Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

According to “The Economist” (2017), childlessness has been a growing social phenomenon in many societies. In relation to aging, childless elderly could be more vulnerable facing challenges from various aspects in their old age (Miall, 1986). More particularly, a group of elderly people, who struggle from involuntary childlessness, may have to confront even more pressures from the broader socio-cultural environments as well as themselves, including, stigma, marginalization, and exclusion (Van Balen, 2009). However, research on the aging lives of these involuntarily childless elderly still remains untouched. Therefore, this study chooses two socio-culturally distinctive countries, China and the United Kingdom, to snapshot the everyday lives of these elderly and issues that they may confront along with their aging process. According to a Chinese national census in 2013, it was estimated that there were one million childless households following the death of an only child as an unforeseen consequence of the One-Child Policy. Meanwhile, according to a British government statistic in 2017, nearly one in five women in England and Wales born in 1971 have no children at all, compared to one in ten of their mother’s generation. Media have reported that there are a growing number of women and their partners in Britain whose childlessness is involuntary. Therefore, this study uses primary interviews from China as well as secondary materials from Britain to explore the socio-cultural differences on the lives of aging, childless elderly in terms of the relationships between the individual and the broader social structures.