⁠I'm done explaining my child-free life

[00:00:00]Several months ago, I posted something on LinkedIn that I thought might resonate with a handful of people. It started with a pretty simple statement.

[00:00:06]I was 41, I'm married, and I don't have children. I asked whether other women in a similar position ever felt a bit unseen in the workplace and in advertising. And the response was huge.

[00:00:16]I had hundreds of comments, messages, emails, and conversations. Women sharing stories I'd never heard before, and perhaps more surprisingly, stories I'd experienced myself but never really put words to. Some women had never wanted children, some desperately did, some were still figuring it out. Some were single, some were married, some were carers. And I wanted to share a few things I've been thinking about. I don't have all the answers, and I don't think every woman will relate to this. But I think there are a lot more people living outside of the traditional script than we talk about. In fact, I know this isn't a small group. The latest ONS stats show that in England and Wales, nearly one in five women and almost one in four men have not had children by the age of 45. And look, I'm a few years off that. But despite those numbers, there are remarkably few places where we openly talk about what that experience feels like. Just to caveat, this video is centered on women because that's the experience I can speak to, but I suspect some of what I'm about to talk about will resonate with men, too. And what I want to be clear on up front is the more comments I read, the more messages I receive, the more conversations I've since gone on to have with people, the more I've realized this conversation wasn't really about having children, well, not entirely. It was about belonging, about identity, and honestly, about adulthood. It was [laughter] about what happens when your life doesn't follow the path everyone assumes it will. So, what I'm about to share are observations, but they are not universal truths. They're just seven things I've been thinking about since opening up that conversation. Number one, at some point, you stop being seen as not yet and start being seen as not at all. One thing I've noticed is when you're younger, people assume you're on your way somewhere. You're not married yet.

[00:01:48]You don't have children yet. You haven't settled down yet. The assumption is that these things are coming. And then somewhere between your late 30s and 40s, something shifts. You stop being seen as someone who hasn't done those things and you stop being seen as perhaps someone who isn't going to. There's a gradual change in language, in the way people ask questions or their assumptions. The way the world has categorized me changed before I consciously realized it happened. And I guess sometimes it feels uncomfortable because my life hasn't suddenly changed, but the way it's interpreted has. I think that's why this stage of life can feel disorientating.

[00:02:17]Partly I guess, and I'm speaking for myself here, I sometimes feel like I'm grieving a life I thought I might have had, but also because you're realizing the world has quietly placed you in a different category. Number two, the conversation isn't really about children, it's about belonging. One of the strongest themes that came through in the comments was belonging, or perhaps lack of it. Women talked about feeling slightly outside of things, outside certain conversations, of certain friendship dynamics, certain experiences. One woman described it as everyone crossing over into another world. And I thought that was such a powerful way of putting it. I think many of us have experienced that feeling of something. For me, one example is dinner parties, and I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but once you see it, you don't unsee it. When I'm in a relationship, I get invited to dinner parties all the time, but when I'm single, those invitations disappear. And I've spoken to enough single women to know this isn't just me. Pretty much every relationship I've been where we've had dinner parties as a group, there's often a single man or two, but there are rarely single women. And maybe some of that is coincidence, maybe some of it is logistics, but I also suspect there's some internalized nonsense there, too.

[00:03:15]Some old story that a woman on her own somehow changes the dynamic, or that she's a threat. And I know that sounds dramatic, but if you're a single woman watching this, there is a good chance you've experienced some of version of that. I think it's such a small thing, but it illustrates something much bigger. And that feeling isn't necessarily people are deliberately excluding you, it's that you suddenly realize you're standing outside of a social structure that was designed around couples and families. And after a while, that can feel surprisingly lonely. And again, I don't think it's necessarily about not having children, but about being outside of the experience. Number three, we still treat parenthood as the final marker of adulthood. One phrase in the comments on my LinkedIn post really floored me.

[00:03:50]Someone described their experience as being treated like they were living adulthood light, and I knew exactly what she meant. You can run a business, pay a mortgage, look after family members, build a career, support other people, navigate heartbreak, manage your finances, make difficult decisions, and yet somehow there is a subtle suggestion that the real version of adulthood looks somewhere beyond where you are, usually behind a spouse and a couple of children. It shows up in little comments. You wouldn't understand.

