People ageing without children or family: out of sight, out of mind

Hadley, Robin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4254-7648 (2023) People ageing without children or family: out of sight, out of mind. Age Action Alliance.

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Abstract

There’s a widespread assumption that family will support their relatives as they age. But what happens to those without children? Robin Hadley, one of the founders of Ageing Without Children, explains the challenges, not least of which is a lack of data. While precarity in ageing is increasingly recognised in academia, people ageing without children are not widely acknowledged as a group and end up being dismissed as a “non-category”. This means they are in danger of being invisible to academics, policymakers and other institutional stakeholders. And yet, 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 two million by 2030. These are not insignificant numbers. Why does this matter so much? “If you are not counted, you don’t count” has become a mainstream saying: few acknowledge that it was written by Horace Sheffield (1) to encourage the African American electorate to vote. More recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) campaigners in America have highlighted the importance of completing the census because of the link to state funding of food, health and housing support (2). The LGBTQIA community has high rates of accommodation precarity, homelessness and poverty (2) and is also more likely to be childless – especially gay men(3). The popular management mantras, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and “What gets measured gets managed” (4) lead to the question: who gets counted? And, when it comes to measuring groups, who decides who is included and who is excluded? Who is structurally excluded and/or made to feel invisible? One such group currently being excluded are those ageing without children.