The unspoken grief of never becoming a grandparent

UNITED STATES – Ms Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favourite copy of The Velveteen Rabbit since her three children – now in their 20s and 30s – were young.

She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family’s home with books. She hoped one day to be a “cool” grandma who would share her favourite stories with a new generation.

But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is “right for them”, Ms Birk said, it still breaks her heart.

“I don’t have young children any more, and now I’m not going to have grandchildren,” she said. “So that part of my life is just over.”

Like her, a growing number of Gen Xers and baby boomers are facing the sometimes painful fact that they are never going to become grandparents.

A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 per cent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more US adults say they are unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just do not want to.

“That is a best and worst thing about having kids,” said Ms Birk’s husband, Mr John Birk Jr, 55. “You watch them make their own decisions, different from your own.”

Still, would-be grandparents like the Birks may experience a deep sense of longing and loss when their children opt out of parenthood, even if they understand at an intellectual level that their children do not “owe” them a family legacy, said Ms Claire Bidwell Smith, a therapist based in Los Angeles and the author of Conscious Grieving.

It does not help that society tends to paint grandchildren as a reward for ageing.

“You always hear people talk about how great it is to be a grandparent, how it’s better than being a parent,” Ms Bidwell Smith said. “I think when people don’t get to experience that, there’s a very real grief that comes with it.”

It is a kind of grief, she said, that today’s culture tends not to recognise, and that people do not know how to talk about.

Feeling left out, without a legacy

Ms Christine Kutt, 69, had her only child at 42, after years of thinking she did not want to become a parent. The experience transformed her, she said, and she has loved being a mother.

But her daughter is adamant she does not want children, pointing to her pessimism about the state of the world and climate change.

Ms Kutt, who is divorced and lives in the suburbs of Chicago, vacillates between feeling supportive of her daughter’s choice and quietly hoping she might change her mind.

She dreams of being surrounded by grandchildren as she ages, passing on to them her family recipes and love of rock ’n’ roll. Even when her daughter was little, she envisioned such a future.

“I was like, ‘It’s so much fun to teach her all this stuff. And someday, she’ll have children, and I’ll be able to teach them’,” she said.

Parents who are hoping for grandchildren are likely at an age when they are experiencing a “shrinkage of time”, with fewer years ahead of them than behind them, said Dr Maggie Mulqueen, a psychologist based in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

That can mean wrestling with existential questions about their lives and legacies, she said.

Dr Mulqueen, who has counselled many baby boomers through their longing for grandchildren, has found that the decision to remain child-free can strain the parent-child relationship, particularly when parents who have dreamed of grandchildren fail to separate any personal disappointment they feel from a sense of being disappointed in their children.

Ms Kutt, wary of making that mistake, does not talk about the topic with her daughter often.

“It’s been made perfectly clear to me that this subject is not to be discussed,” she said, though sometimes she cannot help herself.

Ms Kutt tells her daughter that the woman she is 10 years from now will not recognise the person she is today, and nudges her to keep her options open.

The situation can feel like a personal rejection for older parents, Dr Mulqueen said. Some of her clients ask themselves: “Did I mess up as a parent so much that my kids don’t want to have children?”

Grieving a child’s choice

Like every parent interviewed for this article, Ms Jill Perry, 69, said her two daughters – both in their 30s and child-free – should be able to make their own choices about parenthood, and they have her full support.

But now would also be the “perfect” time for her to become a grandmother, she said. She was laid off from her job running a college student health centre two years ago, after decades of working as an emergency room nurse.

When friends post happy photos with their grandchildren on social media, Ms Perry often feels the tug of what might have been. Her house would be the “fun house”, she said, where little ones could paint, have adventures and make a mess.

“I think that’s the part I’m really struggling with,” she said. “Like, okay, I won’t be able to do that with grandchildren. So what can I do to fill that need?”

She stays busy with her husband, dogs, book club and playing mahjong. But she also feels a bit alone as time goes by. “Grandchildren bring such hope and light into your life,” she said. “To have that is a counterbalance, I think, to ageing. Because ageing is hard.”

Ms Bidwell Smith said that it was important for parents like Ms Perry to give themselves permission to acknowledge and sit with their grief.

For some, that is difficult – they may tell themselves they should simply get over it because there are far more serious types of loss in the world.

To the extent it is possible, experts encourage non-grandparents to explore different sides of themselves.

Those who miss spending time around younger children can find ways to get involved, Dr Mulqueen said. One of her clients who had a background in accounting volunteered to tutor mathematics at a local school.

Ms Bidwell Smith said it could also help to ask: If the next chapter of your life does not include grandchildren, what new activities or adventures might be possible?

Ms Perry’s husband, Dr David Cox, 67, does what he can to avoid romanticising the grandparent experience, clocking when friends grumble about having become an “overworked babysitter”.

Still, he feels pangs of sadness, particularly when he and Ms Perry pass a park full of happy kids. Or when he reminisces about his grandfather, who immigrated from Sicily and was, in some ways, more of a father figure to Dr Cox than his own dad was.

“I think we both would have loved to pay that gift of unconditional love and guidance back in spades if we were grandparents,” he said, speaking of himself and his wife. “But, not to be.” NYTIMES