Life without Children

Abstract

When the editors of this volume approached us to write an essay on what it means to be “childless” in the academy, we were intrigued. Over the years, we have heard any number of presentations wholly or partly about the complications of having children: whether and how to stop your tenure clock, what rights you have under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and what tuition discounts you receive for dependents. It’s not that we don’t appreciate the information. For one thing, we have both contemplated a future career path in administration, where knowledge of these things is crucial. For another, policies associated with medical leave can be every bit as crucial for faculty facing serious illness as for those expecting a child. But for the childless, these programs often seem to imply, however subtly, that faculty without children have it easy—that we don’t have personal obligations or complications and, instead, spend our time at culinary clubs, or traveling Europe, or otherwise making luxurious use of endless expanses of free time. If only it were so. The fact is that being child-less in the academy can pose its own complications. By writing this essay, we hope to help the childless know what to expect, and to give their colleagues, chairs, and deans a sense of the issues that perturb these modern-day Sphinxes—inscrutable to the parenting majority—who can’t or won’t have a child.