Existing support tends to assume that everyone has family or friends People who are ageing without children or other “next generation” family support are a significant and increasing proportion of the growing number of older people. Penny Shepherd explains why advance care planning materials need…

Organisations must update their approach to emergency contact details, says Penny Shepherd of AWOC East Kent Whether on official forms or elsewhere, being asked for your “next of kin” is often problematic for AWOCs. “When people ask me to record my next of kin, I…

Planning for later life is one of those things that everyone knows they should do but like other things we know we should do; eat more healthily, do more exercise, drive less, stop watching Question Time because it makes our blood pressure soar! it’s one…

Ageing Without Children – One Simple General Election Ask . . . With the UK General Election in full swing, this is a timely opportunity to ask politicians to recognise the growing and important issue of ageing without children. The Longevity White Paper from the International Longevity…

Has the time come to collect more official data on ageing without children? Mapping informal carers and their support needs has rightly become a key priority for health and social care in recent years. However, equivalent information about access to informal care, including where there…

8% of carers are providing care to non family members (Measuring National Well-being Households and Families, 2012), a whacking 92% of care is provided by family, primarily either adult children caring for parents or older couples providing care to a spouse/partner. And yet still documents…

Last week the Nuffield Trust and the Kings Fund published Home Truths which looked at the state of social care for older people. It highlighted yet again the parlous state of the social care sector saying “The social care system in its current form is…

Two of the key role models for AWOC are Carers UK and Campaign to End Loneliness. Both took issues that had been known about but over looked or brushed aside as too difficult to deal with and by relentless campaigning coupled with research and engaging…

It’s dementia awareness week and it also sees the launch of “Our Voices: the experiences of people ageing without children. Of all the many concerns people ageing without children have, what happens if they get dementia is one of the biggest, causes the most fear…

“As the baby-boomer generation ages, a growing ‘family care gap’ will develop as the number of older people in need of care outstrips the number of adult children able to provide it. This is expected to occur for the first time in 2017” The Generation…

Big Lottery Fund Development Grant In October we received our Big Lottery development grant and started work on consulting people ageing without children about how we can 1. Develop, roll out and support local AWOC networks and 2. Develop a support model for people ageing…

  Guest blog by Joy Anderson, member of AWOC facebook group Care and my own destiny was not something I thought about that much before the birth of AWOC although I had been acutely aware that not having children meant society and my family treated…

Who cares for those without carers?

Last night BBC 1 showed “Care” which told the story of Jenny a single mother and her sister Claire struggling to care for her widowed mother Mary after she has a sudden stroke which leaves her unable to communicate properly and with vascular dementia. This…

There is something about having low expectations which means you are never disappointed. I didn’t expect much for social care in the Chancellor’s autumn’s statement and I was proved right. However, it’s quite something when the chancellor managed to get below even my low expectations….

The Jo Cox commission on loneliness is now looking at older people and last week released a report based on a survey carried out on Gransnet. It seems useful to reflect on loneliness through the prism of ageing without children When we were carrying out…

As part of world childless week, lovely blog on Walk in Our Shoes from 80 year old Robert https://walkinourshoes.net/#/robert/

There has been an interesting thread on our Facebook group this week based on people’s experiences of not being in the grandparents club. People talked of being at retirement parties, family get togethers, clubs they belonged too & even holidays with friends where they were…

“Britain is too selfish to care for its elderly” scream the headlines in today’s Daily Mail. This follows hot on the heels of Care Minister Jacky Doyle Price’s comments at the Conservative Party conference lecturing the country on how it should look to the example…

When I founded Ageing without Children back in 2015 I was under no illusions of how difficult the situation facing older people who had no adult children or adult children willing or able to support them would be. In 2014 the IPPR had published The…

  Read any report on inequalities on ageing and you’ll see many of the same things: the adverse impact of being isolated with poor support networks, loneliness, having poor health and a low income.   Certain groups will be highlighted as being particularly at risk,…

Our guest blog for Independent Age CLICK HERE TO READ

Context The numbers of people over 65 without adult children are set to double from 1.2 million at the present time to 2 million by 2030. At the moment 92% of informal care is provided by family [1] and 80% of older people with disabilities…

Over the next 20/30 years there will be unprecedented numbers of people without children reaching oldest old age. Policy and planning focused on older people being supported by their children/grandchildren in later life will not meet this need and risks leaving individuals ageing without children…

It is Carers Week, the time to highlight the work of the unpaid carers that prop up the health and social care system. Everywhere there are articles pointing out how much unpaid carers save the state and how much the system would collapse without them,…

One of the many things that makes ageing without children so difficult for people to engage with is that bluntly, thinking about it is hugely uncomfortable. There are many wonderful campaigners – Beth Britton http://d4dementia.blogspot.co.uk  Nicci  Gerrard and Julia Jones  of Johns Campaign http://johnscampaign.org.uk ,…

Before AWOC mark 1 closed in 2019, one of the concepts we had been exploring was that of ‘alterkin’. Drawing on the circles of support model, and our own research with people ageing without children, we looked at what could be created that would offer…

    Dear AWOC members and supporters, Looking back at 2017, one of the most remarkable thing for us is that AWOC is still here. We started the year with high hopes of receiving a grant from the Big Lottery Accelerating Ideas programme, a process…

