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Chapter 2. Child-Free: Pioneers of a Generation

“Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg paved the way for me and so many other women in my generation. Their pioneering lives have created boundless possibilities for women in the law …”

—Elena Kagan, Supreme Court Justice

Congratulations! You are a pioneer of your generation. You have successfully navigated your life along an unconventional path. Most child-free adults made a deliberate choice not to have children. Although that decision was somewhat more acceptable for baby boomers than for previous generations, most boomer women—and men—continued to experience a great deal of pressure to marry and raise families. If you held fast against those pressures, you demonstrated strength in your convictions. You deserve to be proud of your accomplishments and the path you chose.

I interviewed a large number of women and a few men—all child-free—for this book. They shared their stories with me about their choice to not raise children and where their lives had taken them. Some had led conventional lives; some had cast caution to the wind and chosen more varied and exciting lifestyles. Because they did not have children dependent on them, they had had more options—changing careers on a whim, moving to a different state or country, or experimenting with alternative lifestyles.

The women I interviewed never felt compelled to be mothers; they were drawn to other occupations and interests. In the late 1970s, women who wanted to be mothers described their maternal urge as the ticking of their “biological clocks.” I never experienced that internal pressure, nor did the child-free women I interviewed.

Deborah’s story provides a good illustration of a boomer woman who chose a solo life:

Born in a suburb of Philadelphia, Deborah attended a local university, majoring in liberal arts with a minor in business, and then getting an advanced degree in organizational studies. She wanted to see more of the country and, with nothing tying her to Pennsylvania, she moved around quite a bit, seeking opportunities to have the active, outdoor lifestyle she loved. She was never particularly career-driven, but as a woman with a master’s degree in the 1970s, she had enough education to find good jobs wherever she went.

Deborah ultimately settled far away from her family. She discovered the West Coast had more accessible year-round activities, along with the arts and a diversity of people she came to appreciate. After living for short periods in Southern California, Northern California, and the Portland, Oregon, area, at age thirty-seven she settled in Seattle. By then, she had established a career in human resources and managed to find jobs in her field wherever she landed. In Seattle, she worked first for Boeing, then for the newcomer to the area, Microsoft.

Deborah never felt the urge to marry or have children. She loved being on her own, able to make her own choices, go where she wanted, when she wanted, and with whom she wanted. She had boyfriends along the way, but none of her relationships ever got serious enough to consider marriage. Her independence always came first. Over three decades in Seattle, Deborah developed a strong cadre of friends, mostly other women in her field—some single, some married—with similar interests and experiences. They shared meals, holidays, travel, career ups and downs, and the occasional heartbreak.

At age sixty-three, Deborah looks back at her life as a series of deliberate choices. She continues to enjoy success and fulfillment in her career and her social sphere. She has no immediate plans to quit working, and since becoming a human resources consultant she can now take on as many or as few clients as she chooses.

Having chosen to not have children, you are among the many baby boomer men and women who have created a very different life, one that focused more on achievement and independence than on raising a family. You chose to be an engineer, a flight attendant, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a builder, or any of the hundreds of professions that were starting to open up to both men and women in the 1970s. In choosing not to be a parent, you helped write the story of those like us all over the world. As you crest midlife, you have another opportunity to be a pioneer. This time in the interest of having a safe and secure future as you move into your later decades.

“In every single thing you do, you are choosing a direction. Your life is a product of choices.”

—Dr. Kathleen Hall

Always a generation enamored with reinventing itself and the world, baby boomers are now poised to create new ways for living safe, productive, and meaningful lives. Today we are seeing the beginning of new and different community structures, innovative technologies for working when and where we want, and new technologies for living in a more connected way. These developments carry tremendous promise for leading interesting and rewarding lives in our seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond.

Our later decades of life will differ in important ways from people who have children. We will all face issues common to aging: our own aging parents, personal health challenges, and a gradually slowing pace. However, there are benefits to getting older: we are more patient, we see things in shades of gray rather than black and white, and we are no longer novices at our work—we are the experts. And let’s not forget about those “senior” discounts. In short, for most people, getting older represents a mixed bag, and we would do well to remember the positives when we are being inundated with the negatives.

