115: Let's Talk Terminology for Women Without Kids

Childless?  Childfree?  Woman Without Kids? Take your pick! 

I've been really curious about how women who don't have kids and wanted them identify themselves.  Some appear to be really attached to the Childless Not By Choice term, and yet my own experience and in the multiple discussions we've had in my group program, childless seems to make us FEEL less.

In this solo episode, I unpack all the different terms, the fact that it's not as black and white as childfree versus childless, and how to detach yourself from the terminology altogether.

If you are someone who wants to have this kind of discussion openly and lovingly with other "childless" women, summer is the perfect time to join the Women of Worth program.  Imagine how much better your summer could look with the right support through grief and to manifest your best life?  Send me an email or a DM with the word "podcast 115" and I'll share the details with you.

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

If you are a childless woman looking to up-level her life in a major way, join the Love Your Beautiful, Unconventional Life Retreat, coming up at the end of February 2025.  Book a Retreat Call with Sheri here if you have questions or want to know more!

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Transcript

I saw a post recently where a childless woman was complaining about people who mix up the words childfree with childless – women who choose not to have kids calling them childless when this person felt they should be using the word child-free and vice versa.

This person also suggested that parents who call themselves childless when they don't have their own kids for the weekend are ignorant and disrespectful of the grief someone who wanted kids might feel.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently and we've actually had a couple of discussions about this in my group program as well.

So this is, I feel like it's kind of a hot topic, and what I'm learning is that the terminology for women without kids is way more complicated than this black and white childless, child-free binary.

So today, I want to dive into this a little bit, and just discuss it, share some of the things that I've been learning, share some of the things that I've been hearing from my clients, and seeing out in the social media world.

So if you want to hear my musings on this, and I'm also going to sort of challenge you to think, stay tuned.

Welcome and welcome back if you are a regular listener. This is Sherri Johnson. I'm your host and today I want to talk about terminology that we use for women who do not have kids.

That's what I've been starting to use actually is women without kids. I'll talk about, let me talk about why later, I was going to already dive in but I want to say some things first.

So first I would love to know your take on this. I'd love to know what your terminology is that you prefer, send me an email to Sherri at SherriJohnson.ca or a DM on Instagram to Sherri Johnson Coaching, those are linked up in the show notes if you want to just click on something.

And again, Tom what terminology you prefer to use for women who don't have kids and wanted them. Or the other, if you're someone listening and you made a choice or you felt ambivalent about it, about having kids that is and don't have them, tell me your thoughts as well.

I'm really interested to hear. I've heard a bunch of different terms for women like us who don't have kids, childless, child-free.

maw has won that Jody Day uses. think that's short for, I forget if it's not a mom or nobody's mother.

I recently heard Enling and Flertile, those are two that I don't hear very often, and Ruby Warrington suggested the word 80 reproductive, which I think is me be more for someone who actively chose not to have kids, but maybe if that resonates, I don't know.

Even if you didn't choose that. And then there's the scientific term, which I don't even know how to pronounce it properly, Noli Paris.

That's the term used for a woman who not just didn't get pregnant, but it doesn't have kids. So a bunch of different terms.

And to be honest, none of them really resonate for me. But it seems as though the community of women who don't have kids, but one of them has claimed the term childless.

And those who chose not to have kids are child-free. But again, I'm learning that there are actually many of us who either don't feel like we fall clearly into either one of those categories, or we simply don't want to be known or identified as someone who is less or someone who's missing something.

Childless can seem negative, even child-free. can be because if you have children in your life, maybe you don't feel as though your child free, maybe you're a stepmother or a bonus mom, or maybe you care for children on a regular basis.

So maybe that doesn't resonate either. So there's a few things that I want to put forward here. First of all, I love that Ruby Worrington posited in her book, Women Without Kids, that this is not a binary.

That was a concept that I had been thinking about for a long time because I myself didn't feel as though I sat comfortably in either so-called category of child free or childless.

I felt like I was in the middle and sometimes I moved back and forth. Sometimes I felt really a life of freedom, child free, and other times I felt

really less than, and like I was missing something. I did try to have kids. I had three miscarriages. I had a bunch of fertility treatments.

We ultimately gave up, but once I started to tease out all the different emotions I felt and beliefs that were underlying those emotions, beliefs that had about women, pronatalism, and patriarchy, I realized that I had actually been a bit ambivalent about having kids for most of my life, but saying clearly that I was child free or chose not to have kids that didn't really feel accurate to me.

