“If you don’t have children…”: the life experience of older involuntarily childless men

Hadley, Robin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4254-7648 (2016) “If you don’t have children…”: the life experience of older involuntarily childless men. In: Centre for Research on Families and Relationships International Conference 2016, 13 June 2016 - 15 June 2016, Edinburgh, UK.

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Abstract

The global trend of a declining fertility rate and an increasingly ageing population has been extensively reported. Childless men are, compared to women, missing from gerontological, psychological, reproduction, and sociological research. These fields have all mainly focussed on family and women, with the fertility intentions, history and experience of older men being overlooked. Infertility research has shown that failure to fulfil both the personal, and socially accepted, status of parenthood leads to a complex form of bereavement and a significant challenge to identity. This qualitative study used a pluralistic framework drawn from the life course, biographical, and gerontological approaches to examine the experiences of older involuntarily childless men. A thematic analysis was applied to the semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 men aged between 49 and 82 years. The analysis showed the complex intersections between men’s experience of involuntary childlessness over the life course with personal agency, socio-cultural structures, and biological and social clocks. This study challenges research that reports that men are not affected by the social, emotional, and relational aspects of involuntary childlessness. The participants' narratives showed a range of diverse elements that affected the men’s experience of involuntary childlessness: upbringing, economics, timing of events, interpersonal skills, sexual orientation, partner selection, relationship formation and dissolution, bereavement, and the assumption of fertility. The importance of relationship quality, and the significance of being partnered, was highlighted in the social networks of both those with and without partners. The search for meaning for four of the men, as they aged, was seen in their negotiation of a form of ‘grandfatherhood’ role: Adopted, Latent, Surrogate, and Proxy. Awareness of feeling both a sense of ‘outsiderness’ and a fear of being viewed a paedophile were widely reported.