The stories of child-free baby boomers are quite varied, yet most revolve around the common themes of independence and freedom. Many of their lives have taken unique twists and turns, owing to the choices they were able to make. In the following stories, Carolyn, Glenn, and Marion are representative of millions of boomers who took full advantage of the opportunities open to them. Their stories give us additional examples of how many child-free people have led their lives:

Carolyn and Glenn are a classic baby boomer couple. Carolyn was born in 1954, the oldest of four siblings in a military family. As her father, a naval officer, moved from base to base every four years, the family accompanied him. That meant Carolyn and her siblings bounced from school to school, never setting down roots in any one place. During her sophomore year in high school, her father retired and the family settled in Fort Collins, a midsize town in Colorado, where her father had secured a teaching position.

The years of rootlessness taught Carolyn how to make friends quickly and find her place in a variety of social situations. Those skills proved valuable in college and beyond. Thinking she might teach, Carolyn majored in English Literature, but teaching didn’t suit her. She preferred writing, and from her first job as a newsroom runner, she knew journalism was the right path for her.

Glenn, a year younger, took over his father’s insurance business the year he graduated from Colorado State University and discovered that with hard work he could grow it well beyond what his father had achieved. Having been a child of working parents, he had a feel for the stress that accompanied raising children and tending a career at the same time. Glenn had no strong desire to be a father, and when he met Carolyn, he quickly came to understand that her primary interest in life was her journalism career, not motherhood. Glenn and Carolyn both saw their relationship as a good fit. When they got around to talking about marriage and the future, they decided together that they would not raise a family.

After they wed, Glenn told Carolyn that if she had a change of heart about having children, he was open to reconsidering the matter. Carolyn deeply appreciated his willingness to be flexible. From time to time she asked herself whether she was still content not to have children, and the answer kept coming up “yes.” In her mid-thirties, she listened to many of her old high school and college friends talking about the ticking of their biological clocks. Carolyn could not discern any such clock inside of her and felt quite satisfied with the work that continued to interest her and the promotions that were rolling her way.

During her thirties and forties, Carolyn worked for a series of daily newspapers, each one larger than the last, and, at age forty-three, became a key editor for one of Colorado’s largest dailies. During that same time period, Glenn quadrupled his father’s insurance business. He opened three more offices around the state, and when his father retired Glenn assumed the reins of the entire enterprise. When they weren’t working, Glenn and Carolyn spent time with extended family, an eclectic assortment of friends from their neighborhood, their respective work circles, and old college chums who were still in the area.

Marion, now sixty-two and a successful marketing executive for a large public relations firm, always loved children and assumed she would marry and start a family sometime after college. However, life didn’t go quite as she had planned. Although she grew up in a vibrant, midsize city in Massachusetts, Marion always wanted to see the Northwest, and college gave her that opportunity. Accepted to the University of Washington in Spokane in 1973, she made her way across the country. During Marion’s sophomore year, her mother developed metastatic breast cancer. Marion rushed back to Massachusetts to be at her mother’s side for the surgery and the chemotherapy that followed.

For the first three years after surgery, her mother responded to treatment, and after six months in Massachusetts, Marion returned to college to finish her degree. Upon graduation, she accepted a marketing job in Tacoma, Washington, and signed a lease on a condominium a few miles from her workplace. Within a year of moving to Tacoma, Marion also fell in love with a man she met through a friend and became engaged to marry. Life appeared to be working out much as she had hoped.

However, in 1980, Marion’s mother had a setback and needed more extensive chemotherapy. This time, Marion and her mother decided to pursue further treatment in Washington State so Marion could be with her fiancé and continue working at the job she loved. He helped her sell the Massachusetts home and move her mother into an apartment in Tacoma, about a mile from Marion.

