What life is like for a man without children

"There is a sort of artificial pressure to find meaning in life if you don’t have kids"

Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash

I have wanted to give a voice to men without kids for a while, and it has been tricky to find people who are willing to talk to me.

Robin Hadley (who writes

Doing Being with Robin Hadley

and is almost my surname-sake!) is one of the only academics and humans researching and talking about male childlessness, and he generously gave me his time for my article in the Guardian about how I found joy in life without children of my own.

“Something is missing [when you don’t have kids as a man], is what came up in my research,” he told me back in 2023. “I can’t describe it, there’s no words there, no narrative, no structure, no ritual … that’s why I do all the stuff I do, because voices need to be heard,” he said.

Voices do, indeed need to be heard. This is why I write The Honesty Box, in the hope of encouraging understanding of all sorts of ways of living life, while trying to make sense of my own.

And so it was wonderful when C agreed to speak to me anonymously about his life without kids, from the great pressure he felt from his parents to have children, to how he answers the question: “Do you have kids.”

C’s insights were fascinating and, as he said, “The kids/no kids question is kind of a portal to a much bigger topic, which is about self-acceptance.”

C is in his mid-40s, and he lives with a female partner.

Here’s what he told me. I’ve edited our chat for clarity.

For a very long time, I didn’t think I wanted kids. Having children felt like something too big to have to care for and plan life around – and that didn’t feel right to me. I’m quite young at heart.

But then at some stage in my 30s, my resistance washed away a bit, and my mindset shifted from actively not wanting children to being open to the possibility. But I wanted my desire to maybe have children to come from the right place.

I saw some wealthy people around me who came from a background where they had nannies growing up and whose parents weren’t actively engaged in their upbringing. And now that means that sometimes they swing the other way and mollycoddle their kids with attention which they never had.

But there are others who don't see any issue in not being around much. They're not all necessarily the ones who had a certain upbringing themselves. I don't want to make a value judgement on wealthy people. But I do think that the pressures of society these days can mean that the desire to do everything means some people take on so much they can't make time to do everything without being in a rush about it or "fitting it in".

With my partner now, we got to the point where it felt like now or never, during our early 40s. But if we did decide to try for children then, it would have been because the window was closing. And so we decided not to try, because that was the right thing for us. Neither of us has kids, and that’s OK.

I must say I do not regret not having children. I’m fortunate to have nephews and nieces who I spoil – I can become unpopular with their parents because I show up, spoil them with presents or pizza and then leave and my brother has to deal with the mess afterwards – and I get to just disappear [laughs]. Being an uncle has allowed me to have relationships with children that are really fulfilling.

Society really expects people to bend to its will. Most people would still assume that most other people want to have children. It’s uncommon for people in my parents’ generation to not have children. There’s a sense of: “Isn’t it sad so-and-so didn’t manage to start a family.” There are such stereotypes of success. You can be a massively successful international pop star, and the world will still ask you if you want kids, as though you can never be “enough” without them. That sense is still there.

It took years for my parents to accept that I wasn’t going to have children. It was noticeably disappointing in the eyes of my parents that I didn’t and they viewed me as someone to pity. We had about 20 years of conversations, with questions like: “Are you doing the right things to plan for your future? To start a family?” even though there were indications from me that it wasn’t going to happen. I felt pressure to deliver grandchildren, that there was a sense that people have the right to be grandparents.

My brother and sister have children, but my parents would consider they had failed if they had no grandchildren. There would be a sense of personal and public failure, a sense of shame that none of their kids had kids. My dad’s sister didn’t have children, and my parents felt so sorry for her. There was a sense that she was a brilliant woman who missed her potential in life.

A lot of that pressure from "society" could also be my own subconscious. No doubt my parents placed great pressure on me to have kids. But perhaps that pressure isn't there in the same way now, and whatever I feel could be my own pressure, expressed externally. I'm genuinely very happy and blessed in life. But I grew up in a time when you were expected to have kids and that will always be in the back of my mind.

When you get past the question about whether to try to have kids or not, and decide not to, there is a sense of liberation. I find myself hanging out with different people, I can go on holiday out of school holidays, I’ve moved countries. But it does kind of come with caveats - there is a sort of artificial pressure to find meaning in life if you don’t have kids.

If I was being really critical, I might say that some people have kids to give themselves purpose. They didn’t know what to do with themselves in life and the answer seemed to be to have children. Which comes down to the question: Why do people have children? If you have kids, maybe there’s a sense that you can transpose that meaning on to your children. Then there’s the pressure to have grandchildren. But there are different types of meaning in life, a diverse range.

Most people I work with have kids. So, I don’t take holidays during the school holidays, those things are kind of assumed, that I will do the early phone calls when my colleagues are dropping their kids at school. It’s not said explicitly, but it is one of the practicalities of being a human being in this world. Society does help out parents.

Other things can never be a priority in the way that kids are. What if I want to go and build my model train set all day?! [Laughs]. There’s a little bit of, I can feel as though the world perceives me to be less important because my days are not spent caring for a mini human. I do feel that sometimes.

My advice to my 30-something self around having kids would be not to over-analyse it. Work out how you actually feel. It’s not a rational thing. Be reassured that it’s going to be OK either way. If you have kids, you’ll work it out – don’t make a decision to try to have kids out of fear. There might be a sense of “What if I get to 50+ and don’t have kids? I can’t run the risk of turning into that person.” Yet lots of people have fantastic, fulfilled lives in their 50s and beyond.

Once upon a time, society was different. Families lived on top of each other, lots of people in homes together. Children would have been around lots of people, not just their biological parents, and there would have been a group effort to teach kids communally. But now capitalism is the cult of individualism, and that contributes to defining a clear family unit.

The idea of the nuclear family changes the role of people who don’t have biological children. I kind of get to adopt a role. I sometimes feel my friends have sympathy with me because I don’t have biological children – so they might feel they want to let me spend more time with their kids. But 30 or 40 years ago, it would have been trickier to be a man without kids.

When people ask: “Do you have kids?” I feel it’s because they want to get an idea of you as a person, and what you do. But I don’t think it’s because they want to look at me and say: “Oh, there’s C, the family guy,” it’s much more harmless than that.

Sometimes I say: “No, but I’m a great uncle,” and other times I say: “No, it didn’t work out that way.” It is a way of letting the other person know that having kids isn’t a right – that it works out for some and not for others and suggests, gently, that they should be considerate when asking that question.

There are many ways to live your life, and the most important thing is to be at peace with whatever it is. If you don’t have kids, the world won’t fall over. You will adapt.

I know people who don’t have kids who do radical things to utilise their freedom, which is amazing but are they desperately searching for meaning? I mean how many ultra-marathons do you need to do? [Laughs]. The kids/no kids question is kind of a portal to a much bigger topic, which is about self-acceptance.

I’m so grateful to C for his wise words. If you are a man and you’d like to talk about your experiences of not having children for potential inclusion in The Honesty Box, you can send me a message (link below). If you’re reading via email, hit “reply.” I will treat our conversation sensitively, and it can be anonymous.