The Untold Grief Of Childless Men

[icyfroth]

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”.

Entire Article Here

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.

[282eecb2b518b00a18f5b4fde8ac47aa1461997566]

Looking from a mans point of view,if you meet and fall in love with a woman

plus take on the responsibility of children of a previous union.

Provide for them, love them as your own for an extended period of time,

to then be told years down the track when a problem arises that

"My children will always come first"

Is a pretty big slap in the face to any guy, don't you agree 

[johcaschro]

Well, I agree with you even if lind9650 doesn't.

I understand the social dynamics of having children and about the evolutionary pressures which drive a woman's imperative to care for her children above all others.

The ancient biological/evolutionary drives cause a man to care about his children (and his woman) until the kids reach an age where they can survive without him.

Then he leaves to find another woman who can give him more children. and repeat the same pattern.

This is a sort of intuitive behavior, a behavior which is purely on the animalistic, survival-of-the-species level.

Our current constructs surrounding the relationships between the sexes and between the children of such relationships are a result of an increased degree of civilisation where the effort to just survive is no longer so much at the fore-front of our (species') consideration.

We're a lot more sophisticated nowadays than our primitive forebears were and we now experience a situation where a man might invest his time and effort and his finances in the support of children who are not his own because he values the companionship and the love of a good woman more than he values his wealth (such as it is).

and then he is told "My children and their needs will always take precedence over you and your needs."

and then he thinks to himself "why did I even bother?"

I think that the reason we have children at all is a selfish reason. (there's a biological and evolutionary selfishness where we are driven to breed, just like other animals) and there's a social reason to have kids as well which may vary according to the culture and society one lives in.

 There's no modern moral imperative to breed; in fact, the moral position would be to have a minimal number of children. (in some cultures there might be a religious imperative to create more little faithful god-botherers)

If women want a good and faithful man then they have to be good and faithful themselves (social contract).

If a woman tells her man that her children (from a prior relationship) will always take precedence over him, then she's really expecting a lot to expect from him his undivided loyalty, love and (financial as well as emotional) support.

Children are sometimes seen as being some sort of sacred object.

The whole world is seething and crawling with millions upon millions of these little voracious consumers who, let's face it, consider their own interests first; that's evolutionary elementary.

Are we, even after all these many hundreds of thousands of years of human development, still hung up on the evolutionary and biological imperatives which dictate our attitudes to and our desire for children?

Yep, we're still animals, after all, even if we now have the capacity to think about and to reflect on what motive forces drive our behavior.

(well, some of us think and reflect about this sort of stuff . . . . others just unthinkingly churn out children as if this were a normal way to live, despite the fact that our planet is dying because of pressure of the numbers of its human population)

[tasfleur]

On Children
 Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

[***super_nova***]

Of-course, child has to be always the first priority for people of all genders.  The child is totally dependent on its parents, and when there is a conflict of interest between the child and partner, the child has to come 1st.  As child grows and its dependence on parents is slowly diminishing than the balance is changing.  Partners need to understand that, be they biological partners or not.  That does not go just for men.  Some years ago I was in relationship with a man who had 2 teenage children, while my own daughter was grown up and totally independent.  His kids were 12 and 14 when I first met him, and in the age needing lots of support and understanding, and it would never for a second occur to me that I should have precedence over them.  by the way, I was the wealthier one in that relationship.

I suspect that the people who are saying that woman should put her partner before her children, are the same people who would say she is a bad mother if she did that.