[00:04:15]You've got no real responsibilities. You can do whatever [clears throat] you want. And every one of those comments carries an assumption about whose life counts as serious and whose doesn't. The truth is my life isn't responsibility free. I carry every financial responsibility in my life alone. I don't have another income to fall back on. I run a business. I've supported family members through difficult times. I make decisions every day that will affect my future. My responsibilities might look different to a parent, but they're still real, and I don't think adulthood should require a specific life event to validate it. Number four, we talk about flexibility at work as though only parents need it. One of the most interesting conversations I had after posting this topic came from one of my clients. She told me about a company-wide call during lockdown. The head of HR came on to the call to acknowledge how difficult things were for parents trying to juggle work, home school. I mean, yeah, of course it sounds incredibly difficult. My client was saying she remembered sitting there thinking, "We're in the middle of a global pandemic. People are isolated, living alone. Perhaps they're trapped in relationships they don't want to be in, caring for elderly relatives, struggling with anxiety, grief, loneliness, financial uncertainty." And the idea that hardship somehow belonged exclusively to parents felt completely disconnected from what everyone else was experiencing. And I think that story captures something bigger. Sometimes we become so focused on supporting one group that we accidentally stop seeing everyone else. The problem here is not flexibility for parents. Of course parents absolutely need flexibility. The problem is when flexibility becomes treated as a parenting benefit rather than a human one. Because people without children have lives, too. We have families, responsibilities, and sometimes we simply want to leave work on time because our lives matter. That should be enough. Number five, there isn't one version of this experience.

[00:05:48]One thing I became very aware of reading the comments was how different everyone's story of reaching midlife without children is. Some women never wanted children, some desperately wanted them, some are still deciding, some experience infertility, some experience loss, some simply never met their person they wanted to build a family with them, some feel completely content, others still carry sadness, and many seem to sit somewhere in the middle. I think that's important to acknowledge because I often feel there is a pressure to provide a neat answer, a very simple explanation or tidy narrative, but life really works like that. I think many women are carrying complicated feelings, and perhaps we need to make more room for complexity. It's why I've recently started to reply, "No." when I'm asked if I have children. I don't want to have to explain myself. And yeah, it can make people feel uncomfortable, but ultimately the more comfy we all get using no as a full sentence, the easier it will become and we can move the conversation on. Number six, many of our systems still assume one version of adulthood. The older I get, the more I realize how many systems are built around a very specific path, a spouse, children, a family home, assets that are passed down to the next generation. But what happens when your life doesn't look like that? Who becomes your next of kin?

[00:07:00]Who makes decisions for you? Who do you leave things to? How do you think differently about money? About retirement? About aging? I think when I was younger I assumed a lot of those things would be eventually built with someone else. There would be a we. And look, maybe I will. I'm only 42. I'm barely halfway through my life. But one of the biggest achievements of my 40s has been recognizing that I might be building much of that myself. Sometimes that feels but there's also something quite empowering about it. There is also something that requires intention. You don't drift into those answers, you have to design them.

[00:07:29]I think this is why this conversation feels so connected to everything I'm building with my new business, Career Ring, because career design is life design, and the further your life moves away from the default path, the the intentional you have to become. Number seven, representation matters because it gives us more possible futures. The final thing I've been thinking about is representation because when we talk about women in midlife, the story is often centered around motherhood. And those stories matter, of course they do, but they aren't the only stories. Where are the women living alone, starting businesses, changing careers, building chosen families, traveling, reinventing themselves, creating lives that don't revolve around parenthood? Something I've been thinking about recently is how differently we talk about men and women whose lives don't follow the traditional path. Remember the stats from earlier?

[00:08:11]There are actually more men than women reaching midlife without children, yet culturally we seem to tell very different stories. Historically, an unmarried man was a bachelor. An unmarried woman was a spinster. One sounds rather independent and the other sounds like a cautionary tale. Even now when we imagine a man in his 40s or 50s without children, there are often cultural scripts available to him. The entrepreneur, the bachelor, the George Clooney type, the man who's chosen freedom. But for women, those stories have traditionally been narrower and they are often framed around absence.

[00:08:39]What didn't happen? Who didn't arrive?

