Deborah’s story provides a good illustration of a boomer woman who chose a solo life:
Born in a suburb of Philadelphia, Deborah attended a local university, majoring in liberal arts with a minor in business, and then getting an advanced degree in organizational studies. She wanted to see more of the country and, with nothing tying her to Pennsylvania, she moved around quite a bit, seeking opportunities to have the active, outdoor lifestyle she loved. She was never particularly career-driven, but as a woman with a master’s degree in the 1970s, she had enough education to find good jobs wherever she went.
Deborah ultimately settled far away from her family. She discovered the West Coast had more accessible year-round activities, along with the arts and a diversity of people she came to appreciate. After living for short periods in Southern California, Northern California, and the Portland, Oregon, area, at age thirty-seven she settled in Seattle. By then, she had established a career in human resources and managed to find jobs in her field wherever she landed. In Seattle, she worked first for Boeing, then for the newcomer to the area, Microsoft.
Deborah never felt the urge to marry or have children. She loved being on her own, able to make her own choices, go where she wanted, when she wanted, and with whom she wanted. She had boyfriends along the way, but none of her relationships ever got serious enough to consider marriage. Her independence always came first. Over three decades in Seattle, Deborah developed a strong cadre of friends, mostly other women in her field—some single, some married—with similar interests and experiences. They shared meals, holidays, travel, career ups and downs, and the occasional heartbreak.
At age sixty-three, Deborah looks back at her life as a series of deliberate choices. She continues to enjoy success and fulfillment in her career and her social sphere. She has no immediate plans to quit working, and since becoming a human resources consultant she can now take on as many or as few clients as she chooses.
Having chosen to not have children, you are among the many baby boomer men and women who have created a very different life, one that focused more on achievement and independence than on raising a family. You chose to be an engineer, a flight attendant, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a builder, or any of the hundreds of professions that were starting to open up to both men and women in the 1970s. In choosing not to be a parent, you helped write the story of those like us all over the world. As you crest midlife, you have another opportunity to be a pioneer. This time in the interest of having a safe and secure future as you move into your later decades.
“In every single thing you do, you are choosing a direction. Your life is a product of choices.”
—Dr. Kathleen Hall
Always a generation enamored with reinventing itself and the world, baby boomers are now poised to create new ways for living safe, productive, and meaningful lives. Today we are seeing the beginning of new and different community structures, innovative technologies for working when and where we want, and new technologies for living in a more connected way. These developments carry tremendous promise for leading interesting and rewarding lives in our seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond.
Our later decades of life will differ in important ways from people who have children. We will all face issues common to aging: our own aging parents, personal health challenges, and a gradually slowing pace. However, there are benefits to getting older: we are more patient, we see things in shades of gray rather than black and white, and we are no longer novices at our work—we are the experts. And let’s not forget about those “senior” discounts. In short, for most people, getting older represents a mixed bag, and we would do well to remember the positives when we are being inundated with the negatives.
The stories of child-free baby boomers are quite varied, yet most revolve around the common themes of independence and freedom. Many of their lives have taken unique twists and turns, owing to the choices they were able to make. In the following stories, Carolyn, Glenn, and Marion are representative of millions of boomers who took full advantage of the opportunities open to them. Their stories give us additional examples of how many child-free people have led their lives:
Carolyn and Glenn are a classic baby boomer couple. Carolyn was born in 1954, the oldest of four siblings in a military family. As her father, a naval officer, moved from base to base every four years, the family accompanied him. That meant Carolyn and her siblings bounced from school to school, never setting down roots in any one place. During her sophomore year in high school, her father retired and the family settled in Fort Collins, a midsize town in Colorado, where her father had secured a teaching position.
The years of rootlessness taught Carolyn how to make friends quickly and find her place in a variety of social situations. Those skills proved valuable in college and beyond. Thinking she might teach, Carolyn majored in English Literature, but teaching didn’t suit her. She preferred writing, and from her first job as a newsroom runner, she knew journalism was the right path for her.
Glenn, a year younger, took over his father’s insurance business the year he graduated from Colorado State University and discovered that with hard work he could grow it well beyond what his father had achieved. Having been a child of working parents, he had a feel for the stress that accompanied raising children and tending a career at the same time. Glenn had no strong desire to be a father, and when he met Carolyn, he quickly came to understand that her primary interest in life was her journalism career, not motherhood. Glenn and Carolyn both saw their relationship as a good fit. When they got around to talking about marriage and the future, they decided together that they would not raise a family.
After they wed, Glenn told Carolyn that if she had a change of heart about having children, he was open to reconsidering the matter. Carolyn deeply appreciated his willingness to be flexible. From time to time she asked herself whether she was still content not to have children, and the answer kept coming up “yes.” In her mid-thirties, she listened to many of her old high school and college friends talking about the ticking of their biological clocks. Carolyn could not discern any such clock inside of her and felt quite satisfied with the work that continued to interest her and the promotions that were rolling her way.
During her thirties and forties, Carolyn worked for a series of daily newspapers, each one larger than the last, and, at age forty-three, became a key editor for one of Colorado’s largest dailies. During that same time period, Glenn quadrupled his father’s insurance business. He opened three more offices around the state, and when his father retired Glenn assumed the reins of the entire enterprise. When they weren’t working, Glenn and Carolyn spent time with extended family, an eclectic assortment of friends from their neighborhood, their respective work circles, and old college chums who were still in the area.
Marion, now sixty-two and a successful marketing executive for a large public relations firm, always loved children and assumed she would marry and start a family sometime after college. However, life didn’t go quite as she had planned. Although she grew up in a vibrant, midsize city in Massachusetts, Marion always wanted to see the Northwest, and college gave her that opportunity. Accepted to the University of Washington in Spokane in 1973, she made her way across the country. During Marion’s sophomore year, her mother developed metastatic breast cancer. Marion rushed back to Massachusetts to be at her mother’s side for the surgery and the chemotherapy that followed.
For the first three years after surgery, her mother responded to treatment, and after six months in Massachusetts, Marion returned to college to finish her degree. Upon graduation, she accepted a marketing job in Tacoma, Washington, and signed a lease on a condominium a few miles from her workplace. Within a year of moving to Tacoma, Marion also fell in love with a man she met through a friend and became engaged to marry. Life appeared to be working out much as she had hoped.
However, in 1980, Marion’s mother had a setback and needed more extensive chemotherapy. This time, Marion and her mother decided to pursue further treatment in Washington State so Marion could be with her fiancé and continue working at the job she loved. He helped her sell the Massachusetts home and move her mother into an apartment in Tacoma, about a mile from Marion.
As