5 Things ‘Childfree’ People Want You To Know

‘‘People who have decided not to have kids arguably have been more thoughtful than those who decided to have kids. It’s deliberate, it’s respectful, ethical, and it’s a real honest, good, fair, and, for many people, right decision.’’ — Bob

‘‘I would like it to be considered a decision just like any other.’’ — Barb

“I wish more people thought about thinking about it. … I mean I wish it were normal to decide whether or not you were going to have children.’’ — Tony

What to keep in mind about this small study 

Nancy Molitor, a practicing clinical psychologist and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral science at Northwestern University Feinburg School of Medicine, commended Blackstone for diving into the little-researched and little-understood subject of deciding to become childfree. She was also intrigued by the way gender appeared to affect a person’s decision-making. 

However, she noted that given the small, homogenous sample and the fact that participants weren’t selected at random, it’s next to impossible to draw any general conclusions about the larger childfree population in the U.S. or around the world. The gendered patterns Blackstone observed, for example, need to be validated and confirmed in a much larger population. Some of this is inherent in qualitative research, which lacks the randomized samples and control group that underpins quantitative research. But qualitative research still has its place in the sciences, especially for emerging topics, because of its ability to raise the profile of new ideas, ask questions and generate new hypotheses for future research.

“This is a small, self-selected group,” Molitor said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, but it’s hard to speculate whether this would have results that would stand up in a larger sample taken from folks in rural Mississippi or the Midwest.”

Molitor called for long-term studies to see if and how childfree people in their 40s (the upper limit of the ages in Blackstone’s study) change their minds as they enter their 50s. Molitor also said that it would be interesting to continue research on the childfree community by examining regional and generational differences across a wider, randomized population.

“A lot of [childfree] research goes back to the 90s,” she explained. “I can say from my own experience and research that studies that were done in the 90s and their decisions about childfree might be very different from a young woman who is a millennial who is making that decision now in 2016.”

Since publishing her research in The Family Journal, Blackstone has interviewed 44 more people, expanding the diversity of her participant pool beyond the mostly white, straight and middle or upper class respondents in her original cohort. She hopes to continue debunking myths and assumptions about childfree people with future research, which will hopefully create a world where childfree people don’t have to defend their choice to others or suffer socially for it. Blackstone herself is childfree, and manages a blog she founded with her husband called “We’re {not} having a baby!”

“People don’t really know what to do with us,” Blackstone said. “Sometimes we get left out of, for example, events at friends’ houses if there are children involved, because people assume that we don’t want to be involved. It can be a kind of lonely existence.”