Creating a Business Community for the Childless and Childfree
Why do people still ask “Do you have kids?” when they meet someone new?
Don’t they know it has the power to hurt those of us for whom the answer is, “No”?
The truth is, no, they don’t. Unless you’ve been through the pain of involuntary childlessness or know someone who has, it’s difficult to recognise the difficulties this question can bring up. For the childfree, too, this question can be problematic.
Instead of getting into the myriad reasons why this question can hurt people, can we just agree that asking about someone’s reproductive status is a bit graceless? Let’s be clear - this is mostly happening to women, and since when did a woman’s uterus become anybody else’s business?
If someone has kids and wants to talk about them, it’ll come up naturally in their narrative and anecdotes.
For those of us who don’t have kids and don’t want to talk about it in a professional setting, “Do you have kids?” can be a difficult question which leaves us trying to hoover up the detritus of the conversation because the person asking doesn’t know what to do with a “No”.
For me, it opens up a whole can of worms about my fertility struggles and challenging stepfamily dynamics. For others, it can bring up traumatic past events or conversations they’d rather not think about in a business environment.
This question still prevails because, statistically, the other person is more likely to say, “Yes”.
Let’s look at it mathematically.
In the UK, around 1 in 5 women over 40 doesn’t have children.
So, if you’re asking a midlife woman whether she has kids, there’s a high chance she does. If you also have kids, this is the quickest and easiest way to find common ground and connection with someone who is otherwise a complete stranger.
With an 80% success rate, “Do you have kids?” persists because it works.
Until it doesn’t.
I started going to networking events online in early 2024, gradually widening my network of self-employed people.
Mostly they were enjoyable events, but I'd always put up invisible walls around myself to brace for the impact of the inevitable questions about children.
If someone has children and wishes to talk about them with you, the topic will come up naturally in chit-chat because that’s what their life looks like. The issue isn’t with curiosity (mostly), but with the direct and intrusive way the question can be thrust at us. Changing the way it's asked can be helpful, for example, “I’ve just dropped the kids at school, what have you been up to this morning?” gives the other person more space to decide how to answer.
As mentioned above, the question remains part of our conversational toolkit because most of the time, it works well as a way of connecting with a new person. But for the 20% of us over 40s who don’t have kids, it can feel antagonistic. Especially if the other person refuses to accept the “No” and move on (which happens more than you’d think).
This small but solid barrier made it really difficult for me to fully connect with other professionals. I craved a place where I could talk passionately about my fledgling business without being blindsided by questions about kids.
My issue is that the duty typically falls to the childless half of the conversation to repair the awkwardness. It’s bloody exhausting, is all.
So I began to create that place I was craving and put the feelers out to see what others were thinking about the subject.
Many people got in touch to say how much it resonated. The space I envisaged was obviously needed - there were lots of people needing respite from the pronatalism of the freelance world.
Pronatalism is the ideology of a culture which idolises parenthood and believes the only way to make a valuable contribution to society is to procreate and therefore increase the population for capitalist reasons.
Since the world turned upside down through Covid and beyond, the prevalence of Mum/Dad groups for businesses has grown exponentially. This is wonderful; everyone needs a space where they can be with others who understand their specific daily challenges.
The thing is, being a Mum or Dad is only one way of living a life, and when that’s not part of your everyday, it can feel like you’re cast out of mutual spaces, even if it’s mostly in your own head. For women, in my experience and that of many others, women's groups easily turn into groups for Mums.
And that can be difficult for us because we don’t have the same experiences to contribute to the conversation.
I didn’t - and still don’t - want to create a divide between us and parents, and I appreciate the support of those parents who recognise and understand this need. Just like there are a million and one Mum groups, the space I’ve created enables us to meet others who recognise our particular viewpoint.
We all have challenges, and a place to talk about them without judgement is helpful. The childless community is great for supportive conversation and connection - with communities like the Full Stop, Childless Collective and We Are Childfree.
Flow is something a little different.
One of the main benefits of Flow is that you never have to justify, or even mention, being childless or childfree unless you choose to. But how to talk about something without talking about the reason that thing exists?
I explained this dilemma in a meeting recently like this: “The first rule of childless club is you don’t talk about childless club,” because we’re not there to discuss our parental statuses (it does come up now and then, but it’s never the primary focus).
First and foremost, we’re a supportive and collaboratively minded group of people who get together every couple of weeks to chat about business life, to build relationships, to be colleagues for each other in a pretty lonely profession, and to cheer each other on like we would if we worked in a traditional team.
We also happen to not have kids, which is the thread drawing us together. It’s not a focus of the group, but it’s true for all of us.
Finding belonging in the childless community has been the golden thread running through the last few years of my life. It’s why I’m writing this story, sharing information about my own parental status in essays and making an invisible demographic more visible in my tiny corner of the internet.
Flow is a natural extension of the work I already do to raise awareness of childless and childfree narratives. It’s also how I embrace my childlessness as a way of doing some good - bringing people together to share successes and lift each other up when things don’t go to plan.