but by actions. Recently the New York Times featured an article about childfree women and men who had taken the appropriate steps to plan for end of life so that they could embrace their golden years without worry and stress. Here's one man's story:

Bill Strubbe, 58, a travel writer and painter living in San Francisco’s East Bay, plans to leave the country. In the fall, Mr. Strubbe, who has no children and is single, is relocating to a kibbutz outside Haifa, Israel, that he has been visiting since he was 20.

“I’ll be living among a community of people I have known all my adult life and has systems in place for care of the elderly,” he said. “Unlike the U.S.A., Israel has excellent health care for all its citizens, and that will take a big load off of my mind, knowing that I won’t be left flapping in the breeze if something happens to me.”

Of course, one issue facing the childless is what to do with their estates. Some establish foundations in their name or leave money to charity, said David W. Nethery, senior vice president for wealth management at Merrill Lynch in Dallas. Others bequeath money to siblings, nieces and nephews, or friends, as did Ms. Lewton.

In Mr. Strubbe’s ideal world, he won’t have any cash left. “Hopefully I will have used it all up,” he said. Should there be any, he said he would most likely leave it to “nieces and nephews and/or some of the children of close friends on the kibbutz.”

Among the stipulations, he said, he is ordering recipients not to use their inheritance “to pay bills, taxes, rent or other such mundane things, but to earmark it for taking a trip you could never afford, enrolling in an art class that was not in the budget, or do something meaningful, wild and fun.”

I love this! Mr. Stubbe isn't the only who is considering communal living at the end of life and it makes sense. As a coach, I am constantly reminding my clients the importance of staying connected and building tribes, especially as we age. It's so important to our quality of life. I am thrilled to know there are role models for a happy, fulfilled, and worry free life into our seventies, eighties and beyond.

Taking Control at End of Life

What happens when you get old? It's an annoying question, I know, but even more annoying when you don't have an answer.

That is why I was thrilled to see NY Times Blogger Paula Span, elder care expert, tackle this issue head on and write in detail about the importance and challenges of a having a health care proxy.
While you may be able to convince a trusted relative, lawyer, doctor, or nurse to be your proxy, they may not feel comfortable in that role, writes Span:

"Geriatric care managers seem a better fit; they’re comfortable in hospitals and nursing homes and charge lower hourly rates than lawyers. Karen Wasserman, director of Your Elder Experts, part of Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Boston, serves as surrogate for a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor with no family, and she’s starting to see healthy people in their 70s putting their paperwork together and asking her staff to take that role.
“I don’t see it as that big a leap,” Ms. Wasserman said. “Often, it’s continuing the work we do anyway, advocating for our clients,” whom the staff has often known for years. “It’s often an honor to be there for these people. It’s part of the deal.”

There are childfree folks out there that would, literally, rather die than relinquish control of their end of life decision-making and that poses another challenge. Are we ready as a society to let them make that choice, like Switzerland allows through the Exit organization? You tell me?

Photo credit: Flickr Photo by Flatbush Gardener

Parents Supporting Their Childfree Children

I have been very fortunate in the fact that both my parents have always supported my choice to remain childfree. This is not always the case for childfree folks, as I documented in my book Two is Enough and the documentary film The Childless by Choice Project. Some parents do put a lot of pressure on their children to produce the grandchildren. Other parents just can't understand why.

I had a really happy childhood, with a Mom and Dad who were excellent role models for Parenthood. Yet I chose to remain childless by choice, not because I didn't know how to parent but because I didn't think parenthood was a good role for me.

I can't tell you how many times people have told me, "Oh, you would be such a great mom!" And maybe I would be but I am convinced that had I been a mother I would have experienced many  unhappy and frustrating days wondering why I had chosen this path when other paths seemed so much more appealing and natural for me.

This is why I was glad to see Barbara Walters, one of the hosts of  the current events show The View defend her daughter's decision to remain childless.  As a career television journalist, Barbara Walters knows more than most women how difficult it can be to navigate motherhood and career and clearly she is very proud of her daughter, saying that she's very caring and loving, particularly to old people like herself.
 
One of the other women on the panel already had a child but was planning for more and couldn't wait for the opportunity to breast-feed a baby. You could tell by the faces of the other women on the panel that breast-feeding an infant was definitely not something they were wishing for as they lay their head on their pillow at night. And this is why The View's panel of five women works so well and why we tune in. These five women are a diverse group from all walks of life and they have a variety of experiences and opinions about issues that concern us all.  Yet they can agree that parenthood is not for everybody and recognize that although they would happily choose parenthood for themselves they can understand why some women and men may not want what they want.

If these five women of The View wanted the same things, believed the same things, and held the same opinions  we wouldn't be watching the show.  
 
Lucky for us, and lucky for the networks who profit from these shows, we respectfully disagree!

