"I quite like people to know that we did want a family": the experiences of older involuntarily childless men

Hadley, Robin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4254-7648 (2014) "I quite like people to know that we did want a family": the experiences of older involuntarily childless men. In: Men, Health, and Wellbeing: Critical Insights Conference 2014, 7 July 2014 - 8 July 2014, Leeds Beckett University, UK. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The global trend of a declining fertility rate and an increasingly ageing population has been extensively reported. Furthermore, the United Kingdom’s gender profile of its ageing population is anticipated to change as men’s age of mortality is predicted to equal women’s. Gerontological, sociological, infertility, and psychological research have overlooked the fertility intentions, experience, and history of older men and have concentrated on family and women. Infertility research has shown that failure to fulfil both the personal, and socially accepted, status of parenthood leads to a complex form of bereavement. The grief associated with the multiple losses and distress levels of females and males in this population have been found to equal those with serious medical conditions. This paper is an overview of a PhD study in to the life experience of older involuntarily childless men. Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with fourteen men, who self-defined as involuntarily childless, were held at different locations across the country. Factors that influenced the participant’s childlessness included partner selection, social skills, timing of relationship entry and exit, health, economic factors, and location. The importance of relationship quality, and the significance of being partnered, was highlighted in the social networks of those with and without partners formed. The search for meaning for four of the men, as they aged, was seen in their negotiation of a form of ‘grandfatherhood’ role: Adopted, Latent, Surrogate, and Proxy.