What will your legacy be if you don’t have children?

One of the biggest emotional problems childfree people seem to face is disappointing their parents by not having kids. I’ve already talked about how to tell your parents about you’re childfree without breaking their hearts. Today, I’m going to go into greater detail about how to leave a legacy that they’ll be able to understand and feel secure with.

In this post, I’ll talk about:

• Why your parents are concerned about their legacy
• Why having kids isn’t always a good way to leave a legacy
• How you can leave a legacy that makes them feel secure

The issue of who gets your money is a simple one, and I’ll go into it in greater detail in next month’s blog series. For this post, I’m going to focus on the intangible kind of legacy.

What’s the Big Deal About Leaving a Legacy?

The idea of leaving a legacy has been drilled into your parents through books, TV, movies, and—most significantly—their parents. A legacy is simply the way you’ll be remembered after you die. Most people plan to be remembered by their kids and their kids after them.

So parents can feel real distress when learning that their child (especially an only child) has decided to be childfree. They’ve been brought up to believe that their immortality is guaranteed through a strong family line. As long their descendants sit around the kitchen table retelling stories about their life, they won’t be forgotten. When their child reproduces, they feel safe knowing that the family they’ve built will continue.

Every Legacy is a Lottery

Yet this isn’t always a source of comfort or joy. Children won’t always live the lives their parents want them to. Try as some parents do, they can’t always force their children to share their interests and values. King Solomon, speaking of the heir to his throne, knew that all to well:

I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. ¹⁹ And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun.

– Ecclesiastes 2:18-19

How many times have you heard a parent talking about how their grown child isn’t living the life they wanted them to live? How often have you seen a father distressed at the way his son is handling the family business? And how many adult children do you know who’ve cut their parents off? Having children isn’t always a surefire way to leave a good legacy.

What Does Your Legacy Include?

So if having a child isn’t an option for you to leave a legacy, how do you do it? And how do you do it in a way that will ease your parents’ minds about their dwindling or finished family line?

If they’re like most, your parents simply want someone to:

• Remember their name
• Retell their story
• Pass on their values and beliefs

Let’s go into these in greater detail.

Who will remember your name?

There’s a reason cultures across the globe have a clear way for children to carry on their family name or names. Not only is your name the way everyone identifies and remembers you, it ties you to your entire family tree. Your first name is the symbol of who you are and your last name is a symbol of your family line. Have you ever seen a gravestone whose name has worn away over the centuries? Even though we’ve never met the person whose bones are lying in the earth their, at least their name—their symbol—lives on. Once that’s gone they’ve lost the living memory and their symbolic memory. They’re really, truly gone.

Who will retell your story?

Lots of people remember those family gatherings when the older generation tells stories about their exploits as kids and young adults. I loved listening to my aunts, uncles and dad retell these tales. But who will I tell them to if I’m childfree? When your parents express anguish over you not having kids, this is part of that anguish. Who will remember me when I’m gone? The family line will wan and then vanish completely. I’ll be forgotten.

Who will share my values and beliefs?

Most people feel very strongly about their beliefs. Whether we’ve come to believe deeply in the morals of our childhood religion or we’ve found our own set of values through other life experiences, by the time we’re adults we generally feel that we know what we believe. And, not to overstate the fact, we believe what we believe. We hold it as truth and want to pass it on. Why have we struggled and come so far to learn so much just to die without imparting our revelations onto the next generation?

Creating a Legacy as a Childfree Person

Now that we’ve narrowed down the reasons your parents want to leave a legacy, let’s look at how to do it. Here are my top 3 ways to leave a legacy as a childfree person:

1. Put your name on it

William Penn was a the son of an English nobleman. When he emigrated to the British colonies in North America, he founded a new province, which King Charles II named “Pennsylvania” after Penn’s esteemed father. Centuries later, the Penn family legacy is secure in the state of Pennsylvania and the City of Brotherly Love.

If your parents are concerned with the family name being lost, find a way to immortalize it.

A few options are to:

• Donate to your parent’s college: This is an expensive one, but you can probably get their name on a plaque (or even a small building) for less than the $245,000 it takes to raise a child (sans college).
• Start a foundation in their name: Create a foundation for a cause they support so that their name is permanently tied to something they’re passionate about.
• Create a scholarship: Similar to starting a foundation, creating a scholarship attaches your parent’s name to the funding that helps future generations of young adults go to college.

If these ideas are currently out of your price range, arrange to have a legacy created after your death by planning your estate. For that matter, help your parents plan their estate and teach them how they can create their own lasting legacy that way.

Finally, remember that this doesn’t have to be something huge. Buy your parent a brick at their favorite zoo, park, or their alma mater.

