With Easter coming up really soon, this seems to be a really great time to talk
about the rise of virgin mothers. Hi I'm Amy and I welcome you to my cozy
little corner of YouTube. The goal of my channel is to raise the awareness of
diverse families in our community and also to provide you with motherly
information about how you can improve your own family relationships. I'm a solo
mother of five children, and I have met literally hundreds of other women who
have been able to conceive their families thanks to medical treatment and
to sperm donors - and some of them were virgins. Now there are some species where
the females can somehow produce embryos from their own eggs without
fertilisation ever taking place. I'll link some videos below that will explain
how it happens and show you some really interesting examples - but there's never
been a proven case of this happening in humans - and for the record it would take
just a really simple DNA test to prove whether or not another human had been
involved in the conception of a child. What does increasingly happen though is
that virgin women choose to have children without a partner. In our
culture, people often assume that women only try to conceive solo when they
haven't been able to find a suitable partner, and their eggs are just getting
too old and their biological time clock is ticking. And it's certainly true that
many mothers who go down that path are much older mothers in their mid
thirties who have decided that they would like to have children on their own
as a last resort or even younger if they wanted to have two or more children. But
there's a growing trend - here in Australia at least - for numbers of
younger women to see solo parenting as their preferred plan A for having a
family. There's lots of really complex layers of reasons why people choose the
timing for starting to have babies; that can include things like whether or not
their peer group is starting families, whether or not they happen to be in a
job or a study program that fits and is really compatible with that phase of
life, or just wanting to be a young youthful parent. But most of the virgin
mothers that I've personally met have fallen into one of two categories: The
first is that they're amongst that first generation of children who were raised
in shared care households where parents share their children between two
households and the children shuttle back and forth so they might spend a week
here and then a week there. The women that I've met usually say that they're
not comfortable with the legal system that kind of sets up these arrangements
but they express no blame to their own parents and the way that they were raised
but they're really adamant about the fact that they want to raise children
who are never at risk of being split into two households because it's
physically a difficult way for children to be raised. And a lot of these women
philosophically fall into the category where they really believe in attachment
parenting and if you know anything about attachment parenting then you'll be
aware that the idea of a primary caregiver particularly in really young
childhood is of fairly central importance. And the other virgin mums
I've met have explained their choice in terms of their broader family. So their
parents are ageing; they want their parents to be able to enjoy their
grandchildren while they're still young enough and fit enough to be involved
they want their children to have known and grown up with their parents and
really gotten to know them and they also express mindfulness that as their
parents age they see a time coming where they will be looking after and taking
direct care of their parents in their old age and they want their children to
be old enough that they're not in that really super dependent state of infancy
so the children are old enough to be helpful to their grandparents and for
the two really intense needs of babies and dependent elderly parents not
clashing. Because again the workload for both of those is extreme. It frustrates
me no end when people assume that nobody ever thinks about having children until
they're in a relationship, and then all of a sudden they want to express
their love by having children. No that's not a reality. Certainly not
for any woman I've ever met. The reality is we know whether or not we want to
have children from a fairly young age and the truth for most women is we tend
to know fairly young whether or not we want to have children of our own
regardless of whether or not we partner with somebody. The virgin mums that I've
met - much like most women that I've met - express no
fear of men; no dislike of men. In fact most of them have expressed a fairly clear
hope that at one point in their lives they will actually meet a compatible
partner. Although there's a bit of variation in whether or not people hope
to experience a partnership during their children's lifetime or after their
children have grown up and moved away. None of these children were
spur-of-the-moment acquisitions or lifestyle accessories. What all of these
women have in common is a huge history of forward thinking and forward planning
and a really firm focus on the sort of secure and nurturing childhood that they
want their future children to experience. I'm really keen to hear what you think
about these miracle mothers in today's poll and in the comments below. But first
I have to say a quick thank you to my sponsors who help to make this channel
sustainable. You'll find affiliate links in the description below. If you use these
to shop it will never cost you money and in a lot of cases it will save you money
but it provides me with a small amount of commissioned income that helps me to
be able to manage the expenses of ongoing costs associated with creating
this channel and continuing to make videos. Also let me know if you think you
have a relevant story or YouTube channel or blog or product or service that you
think would be valuable to this community, and we'll explore whether or
not we can include it in a future Ask AMY video. In the meantime if you'd like
to #AskAMY, please tweet me @Fortune8Family or suggest your topic
in the comments below. I wish all of you a really happy, healthy, uplifting Easter
weekend with your family - and if you'd like to come and join me - come visit the
LuckyFortune8Family Easter videos. You'll find links in the description below.
Please share this video with your friends family and community forums and
join us in the comments below to share your thoughts and experiences of
diverse families, and don't forget to subscribe and turn notifications on so
YouTube can offer your new Ask AMY videos in the future.
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