November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Childless...with Children

Thanks to co-parenting, people who don't want kids of their own can still have kids in their lives.

January/February 2001 Issue
By Andy Steiner, Utne Reader 
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Cynthia Scott and her partner, Cathy Hoffman, have attended two births. They’re not midwives, or mothers, or even doting aunts. They’re godmothers, but not in the traditional sense of the word.

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"I met Suzanne and Doug in 1985," recalls Scott, who lives in Minneapolis. "They had their first daughter, Hannah, in 1987. They asked Cathy and me to be godmothers before Hannah was even born. They also asked us to be present at her birth. At the time, they didn’t know exactly what the term godmother meant to them, except that they wanted us to be part of their future children’s lives. It wasn’t about teaching the rosary or taking them to Sunday school or anything like that. It was more like being a sset of parents."
Now That’s an Extended Family!
From an early age, Marian Turner knew she didn’t want to have children. So when she set out to find a job, what profession did she choose? She opened a child care business.Thirty years later, Turner and business partner Michael Kauper (also childless, he joined the program four years after its inception) consider the work they do to be a form of co-parenting. They are providing a nurturing place for children in Marian’s Minneapolis home while helping those children’s parents raise happy families and hold down jobs. And though they don’t have fat bank accounts, Turner and Kauper say their lives have been enriched by the time they’ve spent with the more than 200 kids who’ve been part of their program."It’s not that I feel like they are my children," says Turner of her small charges, "but I do think of them as part of my extended family. It’s been a good job for me. I get to know these children, but it’s not a 24-hour-a-day commitment."
Hannah’s birth was followed three years later by the birth of her sister, Natalie, which Hoffman and Scott also attended. In the years since, they’ve become a presence in both girls’ lives, providing extra help for their exhausted parents when the girls were babies, hosting them for weekend overnights as they got older, and dispensing advice during difficult stages of their lives.
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