2. Record it

Gather your family history and write it down. This is a time-consuming task, but it’ll help you learn things about your family you never knew.  With so many tools like Ancestry.com and other online records, you can uncover facts your parents might not even know about their family. When you’ve got all you need, either compile it yourself or hire a writer/editor to organize it.

When you have it all typed up, go to a self-publishing site like Lulu. These sites will let you create a professional-looking book for under $20. Your parents will absolutely love seeing their family history and their own life recorded this way.

3. Share it

What if your folks really feel like they need another living, breathing person to carry on their legacy? Join a local mentoring program to mentor a child. Not only will this make a big difference in an underprivileged child’s life, it’ll give your parents the chance to interact with someone from the next generation. Go places together. Tell your parents the ways you’re passing on their wisdom to the child you’re mentoring.

If kids really aren’t your cup of tea, share your parents’ teachings with the world at large. Mention them on your YouTube channel, on your blog, in a book, in a public speech. And tell them about it.

Think of all the people who’ve passed their beliefs on to millions of others. Mr. Rogers taught generations of children that it’s okay to have and express their feelings. Gene Roddenberry showed audiences that human beings can achieve their fullest social potential. Great spiritual leaders like Jesus and the Buddha have been passing on their beliefs to billions of people for thousands of years. Even J.K. Rowling’s message of equality and selfless love will continue to reach new people for the next several generations at least.

Your audience may not be so large, but it doesn’t have to be. You just need to be able to show your parents that their legacy (and yours) will live on after they’re dead.

Honor Your Parents with a Good Life

Ultimately, your parents simply want to know that their name, story, and beliefs won’t be forgotten. You don’t need to bring an unwanted child into the world to show them that. The Buddha said there’s no amount of suffering you can inflict upon yourself that would repay  your parents’ kindness. They only way to truly be a filial child, according to him, is to do good works on your parents’ behalf. I think that applies here too. You don’t need to sacrifice your own happily childfree life to be a good child. You just have to reflect your goodness, kindness, and happiness back to them and honor them with your happily childfree life.

“Dear Mom and Dad, I’m not having kids.”

I live in a pro-birth family. Like many Boomers, my parents grew up with a lot of siblings. As a result, I grew up with a lot of cousins. There are seven of us in total (all of us now in or approaching our 30s). Of these seven, six of us are either childless or childfree.

This is becoming more common¹. Family trees that once had 5+ children every generation are suddenly seeing just a few new shoots. And for the older generation, that’s hard to understand. Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles seem continually puzzled by the lack of baby-making from the younger generation.

Their response can be to pressure we young adults to have kids. And for the childfree, that can feel uncomfortable. This pressure is even greater when the so-called ‘responsibility’ of having children falls to just one person. At least in my case, I have five other cousins who are equally accountable for the lack of offspring. For childfree people from a small pro-birth family, all focus falls on them.

How to cope with being childfree in a pro-birth family

As I mentioned in How to Tell Your Parents You’re Childfree, it’s important to figure out why your pro-birth parents (or other relatives) want you to have children. Some of the common reasons I’ve found are:

• They have a vague feeling that being childfree is wrong.
• They think you aren’t having children because you don’t like your family.
• They’re afraid the family is going to be forgotten (think Disney-Pixar’s Coco).
• They want to see, hear, and play with babies.
• They believe it’s the only way you’ll be happy (and they really, truly want you to be happy).

Once you understand the reasons for their insistence, sadness, or confusion over your choice to be childfree, you can help them understand.

My advice for family gatherings isn’t to start a discussion about being childfree. That can get uncomfortable quickly, and it’s less likely to be effective than just slipping in some ideas here and there.

How to respond when they question you

When the dreaded topic of “When are you having kids,” or “Why don’t you have kids” does come up, remember that they’re not really asking that question. Your pro-birth family members are telling you that they’re uneasy with your childfree status.

Just remember, that’s okay. Yes, it’s kind of rude of them to ask, but while the question may be inappropriate, their feelings aren’t. It’s perfectly natural for them to wonder—and worry about—what’s going to happen to the family line.

Most of us grow up wanting to make our parents and relatives happy. When we get older, it can be tough to reconcile their wants with our individual autonomy. We want to please them, but we also know that it’s our choice to have or not have children. So what do you say?

Bearing in mind that they ask because they worry, not because they’re just rude for the sake of being rude, just smile and say, “Don’t worry, Aunt Judy, it’ll all be fine.” If they aren’t ready to hear more, there’s nothing else you can say.

And if they really want to know…

Sometimes relatives are genuinely interested in your reasons for not having kids. When that happens, have the talk with them:

The worst case scenario is that they aren’t ready to hear it, and they remain puzzled and worried. But if they’re interested and open-minded, you’ll set their mind at ease regarding your choice to stay childfree.

Have you been in this situation? How did you deal with it? Share your experience with the childfree community in the comments below.

All images are provided by Kaboompics.