Men’s Explanations for Being Childless;a dynamic perspective

Abstract

Research on childlessness in contemporary society still focuses mainly on women. This article conversely examines childlessness among men in Czechia – a European post-socialist country in which becoming a parent was a strong social norm before 1989. This article asks how men’s explanations for being childless or childfree change over time and what this says about changing norms attached to parenthood in different historical and social contexts. It draws on an analysis of 24 problem-centred interviews conducted in two rounds about a decade apart on the same sample of child-less or free men. This approach is not usually applied in research on this subject. In the first interviews, the men’s narratives mainly reveal their different views on the impact the post-1989 social transformation had on their lives in relation to their perceived resources and life chances. The follow-up interviews show how the men’s views on their lives change with age, the different emphasis they place on free choice versus the effect of external factors over time, and the narrow line that they construct between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ childlessness. The narratives of child-less or free men unveil that the norm of becoming a parent is growing weaker in Czech society, but age norms and the norms regarding pathways to parenthood are still strong. The article seeks to understand how Czech men construct their childlessness over time, thus contributing to the discussion of childlessness among men and filling the gap in knowledge on men’s childlessness in CEE.