Publication: Journal of Mental Health Counseling
Publication Date: 01-JUL-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Mollen, Debra
Article Excerpt
Traditional mothering continues to receive social sanctioning while women who choose not to have children are oftentimes ignored or criticized. Voluntarily childfree women participated in a qualitative investigation in which semi-structured interviews, journals, and a focus group were utilized to capture their experience of stigmatization. Data source triangulation, member checks, and consultation with a peer debriefer contributed to the authenticity of the results. Two broad themes capturing reasons for the choice not to have children and five categories of stigmatization were delineated from the participants' narratives. Considerations for mental health counselors who work with women who do not want children are offered.
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Despite the growing number of women who are choosing not to have children in the United States and abroad (Casey, 1998), current cultural attitudes and sociopolitical practices continue to lionize traditional parenting while dismissing and oftentimes criticizing women who exercise other options (Burkett, 2000). As "woman" and "mother" have become largely synonymous, those who do not conform may experience an array of responses that can include isolation and rejection. While both women who desire but cannot have children and those who choose not to have children fall outside the purview of mother, the latter are of particular interest based on the fact that they actively choose an identity that differs from the cultural norm.
Reasons for choosing not to have children are complex and responses to childfree women are likely informed largely by gender role expectations. How we come to see childfree women is likely juxtaposed with how we understand what a woman is and moreover, what she should be. Counseling and psychology as disciplines have primarily reflected negative depictions of childfree women, as the standard for healthy adult female development has been equated with mothering (Freud, 1949; Ireland, 1993).
There is some research support for the notion that childfree adults are perceived less favorably than their parenting peers. LaMastro (2001) studied 254 undergraduate students to determine perceptions of voluntary and involuntary childfreedom. Participants read short passages about married couples who had either no, one, two, or six children. Perceptions of childfree adults were more negative compared to perceptions of parents, and adults without children were ascribed poorer marital status than couples with children and were perceived as less caring, sensitive, and kind than parents.
Letherby (2002) studied women without children and found that involuntarily childfree women were typically regarded by others as desperate, while voluntarily childfree women were "viewed as selfish and deviant and portrayed in ways that emphasize this: as aberrant, immature, and unfeminine" (p. 10). Similarly, Park (2002), who interviewed 24 voluntarily childfree women and men, found that the overwhelming majority of her participants reported experiencing others as seeing them as selfish, egotistic, cold, materialistic, peculiar, and abnormal. Byrne (2000) studied childfree single women living in Ireland and found that the women were regularly asked about their single status, including their childfreedom. She noted that the women were often regarded as "too selfish" to have a child.
Much of the research on childfree women has been conducted by asking people about their perceptions regarding family size or by querying childfree women about ways they manage stigma (see, for example, LaMastro, 2001; Park, 2002) as opposed to explicating phenomenological accounts of the choice not to have children and the experiences of approval and stigma. I designed the current investigation to understand voluntarily childfree women's reasons for their choice, their experiences of others' reactions to their choice, and to provide guidelines to clinicians in light of these experiences. The focus on women's experiences specifically was chosen both because of the significance of the role of mothering for women in pronatalist cultures and because of gender role implications for women who make this choice (Eagly, Diekman, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Koenig, 2004).
METHOD
Participants
Nine voluntarily childfree women in a Midwest state were identified by key informants and through snowball sampling (Patton, 2002). The nine women ranged in age from 32 to 51. All but one of the participants were European American, with the remaining participant identifying as multiracial (European-, African-, and Native American). Two of the women had completed high school, one held an associate's degree, one had a bachelor's degree, two had master's degrees, and three held doctoral degrees. Personal annual income ranged from $18,000 to $84,000.
Four of the women were married, one was single and heterosexual, two were living with their partners and bisexual (one with a man, one with a woman), and two were lesbians living with their partners. I chose not to limit participants to heterosexual women only because research indicates that pursuant to mothering, heterosexual and non-heterosexual women report similar experiences (e.g., Flaks, Ficher, Masterpasqua, & Joseph, 1995), because non-heterosexual women can and do choose to become mothers, and because the ability to conceal one's sexual orientation does not preclude non-heterosexual women from potentially having experiences similar to heterosexual women around issues of choosing not to have children.
PROCEDURE
I examined the reasons women choose not to have children and the responses women receive from strangers, acquaintances, family members, friends, and professionals in light of their choice. Approval was granted from the Institutional Review Board prior to beginning data collection. Participants' narratives were collected by three methods: through a semi-structured interview process, semi-structured...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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