As her mother’s treatment became more and more debilitating, Marion found herself going daily, after work, to her mother’s apartment to visit and care for her. She did all the shopping and meal preparation as well as helping her mother bathe and dress. On weekends she did her mother’s wash as well as her own household chores. The all-consuming job of being her mother’s caregiver lasted three full years. During that time, Marion’s fiancé felt neglected, and was emotionally disturbed by the cancer. He finally broke off the engagement and walked out of Marion’s life.

After three years, Marion’s mother fell and broke her hip. Because she needed strength to heal the broken bone, the chemotherapy treatments had to be stopped. However, those treatments were all that had kept the cancer at bay and once they were discontinued the cancer raged anew.

When her mother died, Marion, at thirty, was emotionally and physically exhausted. But as the weeks went by, her body and spirit healed and she rededicated herself to her work. The job began to require quite a bit of travel, limiting Marion’s ability to meet another potential marriage partner. However, the fulfillment she found at work more than compensated for the loss of that prospect. She considered having children out of wedlock and raising them herself, but with her demanding job, raising children didn’t seem to be a realistic plan and she abandoned the idea. Instead, Marion continued to travel and enjoy the benefits her high-profile job afforded. As she thinks about winding down her career now at sixty-two, she has no regrets about how she pursued her life and how things turned out for her.

The life path for most child-free baby boomers has depended on several factors. Among more educated women with higher-paying jobs, being without children at midlife has meant more freedom to come and go at will, living alone or with a companion of their choice. Single or married, they have established social networks that include a personalized mixture of friends and blood relatives. Men have followed similar paths, but theirs have typically relied more on work-related networks and connections and less on contact with family members.

A growing number of men and women today, regardless of age, are choosing to remain single for life. The age at first marriage is now in the upper twenties for both men and women, and appears to rise every year. In the United States today, as in much of Western Europe, one hundred million people—almost 50 percent of the population over eighteen—report as “single” in the census rolls.2 Some unmarried women now raise children they have adopted or birthed, but among baby boomers the majority of single people remain child-free, especially men.

“Conservative estimates suggest that there are more than 3 million LGBT people age fifty-five and older in the US—1.5 million of whom are sixty-five and older. This over-sixty-five segment will double in the next few decades as millions of Americans enter retirement age. Unfortunately, due to a lifetime of discrimination, many LGBT people age without proper community supports, in poor health, and financially insecure.”

—Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders (sageusa.org)

A very large proportion of the LGBT community does not have children. Around twenty percent have kids, either from previous heterosexual relationships, or through adoption or artificial insemination, but the majority of LGBT boomers do not have children.3 Today, same-sex couples are legally allowed to marry, and those unions are becoming increasingly accepted in society. This acceptance has opened the doors for more parenting among gay couples, either through adoption or surrogacy. However, most gay men and women in prior generations are child-free, like Ken:

Ken, born in Cleveland in 1938, went to private schools and an eastern college, then to the University of Michigan Law School, as a good background for politics.

After graduation, he joined a small firm in a midsize Northern Michigan city, and was soon elected to the state legislature. After three terms, he decided he would be happier in the executive branch of state government. He then worked in the governor’s office for five more years before burning out on politics altogether. He felt adrift, not only with regard to his career, but also his sexual orientation. He knew his life had to change in some fundamental ways.

Ken took a year off, and then went into teaching at a Michigan law school. He dated women off and on, but never let the relationships get serious. At thirty-nine, he decided he needed to explore, once and for all, whether he preferred men. On a winter break, he went to Key West, Florida, where the gay lifestyle was already openly happening.

Ken returned to Michigan sure of his preference for men, and began to discreetly explore the gay scene in the town where he taught, which proved to be both frightening and unsatisfactory. He returned to school for a master’s degree, then landed a teaching job at a college in Miami.

