The unspoken grief of never becoming a grandparent

Ms Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favourite copy of The Velveteen Rabbit since her three children - now in their 20s and 30s - were young.

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She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family's home with books. She hoped one day to be a "cool" grandma who would share her favourite stories with a new generation.

But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is "right for them", Ms Birk said, it still breaks her heart.

"I don't have young children any more, and now I'm not going to have grandchildren," she said. "So that part of my life is just over."

Like her, a growing number of Gen Xers and baby boomers are facing the sometimes painful fact that they are never going to become grandparents.

A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 per cent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more US adults say they are unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just do not want to.

"That is a best and worst thing about having kids," said Ms Birk's husband, Mr John Birk Jr, 55. "You watch them make their own decisions, different from your own."

Still, would-be grandparents like the Birks may experience a deep sense of longing and loss when their children opt out of parenthood, even if they understand at an intellectual level that their children do not "owe" them a family legacy, said Ms Claire Bidwell Smith, a therapist based in Los Angeles and the author of Conscious Grieving.

It does not help that society tends to paint grandchildren as a reward for ageing.

"You always hear people talk about how great it is to be a grandparent, how it's better than being a parent," Ms Bidwell Smith said. "I think when people don't get to experience that, there's a very real grief that comes with it."

It is a kind of grief, she said, that today's culture tends not to recognise, and that people do not know how to talk about.