The avoided and excluded knowns: people ageing without children/family

Hadley, Robin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4254-7648 (2023) The avoided and excluded knowns: people ageing without children/family. Ageing Issues Blog.

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Abstract

In the Western world, childlessness affects one in four men and one in five women. In the UK the numbers of people ageing without children aged over 65 years is projected to rise to above 2 million by 2030. Although precarity in ageing is increasingly recognised in academia, people ageing without children are not acknowledged as a group and dismissed as a ‘non-category’ (1, 2). This means they are in danger of being invisible to academia, policymakers and other institutional stakeholders. ‘If you are not counted, you don’t count’ has become a mainstream saying: few acknowledge that it was written by Horace Sheffield (3) to encourage the African American electorate to vote. More recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) campaigners in America highlighted the importance of completing the census because of the link to state funding of food, health and housing support (4). The LGBTQIA community have high rates of accommodation precarity, homelessness and poverty (4) and more likely to be childless – especially gay men(5). Taken in hand with a couple of popular management mantra’s, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ and ‘What gets measured gets managed' (6) highlights the importance of being ‘counted.’ This leads to the question who gets counted? When it comes to measuring groups who decides who is included and who is excluded? Who is structurally excluded and/or made invisible? Does this matter? One such group is those ageing without children.