It's not like she's got anything else to do, is it?

Childless daughters and caregiving.

An unspoken assumption that often plays out in multi-generational families is that it’s the adult daughter without children who’ll be the one to take on a family caregiving role if needed. I mean, she’s the one with the abundant spare time, huge reserves of cash and the emotional bandwidth to take it on… And if she’s unpartnered, even more so.

Forget that someone ageing without children doesn’t have the unconscious safety net of children to possibly do the same for her one day, or that unless she’s financially very secure, she’s the last person who should be taking an average of a £12,000 ($15,000) hit to her annual earnings and potential savings for her old age, or that she may already have a full life and perhaps health conditions of her own to manage.

Nope. A woman without kids, despite decades of being told that she ‘wouldn’t understand’ anything about parenting should she dare to comment, is suddenly deemed to be a natural shoo-in for the demanding, unpaid role of being a parenta…