Paper short abstract:

This paper considers, from a theoretical and cross-cultural approach, how childless people have an active role in issues related to parenting, shared care and childrearing despite the often undervalued position of childless people among their family network, and not only as a strategy in periods of crisis but as a kinship practice throughout history.

Paper long abstract:

Every kinship system constitutes a sociocultural scenario where interpersonal relationships are established to provide responses and solutions to situations that may be experienced as complicated. Kinship values, norms and practices represent a support framework in difficult periods. Throughout history, and in different cultural contexts, the role of childless people in elder or child care and shared child rearing has been overshadowed within the relationships and duties among relatives. Also the experiences, concepts, and relations of people with no direct descendants are a field scarcely studied from Social Anthropology and social sciences in general, and has often been engulfed by the wide networks of family relationships or simply studied as an emergent phenomenon in western societies.

The aim of this paper is to explore the extension of kinship networks that allow and facilitate shared childrearing on the part of relatives with and without children. The idea is that the absence - voluntary or involuntary - of children does not imply lack of relations and responsibilities inside the sociocultural area of kinship, relatives and care. Here, the concept "childless children" is proposed as an expression for the link between childlessness and kinship, that is, the role of childless people in their kinship relationships and the values associated to procreation, childrearing and parenting. A cross-cultural perspective allows us to shape the social area of intersection among childlessness, kinship and care based on topic connections with procreation as a duty, infertility, social expectations and possibilities of childless people and couples, celibacy, and the ageing process in childless people.