on 14-02-2016 10:23 AM
CHILDLESS blokes may have trouble expressing their unmet yearning for kids — but the pain is real. This is the conclusion British sociologist Dr Robin Hadley has come to after studying more than 100 involuntarily childless men, including himself, over nearly a decade.
“It’s an unexpressed grief, it’s a sadness in your pocket,” Dr Hadley says, and moments later adds: “It’s always with you.”
Speaking straight from the heart in his hefty Manchester accent, Dr Hadley, 56, repeatedly uses the word “black” to describe the turmoil of facing up to a childless life.
“I don’t see the future. And if there’s one thing that kids give you, it’s a sense of the future,” he says.
If you are a man who doesn’t have a child, Dr Hadley says a legacy dies with you. Family heirlooms, anecdotes and recipes or other precious items can’t be passed on to the next generation.
Dr Hadley’s voice cracks as he recalls the story of a childless man interviewed during his research, who told him: “My dad loved being a dad. He enjoyed being a dad. And I always thought I would enjoy that as well.”
For Dr Hadley, who got in touch after reading my previous article on women who were unsuccessful at IVF, his mission to shed light on the plight of involuntarily childless men is intensely personal.
He describes himself as a “working class lad” who comes from “a big family of eight children”.
“We were all just expecting to follow my parents, get a job, find a girl, get married, and have children,” he says.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. Dr Hadley’s first marriage split up. In his 30s he met another likely lass, and candidly says: “I really was broody then.”
That relationship also failed, leaving him yearning for children.
“One of my colleagues and somebody I had known from school, he became a father and I was just so jealous of him. I could hardly speak to him, I’d avoid him,” Dr Hadley confesses.
By the time he met his second wife, Maryan, in 1995 the pair were unable to have children due to their age.
Even so, Dr Hadley did not set out to become an expert in this area. He simply went looking for research to explain his own unfulfilled broodiness — and found none.
“There was very little about men’s experience and the desire for fatherhood but there’s an awful lot of research around women and motherhood, and it seemed incredible to me,” he says.
Since then, Dr Hadley’s own research has shown something which negates the timeworn narrative that the desire to procreate falls into the lap of women.
According to an online survey of 232 people conducted in 2009 by Dr Hadley at Manchester University, 59 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women desire to be parents. This means the sexes feel roughly the same yearning for children.
And perhaps unexpectedly, the emotional impact of not having those desired children seems to hit men harder than women.
Dr Hadley says involuntarily childless men, “seemed to be more depressed and more angry”.
“There was a much more emotional reaction than there was for similar women,” he says.
The same research also found childless men felt more isolated and sad than their female counterparts.
The older childless men Dr Hadley interviewed all expressed fears of “being viewed as a paedophile by others if they found themselves in social situations with children”.
This reflects both “society and the media’s coverage of men and ageing,” Dr Hadley says.
While Canberra man Nigel, 62, says he doesn’t grieve for a lack of children, he does sometimes have a “fear of loneliness”.
In his younger days Nigel, a former elite athlete, says he didn’t long for children. But as he got older things started to change.
At about the age of 45, Nigel says he noticed “biological thinking” kicking in. He started to feel that being childless meant “Yes, I was missing out on something” and also that, “I would regret this”.
“I had a relationship in [my] late 40s with a younger woman and I had my vasectomy reversed. I did want a child at that stage,” he explains, but unfortunately “the relationship fell through and so it was never on the cards”.
Nigel says these days he sponsors children from less fortunate circumstances than himself and suggests this might be in order to “compensate, I suppose, or to fill that [fathering] need”.
That's so sad.
It's so hard for men to find a woman to settle down with and start a family. Most modern young women want to have a career, travel and/or party, Not necessarily in that order. Kids tend to get in the way of that.
on 14-02-2016 05:27 PM
Good on you both. It's sad that families and communities are breaking apart.
Kids move away and neighbours don't know each other any more.
on 15-02-2016 02:22 AM
on 15-02-2016 02:41 AM
@nicnacs_4u wrote:Went out with a man who never fathered any children..the relationship was going well until I had to change plans a few times as my daughters needed me to babysit etc...he got upset and couldn`t understand my family came "first" and always would that relationship has ended but we still chat now and then.
This is a big problem for men who want a relationship with women who have children from a previous partner.
The men want to feel wanted and don't want to feel as though they are a second class consideration to children who they really feel no affinity for, not having fathered them.
The women want good men and the men want good women. It takes a very strong man indeed to commit to a woman who admits that her children from a previous relationship will always take precedence over her commitment to him.
Women; think on this well if you want a good man.
on 15-02-2016 03:18 AM
Children are notorious for being selfish, ungratefull, grasping and exploititive little so-and-sos.
They will take your love as if it were their right, despite the fact that they act in unlovely ways.
They will often suck you dry of love and give little in return. They will sabotage your relationships with men other than their fathers. because they don't care about you, but only for themselves.
Their caring, such as it is, is always posited against their own desire for gain.
Your man; your husband (your woman, your wife) on the other hand, loves you because of who you are and not because of what you can supply in terms of paid lodging, pocket money, unlimited food, a university education, a motorbike or a car for your birthday.