It’s now 3 years since the first blog about ageing without children which was later picked up by The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/social-life-blog/2014/apr/25/ageing-without-children-family-care In those 3 years we’ve learned a lot! People ageing without children includes more than just those who have never been parent through choice…

Guest blog by Joy Anderson, member of AWOC facebook group Care and my own destiny was not something I thought about that much before the birth of AWOC although I had been acutely aware that not having children meant society and my family treated me…

I didn’t watch Disptaches last night. The programme, an expose on abuse and poor practice in BUPA care homes, was another in a very long line of documentaries highlighting the appalling treatment of older people in some care homes. This should no longer be news…

“I don’t expect/want my children to look after me” “Great! What plans have you made so they don’t have to?” I’ve not yet met an older person who told me they expected their children to look after them but as we see below, the reality…

I have worked with & for older people for almost my entire working life (24 years & counting!). For the majority of those years, the impact of being without children in old age never occurred to me. Throughout my 20s as I worked as an…

Along with things that go together like love and marriage and a horse and carriage, the words “friends and family” are permanently linked together in policy documents on health and social care. Last week on twitter, the wonderful John’s Campaign were discussing issues around the…

“older people and their families”, “older people and their relatives”; in all the coverage of the so called dementia tax and the spotlight on social care, older people were entirely bracketed with their family or relatives. AWOC believes we all know what is meant when…

Guest blog from Jill Lamede http://www.lamede.com/ Dignity in Dying What is death? It is the moment of transition – the natural full stop to a life. It is something we must all experience. We can choose to fear death – but that fear can poison…

Our blog for Independent Age’s Doing Care Differently series https://www.independentage.org/policy-and-research/doing-care-differently/designing-care-services-that-dont-rely-family-kirsty-woodard

Ageing without children’s (AWOC) survey of 400 people ageing without children identified that the biggest fears they had were: The biggest fear (28%) was having no one to speak up for them or act in their best interests when they could no longer do so…

There was a time when I naively believed that when Government made policy to address an issue or a problem, politicians looked at the facts, weighed the evidence, asked experts for their opinion and then came up with a policy that would hopefully solve as…

If I had a pound for every time someone has said that to me since AWOC was set up in 2014, I wouldn’t have to work for free! Insisting that most older people in the UK are not helped, supported or cared for by their…

“I wouldn’t want my children to look after me”   “my mum would have said that but she has dementia…..she would have dreaded the thought that my life would be consumed with looking after her but that is actually what has happened” Ming Ho who…

I started working in Adult Social Care four years ago, and almost immediately I felt at home. As a Support Worker for unpaid carers, I visited people at home, having received referrals from the community nursing team I was based in. Spending time with carers,…

In January this year, AWOC was asked to appear as part of a BBC Breakfast weeklong series on ageing. Excitedly we got suited and booted, and Robin and I descended on Jody’s cosy flat which became a temporary studio. We were interviewed for approximately 90…

It’s good to take stock now and then and reflect on things that matter so passionately to you. International day of older people seems a good day to reflect on ageing without children, what we’ve achieved, the disappointments and most importantly where we are trying…

We know that language matters hugely – witness the huge efforts by people with dementia to eradicate using the word “sufferer” or “victim” to describe people living with dementia. We asked people ageing without children what they thought of the term elder orphan; this is…

The ILC/Age UK paper “the end of formal adult social care?” is a must read for anyone interested in social care and older people. It highlights the ever increasing gap between the numbers of people who need social care & the numbers of people who…

Getting older is a fact of life and it may be a time in your life when you can embrace new activities and new ways of living.  I read recently that we live until we die which I thought was a nice sentiment. However, for…

n Last week, Healthwatch England published their report “Safely home: What happens when people leave hospital and care settings?”; it made for sobering if unsurprising reading. They highlighted 5 main reasons for the problems people encountered focused around delays in getting services, lack of coordination,…

In 1954 Rev Mary Webster gave up work to care for her elderly parents. In the years that followed she had a growing realisation that her problems of providing care, unpaid of course, to her parents while dealing with her own loss of income and…

n This week is dying matters awareness week the fantastic campaign to get everyone talking about the one inevitability of life; death. Death cafes where people can talk about dying over coffee and cake have sprung up everywhere and end of life care has become…

Our Voices is based on people’s stories – everyone has a story to tell. The story of AWOC is that it was founded when 2 things collided; the first was my own realisation that I definitely would not be able to have children and the…

Andrea Leadsom’s comments on motherhood, bad enough in print but considerably worse on audio where the full “but I have children” emphasis shines through, have highlighted exactly why AWOC is needed. Her comments do not come as a surprise, In our recent research “Our Voices”,…

It’s hard to know how to respond to the latest in what seems to be never ending line of stories about appalling treatment of older people trapped in the abyss between health and social care. Today’s report by the Health Services Ombudsman highlighted in The…

“Are we really saying these people had no living relatives or friends? Or is it something sadder, namely that the busy, atomised lives we increasingly lead mean that too often we have become so distant from blood relatives that we don’t have any idea even…

One of the many consequences of there being more people ageing without children is that more and more people are not, and never will be grandparents. 1 in 5 people over 50 have no children and therefore of course no grandchildren. In addition there are…

Today we launch “Our Voices” a report based on focus groups and interviews with people ageing without children. The aim of the report is to give space to the thoughts, ideas and feelings of people ageing without children and as such there is one key…