[00:08:41]What wasn't achieved? I'd love to see more examples in film, TV, advertising of different ways to be an adult. And not just for women, for everyone.

[00:08:49]Because there are millions of people building meaningful lives outside of the norm. And most of us still don't have enough language for what those lives look like. What's interesting that if almost [clears throat] any group of people come together around a shared experience, we understand why. We understand communities for parents, for founders, for women, for people who are navigating illness, for people navigating grief. But mention a dinner for women without children and people often react as though you're creating a club around what's missing. As though the only thing connecting you is absence. In fact, I'm currently trying to organize one and every time I mention it, people seem to assume it's some kind of support group. A room full of women mourning the lives they didn't have, but that is not what interests me at all.

[00:09:24]I'm simply doing it because it's nice to spend an evening with people who understand your experience without needing to explain it and knowing the topic of parenting won't come up. One thing I've consciously started doing over the last few years is spending more time with people whose lives don't look like the default. One of my favorite couples is a child-free couple in their 60s who I met about 4 years ago. I started looking after their dog. They are some of the most interesting people I know.

[00:09:49]I feel really emotional talking about them.

[00:09:51]They They >> [laughter] >> They have this incredible zest for life.

[00:09:57]They host brilliant parties. They're curious. They're creative. They're funny. They're always doing something.

[00:10:02]They love to travel and explore and push themselves and they have their own goals. And every time I spend time with them, I come away thinking, "You are so happy." They are happy because of the life they've built and I think that's such an important lesson for me.

[00:10:15]>> [laughter] >> It's making me so emotional. They're such awesome people. Because when we're trying to imagine our future, we tend to look at the lives that are most visible, the lives we show most often, the lives that society tells us is normal. But there is real value in seeking out people who have built something different, people who have made different choices or whose lives simply unfolded in different ways. And not because we want to copy them, but because we want to expand our sense of what's possible. They remind us there isn't just one way to build a meaningful life. There are many. And sometimes all it takes is meeting someone a few chapters ahead of you to realize a future you hadn't considered might actually be a very beautiful one. And perhaps that's why I wanted to make this video. I don't think people without children need special treatment. It's not I don't think our lives are harder and it's certainly not because there's one right way to live, but because conversations shape culture and culture shape systems. It shapes the stories we tell, the policies we create, the assumptions we make, the way we design workplaces, the way we we create advertising, the way we represent adulthood. When I think about work, I often think about how flexibility is framed through the lens of parenthood.

[00:11:16]How often benefits are built around a particular version of family life. How often people without children are assumed to be more available, more flexible, or somehow less stretched. I don't think anyone's being malicious, but I think we've just normalized one version of adulthood as the default. And I I there are opportunities for leaders to think more broadly, to ask whether we're creating policies that support parents or policies that support people.

[00:11:36]And when I think about advertising, I notice something similar. We have plenty of stories about women before children, and plenty of stories about women with children, but far fewer stories about women whose lives took a different shape. Women building businesses, living alone, creating communities, traveling, changing careers, creating meaningful lives that neatly fit into a box. Maybe that's beginning to change, and I hope it is. Because if we're going to help people build lives that work for them, they need to be able to see those lives first. They need examples and possibilities and proof. And perhaps that's what I was really looking for when I wrote that LinkedIn post. I don't want validation or sympathy, I just want evidence that there are other people building thoughtful, fulfilling, complicated lives outside of the path they originally imagined. My life doesn't look like the version I thought it would when I was 20, and guessing yours probably doesn't either. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the goal isn't to follow the path perfectly. Maybe it's to get curious about the lives people are building when they don't. The more people I've met, the more I've realized there isn't one version of a successful life. There are millions, and most of them are far, far more interesting than the stories we've told. So, I'd love to know what resonated with you, whether you're a parent, not a parent, partnered or single, somewhere in between, or your life has taken a completely different route. What assumptions do you think we make about adulthood? What conversations do you think we're not having? And what does a meaningful life look like for you? Ultimately, I don't think this conversation is about children, I think it's about understanding each other a little better, and recognizing there are rich, meaningful, and complicated lives lived in all sorts of different ways.

[00:13:01]That's it for this video, but until next [clears throat] time, keep careering.