I didn't choose not to pursue IVF, we chose not to pursue a donor egg, chose not to pursue adoption.

or fostering any of those other things. So we did make a choice in there somewhere, even though it felt as though it was an impossible choice and sort of forced upon us.

So, oh, and by the way, I interviewed Ruby on the podcast, on the Awakening Worth podcast a few weeks ago, and you can hear more of our discussion on what she calls the motherhood spectrum, which is really what I'm talking about, the fact that this isn't a binary, on episode number 109.

Okay, back to back to what I wanted to put forward. So another thing that I wanted to put forward is my conversations with my clients and share a little bit around that.

So, and this is around, this is based on conversations that I've had with my clients in our group program, also with potential clients, because I literally just had a conversation.

about this very thing with a potential client on a sales call earlier today. so many women who actually wanted kids but didn't get to have them don't actually want to be called childless.

So I think it's a big assumption, I'm finding this, that it's a big assumption that we all want to be called childless and not childfree.

I don't think that's a unanimous. In fact, I know it's not because when we discuss this inside of my program and we've had this discussion several times with different groups of women.

So as women have moved through the program, we've had this discussion several times and none of them wanted to be called childless, not a single one.

So I don't know whether I'm tracking different women to my program or whether this is representative of more people out there than maybe we realize, but it's definitely not a unanimous, we need to claim this word as our own, as the women who didn't have kids and wanted them.

What we talked about was that it feels like this identity child less is a disempowered one. It's one that feels less because she has less, one that constantly also feels like we are a victim of these circumstances, and every one of my clients wanted to be referred to something as more positive, and yet we couldn't really find a term that we liked.

Child free didn't seem to fit those earlier terms that I mentioned, some are okay with the normal. Oh, you know, it's an acronym that maybe after while doesn't really mean not a mom because there still isn't negative in there, not a mom or maybe nobody's mom.

Maybe that doesn't feel as negative. So that might resonate for you. I don't know, I'm curious. One of my, one of my clients actually asked chat JPT what it could come up with.

And I'll share a couple of those just for fun. One of them was L-A-D-E-S stands for Ladies, Achieving Dreams in Everyday Society.

These were all acronyms actually, by the way. Flow was another one. Females leading our world. That was flow. Win, women in solidarity.

I'm not sure about that one. SIS, S-I-S, in Solidarity. And the last one was G E S S group, Empowering Soul Sisters, Group Empowering Soul Sisters.

So I don't know if any of those will land, that's what chat GPT came up for us. I'm curious whether chat GPT will change its mind over the years as different information is out there.

Anyway, that was just kind of for fun. So the next thing that I want to put forward is, unless someone doesn't have kids and one of them, how would anyone know outside of that group which term is correct?

So I was one of those people, I still am, one of those people who doesn't have kids, one of them.

And I actually didn't know what the terminology was. It wasn't until I started to wonder if there were other people out there like me, and so I typed into Instagram Hashtag child-free not-by-choice I use child-free not-by-choice.

I distinctly remember typing that in because I quickly found out that there was a difference or there seemed to be a difference between child-free childless and Honestly, it never even occurred to me that there would be a definition for these words child-free or childless.

just to me, I was just finding trying to find a way to find people like me. It didn't really matter what I was called or what identity I took on and I think we find this across the English language, any language, really, I'm sure.

To give you an example outside of this world, my husband has a spinal cord injury. and he uses a wheelchair.

And I used to say, someone who uses a wheelchair is in a wheelchair, that person's in a wheelchair. And while it doesn't bother my husband when I say this, he did correct me once.

I think on behalf of all the other people who it does bother, he said, I use a wheelchair. And so I just, I would never have thought that that was a sensitive thing.

And yet for some people, it is. And to give me another example, my mom continues to use the word handicapped parking, even though this has changed now to accessible parking.

My husband doesn't care, but a lot of people do. They don't want to be referred to in any way she performed, even though it's handicapped parking that my mom refers to.

Someone with a handicapped, has now been changed to someone with a disability. So, as meanings of words change, we change the words.

So, I don't even know that this is a really, you know, I think this terminology is maybe a lot more fluid than we think.

So, all that to say that really, until you're intimately familiar with the situation, you may not actually know what the best terminology is or what the current day terminology is.

So, why not give the parents some grace when they use the wrong word? That leads me to my next point.

This is point number four. How can we bridge that gap? There is this, I think. a bit of a gap to bridge between parents and non-parents.