Lowest Birth Rate Ever! What Didn’t Get Reported…

When the National Center for Health Statistics reported the lowest birthrate ever recorded in the US in 2011 many media outlets went into alarmist mode with this new data. An example of this is the editorializing done by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe who warned that

when birth rates decline this is what materializes: economic stagnation, dwindling innovation, a declining lifestyle, the exploding health and pension costs of an aging population, and the ever-heavier taxes needed to maintain the government safety net when there are fewer workers and entrepreneurs…And intergenerational conflict and loneliness.

Well we’ll see about that. However, what was not widely reported was that there was some very good news in this report — births to unmarried teens hit a record low and the age group that was having more babies than previously reported was the 35 to 44 age group.

Why is this good news? I think most people would agree that it's good for women and it's good for society if women postpone childbearing until they are ready, both financially and emotionally, to care for the children that they choose to have. Though OB/GYNs and most healthcare professionals will counsel women to have children early—while they are in their most fertile years—the fact remains that women in their late teens and early twenties generally don't feel ready to have children or they have yet to find partners with which to raise a family. And though it's true that you should start procreating early in life if you're planning on having a large family of five + children, increasingly that is not what women, and men, want for themselves. Studies show that only 33 percent of Americans consider the ideal family size to be three + children. That's a huge change from the 1940s to the 1960s, when roughly 70 percent said that three or more children would be desirable.

When women postpone childbearing they generally do so by choice, even though it may not be a conscious day-to-day choice. And when they make those series of decisions to hold off on parenthood until they feel they are ready they become the intentional parent. The one who prepares the nest, physically, financially, and emotionally, is engaged in a conscious decision-making process that happily welcomes a child into the world. Sometimes it will take a woman many years to get to that point —where motives, desire, and resources meet. And, as these new birth stats show, that point might be in your late thirties or early forties.

The good news is we now have an age 35+ population that is healthy enough to carry a baby to term, although with the 40 + group it remains fairly risky and rare. But it is still an option for some of those 40 + women. And we also live in a country where there is the option to postpone parenthood until we are ready to raise our children or to forgo children altogether.

According to this report, it looks like that's exactly what is happening.

Brave New Label

I recently got an email from Pamela S. who is about to turn 45 years old. Pamela’s an early articulator who knew at the age of eight that she didn’t want children but she has never truly adopted the terms childless by choice or childfree.  Here’s her story:

My decision to remain childless by choice was never really a decision, it’s just who I am. When my mother was alive she loved to tell friends (both mine and hers) about how, at age eight I went around telling people that I’d never get married and I’d never have children. Well, I did get married, for the first time at age forty-four! Still no children though; no regrets, either.

Throughout my teenage years I had to contend with the wedding and baby dreams of most of my friends and peers. At age 20, I was diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful, incurable condition that often robs many would-be-mothers of their fertility. I wasn’t one of those; I never wanted children but I certainly didn’t want endometriosis either. It also did not rob me of my fertility so I had to use birth control, but endometriosis was an excuse, something I could tell people instead of “I just don’t want them.” Over the years, various women have made offhanded comments about how “it’s lucky that you have that condition and not someone who wants children.” Seriously? I thought: How insensitive.

Many people (most of them women) have also theorized that there must have been some fatal flaw in my upbringing that would cause me to not want children because they believe that there must be something wrong with a woman who doesn’t want to be a mother. Well, let’s see…my parents were happily married for over 35 years, until the day my mother died of cancer. I went to a nice private school, have two College degrees and work as an English teacher. I have no criminal record, own my own home, recycle, pay my taxes, and maintain a good credit score.

There is, however, a bittersweet twist here; I was adopted as an infant out of foster care by my parents, who had tried to conceive a child but weren’t able to. My mother, who passionately wanted children, couldn’t have them. I’d never wanted children but had to rely on birth control not to have them. So here I was, a child who didn’t want children, given up for adoption by a birth mother who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep me, delivered into the arms of a woman who truly wanted a child. Maybe the universe really does work in mysterious ways.

Ultimately though it does bother me that the term “childless” seems to infer that having (or wanting) children is the normal, default position, while not having (or not wanting) them is somehow defined as “less” than that. I propose that we come up with a new term to define those who have consciously, happily chosen to remain without children. The term “child free” is marginally better, implying a sense of freedom that hey, let’s be honest here; parents just don’t have. Still, I would like to see a new term enter the lexicon; one that accurately describes the desire to remain child free by choice. Despite my multiple English degrees and many headache inducing hours spent trying to come up with a term, I just can’t. Perhaps I too have been unwittingly socialized to believe that children are the “natural” default. Or maybe there just are no words to describe what I feel in a language created by the same world that deems me and others like me “not normal.” I’m open to suggestions…

Flickr photo by Bashed