Storyhouse Childless: Ageing Without Children

Jody Day  is the English/Irish founder of Gateway Women (2011), the world’s best-known champion for childless women, and often described as the founder of the ‘childless movement’. An author, speaker, systems thinker, community builder, Work That Reconnects facilitor and integrative psychotherapist, she’s known for her best-selling Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (Self-Published 2013; PanMac 2016/2020) and her TEDx talk ‘The Lost Tribe of Childless Women,’ which has been watched more than 200,000 times. Now in her early sixties, she is increasingly focused on practical and existential challenges of elderhood without motherhood, and is co-creating the first local Alterkin Circle (Alternative Kinship Circle), and charting its development on her Substack, Gateway Elderwomen; winning a coveted Advantages of Age award for her writing in 2025. Jody’s been a World Childless Week Ambassador since its inception in 2017, was a founding and former board member at the UK Charity Ageing Without Children, and is a former Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. After a lifetime in London, she now lives in a tiny hamlet on the Atlantic coast of West Cork, Ireland. 

Having trained personally with Louise L Hay in 1990, Jane was the first person to bring Louise’s work to Europe and the UK, in the form of You Can Heal Your Life® study groups.  

Over the next ten years, she became well known in the personal development world, eventually publishing her first book, Choose Your Thoughts, Change Your Life in 1991. She trained as a counsellor and group leader, and developed a thriving therapy practice, whilst also owning and managing Oxfordshire’s largest health clinic, the WellBeing Clinic.  

Having sold this business, she and her husband lived in Ireland for a short while before moving to the north of Scotland, near to what was then the Findhorn Foundation Spiritual Community. At this point she trained as a coach, specialising in helping spiritual business owners receive better results with ease, joy and grace.  

Then her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and died a year later. This changed everything, and led to another book, Gifted By Grief, her memoir of that time. Readers response to the chapter outlining the questions she had asked him before he died led to her founding her 6th small business, Before I Go Solutions®. This social enterprise trains lay and professional people to become End of Life Plan Facilitators, and help others get their end of life plans done before it’s too late. A third book followed, Before I Go: The Essential Guide to Creating a Good End of Life Plan.  

In 2023, Jane handed over the managing directorship of Before I Go Solutions® and took some time out. Recently she has started researching ageing, with the intention of another book, plus courses and a Substack newsletter. 

Jane remarried in 2020 in between lockdowns, and in 2023 became Scotland’s Woman of Inspiration, as awarded by the Association of Scottish Business Women. She loves to walk solo in the woods in the early morning, and her latest joy is riding a pony regularly, something she did a lot of as a child but has now taken up again.