Still Reflecting: Our World Childless Week Stories

It's World Childless Week again and the eves of Storyhouse Childless, and we find ourselves — as we do every September — pausing to reflect.

Between us, we've are former WCW Ambassadors and a People's Champion. We've watched the landscape of childlessness change over the ten years of World Childless Week, from a handful of voices to a global community stretching across continents. We each have been part of the conversation: in webinars, videos, podcast episodes, and individual contributions that each of us has made in our own way.

Looking back, there's our very first collaboration with World Childless Week in 2019, when we sat down with founder Stephanie Phillips and her Champions to talk about what the week meant to the community. There's Michael's Men Matter Too day, where he and Dr Robin Hadley brought the male experience of childlessness into a conversation that so often centres women. That work continued in 2021, building on what had come before.

There have been harder conversations in World Childless Week too about ageing without children, about sex and intimacy, about the quiet, complicated territory covered in "I don't see why not". Berenice has brought her design eye to the week too, documented in Hello Lovely's WCW case study. And running through all of it, there's the podcast archive and the 2019 blog reflections and Sunday acceptance piece that marked our early years with the week.

We also know how talking about the difficult topic of childlessness, and the deeply personal reflections around it, can leave us all with complex feelings. There's the wonder of being seen … and the worry about being seen. Both can sit together, and neither cancels the other out.

We encourage you, especially during September and if you're also going to Storyhouse Childless, to go easy on yourself. You will have made a difference, even in the small ways that don't feel like enough at the time.

If you need somewhere to land once the week is over, Michael and Berenice will be hosting a gentle wind down for Full Stop Community members on the first weekend of October. It’ll be a quiet space to sit together, no pressure to say anything at all. You'll find the details of how to join in the Community space on our website.

Love, Michael, Berenice and Sarah