childlessness in the media

Media depictions of childlessness miss the mark

Sue Fagalde Lick World Childless Week , , , , , , , , , ,
Cartoon image of Cruella de Vil from 1,001 Dalmations. She has gray skin, wears a fur coat, a red glove and is holding a green cigarette holder. She has an evil grin.

When was the last time you saw our lives without children accurately portrayed in a book, movie, or TV show? Can’t think of anything? That’s because you probably didn’t see anything like that. 

Childless in the Media was the subject of a panel discussion I joined on Zoom last Thursday as part of World Childless Week. Gateway-women founder Jody Day led the discussion. Joining us were author Annie Kirby, counselor and author Meriel Whale, journalism professor Cristina Archetti, and Rosalyn Scott, an editor who runs the NoMo book club featuring books by and about childless women. You can watch the webinar here.

We all agreed that true-to-life images of people without children are hard to find. The childfree are depicted as career-obsessed, hard-hearted, and possibly crazy. Remember Alex in “Fatal Attraction”? Or the countless female characters who were forced to go back to their small-town families for some reason and discovered a handsome hunky flannel-shirted stranger who brought out their feminine mothering side? 

The childless, unable to have children due to infertility and other reasons, are shown as pitiful–until, tada!-a baby magically falls into their hands through adoption or a miraculous conception. The partner who didn’t want kids has done a complete 180 and is delighted to become a parent.

Even those who seem to be set in a childless marriage because one partner doesn’t want to have children–Penny in “The Big Bang Theory”–change their minds. Penny is pregnant and happy about it at the end of the show.

Cristina Archetti, attending from Norway, did a study of 50 films from Norway, Italy, and the United States. The stereotypes hold across cultures, she said. The childless characters either die by suicide or murder, become mothers–thus “normalizing” their lives, or become psychopaths. The exceptions: men and superheroes. Superwoman is apparently okay with not having kids. She’s too busy saving the world. 

Her conclusion: The childless, especially women, are seen as unnatural, broken and needing to be fixed, or as monsters. Yikes. I don’t think that describes most of us. But people often believe what they see in the media. We need truer images of what it’s like to be childless.  

Jody Day asked people who registered for the webinar to list their most loved and hated childless characters. Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City” came out high on both lists. She married Mr. Big relatively late and he didn’t want children. She accepted that with little protest. In the new series, taking place many years later, the widowed Carrie is dating again and children seem to be the last thing on her mind. 

Some of the beloved childless characters include Mary Poppins, Miss Marple, and Jessica Fletcher of the “Murder, She Wrote” series. 

During our discussion, Annie Kirby read from her book The Hollow Sea, and I read portions of my Up Beaver Creek novels  that include childless characters. Meriel Whale shared from her forthcoming book The Unreal City. We believe there is a market for stories about women like us who don’t have children and are not crazy, mean (Nurse Ratched?, Snow White’s wicked stepmother? Cruella de Ville), or likely to end up with a baby at the end (“Mike and Molly,” “Friends”). 

Who would you name as childless characters you admire or hate? 

Is it hard for you to watch shows or read books that are filled with parents and children or that offer magical solutions to childlessness? Can you name any movies, TV shows or books that get it right? 

What do you think? I would love to read your comments. 

  Meanwhile, check out @Nomobookclub on Instagram. 

Little by little, by telling our own stories and sharing the ones that show childlessness as it really is, we can help change the way the world looks at us. 

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Childlessness by Marriage Gets Little Press

Sue Fagalde Lick childless actress, childless vs. childfree, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

I have been racking my brain trying to find a subject for today’s blog, and I’m coming up dry. Plus I’m distracted. Why?

  • Four friends have died this month, and another is on his way out. Every phone call or text makes me jump.
  • I have been spending hours working on the “best of Childless by Marriage” book, which is getting close to finished. It feels like we have covered everything already, but I know there are more stories out there. (See below)
  • I’m getting ready for a writer’s conference I’m working at this weekend—all online, which requires multiple training sessions. My writerly Zoom schedule is busier than my pre-COVID schedule, and the hours, designed to accommodate all time zones, are worse.
  • I’m going crazy with something called Restless Legs Syndrome. I don’t usually talk about this, but it’s running my life these days. Do any of you have it? Basically, it’s an irresistible urge to move one’s legs, caused by a neurological problem. It’s not fatal but totally crazy-making. I finally tried medication for it; it made it worse instead of better. The doc kept raising the dose until I was too dizzy and nauseated to function. Now I’m tapering off because it’s so addictive you can’t just stop. For hours at a time, usually in the evening, I cannot sit still. Not for five minutes. This thing, also known as Willis-Ekbom Disease, can be hereditary, so thank God I didn’t pass it down to my children.

In searching for good things to share with you, this podcast at “Remotely Relatable” sounded promising: “How Many Goldfish Equal a Child?” Once we get past the chit-chat and into the topic, we learn that neither Julie nor Stephanie, both in their 30s, ever wanted children. Julie had her tubes tied at age 30 to make sure she never got pregnant. Yes, her mother is still saving her stuffed animals for future grandchildren, but it’s not going to happen. Stephanie still has intact tubes, but she has never wanted children ever. So, these are not our people.

They did talk about how hard it is for millennials to fit children into their lives, what with student loans, careers, and the major events that have happened in their lifetimes—9/11, Recession, natural disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic . . . We need a village to raise children, they said, but they can’t seem to find that village. Lots of us can identify with all that, but still, they didn’t want kids.

Oh, here’s an article about writer dealing with the decision. Nope, this won’t work either. Another woman with no urge to be a mother, she cites childfree actress Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City as her role model. She says all these people who think women have to have children to be happy should just back off.

Where does that leave those of us who are childless by marriage, who actually wanted children? Those of us who are childless because our partners wouldn’t or couldn’t are still in that rarely-talked-about but oh-so-common situation that nobody seems to acknowledge except those of us who are in it. Do you see your situation mirrored anywhere in the media besides here? Who are our role models? Where is our podcast?

*****

Would you like to write a guest post for this blog? I’m looking for personal stories, 500-750 words long, that fit our childless-by-marriage theme. You could write about infertility, second marriages, partners who don’t want children, stepchildren, feeling left out when everyone around you has kids, fear of being childless in old age, birth control, and other related issues. Tell us how you how you came to be childless “by marriage” and how it has affected your life. We love stories about successful childless women. We do not want to hear about your lovely relationship with your children or how happy you are to be childfree. Nor will I accept posts that advertise a service or product. Not all submissions will be accepted, and all are subject to editing, but those that are published will receive a loving reception from our CBM readers. If interested, email me at sufalick@gmail.com.