And there can be some animosity when they talk about each other. So think about this. What changes in the world when we call parents disrespectful for using the term childless incorrectly?

Or when people mix up the word child-free and childless? What changes when we complain about that? Or when we call parents disrespectful or ignorant?

Does anything change? Let's turn this around. When you're accused of something or blamed, when you had no intention of disrespecting someone, how do you respond?

Think about that for a second. Your partner, a friend, someone on Instagram. and they hurl, you know, you're being disrespectful or you're being, this is ignorant, how do you respond to that?

Most of us would probably get defensive because it feels like your own integrity, your own kindness, your own compassion is being questioned, it's being, it's being questioned, it's being challenged.

And if we think about it in another way, what if someone approached you with kindness and said, you know, I understand why you said that, why you use that word, may I share with you how that impacts me and other people like me?

How would you respond to that? You'd probably say, yes, please tell me. And then when you hear someone feel apologize.

I think most of us would react that way. So what if we were to share with the parents or others or whoever?

Here's how that impacted me. I think that, well, and I don't just think it, I've experienced this every time that I have opened a conversation in that way, where I have felt triggered instead of reacting.

I'll open a conversation with kindness. And this actually opens up a deeper conversation, an opportunity for compassion on both sides.

And that is what helps us to educate. That's what helps us bridge the gap. It's what opens hurts, and it dissipates the shame and the judgment that we feel as women.

and without kids. I might need to just digest that. And before you, I know this podcast episode is probably little bit controversial and it might be even reactive or triggering for you.

So I invite you to just reflect on what I'm saying and you can disagree. That's okay. But I invite you to just really think about how you would react and how others react to you when you come at them with that kind of energy of your disrespectful.

Okay, that brings me to I think what is going to be my last point and then will who is bothered when others use child-free to describe your what you feel.

is your childless situation or if you're bothered by parents using the term childless or maybe child-free for that matter to describe their weekend without kids or their time without their kids.

I would ask you to dig deep. I challenge you to dig deep. I'm going to give you a question and you might not like this question or understand it but my coach uses it on me and it always makes me think.

Here's the question. What are you making that mean about you? When someone doesn't, when someone uses those terms incorrectly, of course, incorrectly in air quotes, what are you making it mean about you?

Does it mean something at all about you? When someone calls you child-free instead of childless? I would I would.

In my opinion, it might mean something about them. It might mean that they don't understand your situation. Yeah, I'm recording my podcast.

Can you close the bedroom door? I'm I'm I'm podcast go my go my go podcast go It might mean something about them that they don't understand your situation, that they don't understand that you might be someone who wanted kids and you're grieving that loss.

So think about that for a second. What might it mean about them? And does it really mean anything about you?

So if for the moment we were to agree that it doesn't actually mean anything about you, it only means something about them, what specifically makes it important to you that they understand your grief?

Especially if it's some random parent out there on the Internet. What specifically makes it important to you that they understand that you are grieving?

Does it change the fact that you are grieving? Probably not. And maybe it's not a random person, and instead a friend or a family member who's got it wrong, who's used the wrong terminology according to your understanding.

What is keeping you from doing what I mentioned earlier and talking about how you feel with kindness or talking about how you feel at all?

And take deep here, what is really keeping you from doing that? might be tempted to say, well, why bother?

What's the point? Now, really think about it. What's behind your excuse? What's behind you not putting yourself out there.

Okay, know that last part might be challenging to to digest and to think about or accept. So just take what you want from this episode and leave the rest.

totally fine. But if you're someone who's kind of open to it, I would challenge you to just go through that last point, number five.

was if you're bothered by others using the quote unquote incorrect terminology, what are you making that mean about you?

Really dig into the questions that I asked here. Okay. I'm going to wrap this up here. If you are someone who wants to have this kind of discussion openly and lovingly with other childless, childless women, and or you want to learn how to have these open conversations with your loved ones, summer is the perfect time to join the women of worth signature program.

Imagine how much better your summer could look with. these kinds of triggers. Imagine how much better your summer could look with the right support to get you through that grief and on to manifesting your best life.

If you are someone who wants to empower yourself and take that kind of action, send me an email with a word PODCAST 115 and I will share all the details with you.

Okay, that is it for today's episode. If you found this valuable, I would invite you to share it with someone else who might also find it valuable.

Someone who needs to hear it or and hit the subscribe, the follow, the review. I would love a review from you if you found this valuable and so go do that and come back next week for another episode.

Bye for now.