Life was better for Ken in Florida, with its larger cities and greater opportunities for self-expression, including sexual preference. He developed a deep and devoted relationship with a man. Both in their mid-forties, they discussed the possibility of adopting children but decided they were too old to start a family. Now retired from teaching, Ken lives in Key West, where he remains active, working to integrate the gay and lesbian communities into the larger population.

Those of us that are child-free may be married, divorced, widowed, or single. We come in all colors and represent a wide variety of backgrounds, but all of us need to prepare for our later years without the help of adult children. That’s what makes us unique. Today’s outlook for the senior years promises many choices—for parents as well as non-parents.

When asked about options for a rewarding older adulthood in the early twenty-first century, I like to say, “This is not your father’s retirement!”

We still fear the big three health challenges, but most people now survive heart attacks and strokes and can live for years, even decades, after cancer treatment. Life expectancy across the United States has been increasing steadily and now hovers in the early- to mid-eighties, so we must stay as healthy and positive as we can in order to enjoy what gerontologists Lynn Peters Adler, Ken Dychtwald, and others have called “the bonus years.”

Jean Houston, teacher, author, and leadership guru for the United Nations, calls this stage of life “the great turning point.”4 She goes on to suggest that we “don’t know a darn thing till we are about fifty-five or sixty. The years after that are the years in which you can bring your humanity to bear upon the great issues of our time.” She includes, in this new way of thinking about older age, the pursuit of lifelong education—both learning and teaching—and reminds us that we have lived through more history of the human race than our grandparents could ever have imagined. Wow! What a positive way to think about our post-fifty lives.

“Life without a script” provides another way of looking at these bonus years. Specific expectations were at play for all earlier stages of life. Here’s how the life script reads: from ages one through five, we are in strong growth mode. We are learning how to get from one place to another in our environment. We are learning about rules and danger and how to express ourselves. Our “job” at that time of life is learning about our separateness from the others around us. Once we enter school, our role is to learn, to achieve, and to earn rewards. We also have to learn social skills during that time. We have to navigate the waters of love, indifference, and hatred, and resolve complicated relationship and sexual questions. And we have to cut the ties with our parents. Once out of school we have to learn to live on our own and support ourselves. Most people’s scripts include finding a partner and, for many, starting a family. For those without children, the next part of the script involves nurturing our careers and pursuing activities that are interesting and fulfilling.

This last part of the script takes us up to around age fifty-five or sixty, at which time the script ends. What now? In American society, the script ends when we leave our careers. For parents, a partial script exists, which involves being a grandparent. However, the main actors in that production are the younger parents themselves, so grandparents play a supporting role at best, unless the parents are incapacitated or unavailable.

Most of us age in stages. If you are reading this book, you are probably in the early stages of older adulthood: fifty-five to seventy. In those years, statistics are on your side. Many people today live healthy lives well into their seventies and eighties, in fact, more and more people are aging to triple digits every year. However, 70 percent of us will need some level of assistance to manage our lives,5 especially as we get into our mid to late eighties and beyond. None of us knows in advance how much or what kind of assistance we will need.

Another mystery is how long we will live. Many factors are at play: general health, genetics, lifestyle, habits, stress tolerance, and more. Because of this uncertainty, we can’t know for sure how much money we will need to fund that long life. Planning requires us to make some educated guesses and prepare for uncertain times.

In the following chapters you will meet more child-free people who have taken the reins of their lives and made plans for their future happiness and safety in a variety of ways. Some have chosen to continue working long past the typical retirement age; some have chosen unique lifestyles and living environments; some have chosen new community designs. Indeed, there is no end in sight to the creative ways those of us without children can prepare for our remaining years.

In addition, we will need to give thought and make plans for how to receive care in our oldest years. In later chapters you will meet child-free people who have made those plans—some in conventional ways, others in brave new ways. They have all done their homework and followed their hearts. I found their stories fascinating and encouraging. They spurred me to do the additional research to round out the guidance offered in these pages. If you take the stories and recommendations to heart and plan aggressively for your later years, you will be able to sit back and continue to enjoy the same freedom you have had all your life. Enjoy the ride!