And yet a woman's love is bestowed on a leech, solely because she gave birth to it, in favour of and above that which she would bestow on her committed companion, freely chosen and in turn herself chosen and not because of some happenstance of birth.
We all know that having children is an over-rated experience and that's because kids are usually a great disappointment to us (usually because we expect too much of them)
What's that saying from the bible which says that , "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh"?
Your children will forsake you and leave you for partners of their own and their children will do the same to them.
And yet there are people foolish enough to choose to bestow their loyalty and their love on their demonstrably disloyal children over and above their chosen loyal partner in life?
I stepped back from a relationship once upon a time when I was told that her children (from a previous marriage) would always take precedence over me.
If you want a loyal man then offer him loyalty. and be damned to the blood-sucking disloyal little rugrats who only exist to chew your socks off anyway.
on 15-02-2016 05:27 AM
on 15-02-2016 09:25 AM
A good article Icy and thoughtful too. I never gave any thought to a childless man and the sadness it can bring, most stories are about the struggle women go through to have a child.
I have 2 childless male friends and I never thought to ask them how they feel about it, I feel bad now.
on 15-02-2016 09:26 PM
@kilroy_is_here wrote:Why does always surprise people have feels about kids either having them or wanting them, women can't expect equality till they give up this myth that women are the only ones who can truely bond with kids
I as a woman never believed that only women can bond with children. I know many excellent fathers.
on 27-02-2016 02:12 PM
@johcaschro wrote:Children are notorious for being selfish, ungratefull, grasping and exploititive little so-and-sos.
They will take your love as if it were their right, despite the fact that they act in unlovely ways.
They will often suck you dry of love and give little in return. They will sabotage your relationships with men other than their fathers. because they don't care about you, but only for themselves.
Their caring, such as it is, is always posited against their own desire for gain.
Your man; your husband (your woman, your wife) on the other hand, loves you because of who you are and not because of what you can supply in terms of paid lodging, pocket money, unlimited food, a university education, a motorbike or a car for your birthday.
And yet a woman's love is bestowed on a leech, solely because she gave birth to it, in favour of and above that which she would bestow on her committed companion, freely chosen and in turn herself chosen and not because of some happenstance of birth.
We all know that having children is an over-rated experience and that's because kids are usually a great disappointment to us (usually because we expect too much of them)
What's that saying from the bible which says that , "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh"?
Your children will forsake you and leave you for partners of their own and their children will do the same to them.
And yet there are people foolish enough to choose to bestow their loyalty and their love on their demonstrably disloyal children over and above their chosen loyal partner in life?
I stepped back from a relationship once upon a time when I was told that her children (from a previous marriage) would always take precedence over me.
If you want a loyal man then offer him loyalty. and be damned to the blood-sucking disloyal little rugrats who only exist to chew your socks off anyway.
Hey mate, you don't deserve the love of a good woman who recognizes her duty to raise her children is her paramount legal and moral duty.
Go get a selfish b!tX who will put her need for a relationship and a man before the needs of her dependant children, you'll deserve each other..
OR wait until you are two old to attract a woman who may still have offfspring at home, problem solved.
on 27-02-2016 03:25 PM
Both my wife and I laugh out loud in your general direction.
She said (and I quote) "Hey honey, come and see this; it's a hoot".
on 27-02-2016 03:46 PM
@johcaschro wrote:Children are notorious for being selfish, ungratefull, grasping and exploititive little so-and-sos.
They will take your love as if it were their right, despite the fact that they act in unlovely ways.
They will often suck you dry of love and give little in return. They will sabotage your relationships with men other than their fathers. because they don't care about you, but only for themselves.
Their caring, such as it is, is always posited against their own desire for gain.
Your man; your husband (your woman, your wife) on the other hand, loves you because of who you are and not because of what you can supply in terms of paid lodging, pocket money, unlimited food, a university education, a motorbike or a car for your birthday.
And yet a woman's love is bestowed on a leech, solely because she gave birth to it, in favour of and above that which she would bestow on her committed companion, freely chosen and in turn herself chosen and not because of some happenstance of birth.
We all know that having children is an over-rated experience and that's because kids are usually a great disappointment to us (usually because we expect too much of them)
What's that saying from the bible which says that , "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh"?
Your children will forsake you and leave you for partners of their own and their children will do the same to them.
And yet there are people foolish enough to choose to bestow their loyalty and their love on their demonstrably disloyal children over and above their chosen loyal partner in life?
I stepped back from a relationship once upon a time when I was told that her children (from a previous marriage) would always take precedence over me.
If you want a loyal man then offer him loyalty. and be damned to the blood-sucking disloyal little rugrats who only exist to chew your socks off anyway.
What a selfish and arrogant statement.
Obviously you never had any children. (Thank goodness for that.) You would never have made a good father, and if your wife laughs with you about the last remark, then she would also not have made a good mother.
One does not have children to be grateful or to take care of you when you are old. Children don't ask to be born, so they don't owe you anything. Love and care and loyalty is earned by the kind of parenting you give.
But this thread is about men who miss being a father and nurture a child to adulthood. You definately don't count in that criteria.
End of argument.
Erica