Living child-free: Danni Duncan

by Metropol | July 8, 2026 8:35 am

Christchurch entrepreneur Danni Duncan is the face of the child-free movement here in New Zealand. Her aim is to head up the global child-free community, and the recent launch of her online platform The Others Club is the first step. Danni spoke to Metropol deputy editor Tamara Pitelen about providing a home for her child-free tribe.

When I first decided to interview child-free posterchild Danni Duncan, I thought the focus would be on the challenges of making that choice, and navigating the controversy it evoked. I imagined that myself and Danni would talk at length about all the online hate she gets and then we’d get philosophical and discuss how the suffocating and intertwining chains of misogyny, patriarchy and capitalism all work relentlessly in unison to keep most doors firmly shut for women, leaving just one ‘choice’, which is to follow the well-trodden path of marriage and motherhood – and about the backlash a woman gets if she dares to consider stepping off this path.

It didn’t turn out to be about that, though. Danni is well past all that. The story is no longer about whether or not choosing a child-free life is right, wrong, or other. It’s recognising that it’s here. The child-free movement is growing fast, and that community needs recognition and resources, says Danni.

That’s not to say she doesn’t still deal with more than her fair share of vitriol regarding her decision as a woman in her 30s to not have children. But she has a great therapist, so that’s all been reframed.

“When people respond in really negative ways or criticise me, I remind myself that it’s actually not about me personally; it’s not about my personal choice. It’s a reflection of their own discomfort with somebody showing a different life path. Or maybe they’re projecting a lot of their own insecurities when they make these comments. So yeah, I’ve worked really hard to reframe that a comment about me isn’t actually about me personally; it’s something that they’re dealing with. That’s not to say there aren’t days when I struggle, but I regularly talk to my therapist, which helps.”

Choice and community

So, what is this story about? Connection. Community. Loneliness. Finding your tribe. Let me back up a bit. About four years ago, Danni unexpectedly became one of New Zealand’s most recognisable voices for the child-free community when a post she did on the idea of choosing to be child-free went viral, bringing her 50,000 new followers overnight.

“At the time, there weren’t a lot of people talking about it; I think that’s why my community grew quite quickly. No one was speaking to it. So, as soon as I started speaking to it, I got a lot of followers almost overnight. I remember one TikTok I did; literally overnight, I got about 50,000 followers.

“I’m definitely a community leader within the wider global child-free community. It’s an honour, actually, because up until now there hasn’t been a lot of representation for this choice.

So, it’s been really nice to have people kind of look to me for access to community.”

Between Instagram and TikTok, Danni has built an audience of more than 300,000 followers. While her posts regularly spark passionate debate, and supportive messages as well as criticism, she is now focused on the bigger picture. Her sights are set on heading up the global child-free community. Whether you’re child-free by choice or by consequence, Danni wants to provide a space where you can find everything from new friends and discussion groups to travel companions, restaurants and hotels, therapists, and specialist resources such as financial advisors who specialise in wealth planning for people without children.

To do this, she launched an online platform in April called The Others Club, a ‘community platform for adults without children’ at www.theothersclub.com. When you open the home page of Danni’s website, the first thing you read is ‘Find your people’. Followed by ‘Being childfree is lonely. TOC is where you stop explaining yourself and start building a real social life with people who actually get it.’

Going global

“I want to be the global go-to platform for child-free people,” Danni tells me. “Eventually I want a hub of resources so that anything you need as a child-free person, you would find it by coming to The Others Club. We now have the members platform for those friendship connections, but I also want to build out the travel, the resources… eventually I want it to become the global hub for this life path.

That’s the plan.”

Danni says that everything she’s built has come out of her own experience of living a child-free life. “I realised that among my own friends, I was going to be the only one not having kids, and I wanted to find friends that are walking a similar life path. As I was talking about that online, there were just thousands of people saying, ‘I’m lonely, I want to find friends as well.

How do I find them? Where do we find them?’ And so I realised there isn’t really a way for child-free people to connect directly. It came out of a lot of people feeling lonely and wanting new friends.”

Since launching The Others Club, more than 1000 people have become members at $19 a month. More than 200 in-real-life events have been held in cities including London, Sydney, and Bristol. Initially launching in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, Danni’s platform now has members in 31 cities. Next step, the United States and Europe.

“Our demographic is growing fast and we deserve infrastructure that reflects that. Social infrastructure. Community. Spaces built for us, not around us as an afterthought,” Danni wrote in a recent Instagram post.

“More women than ever are choosing what’s right for them. And trying to guilt or pressure someone who either doesn’t want kids, or can’t have them, into changing that isn’t a solution. It’s just noise.”

To sum up, there are countless reasons why people don’t have children. Everything from anxiety over global warming and humanity’s future, to crippling financial pressures and the realities of infertility conditions like endometriosis. Or like me, a child-free woman in her 50s who just didn’t meet the right man till I was 42. There is no one way to live your life; that is
the beauty of it.

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THE BUSINESS OF BEING CHILD-FREE

With the recent launch of her online platform, The Others Club, providing services for the child-free community is now Danni Duncan’s full-time job. Currently doing the Ministry of Awesome’s Founders Catalyst programme, she gave a presentation, alongside Kate Radcliffe-Reid of Backkr, at the Electrify Aotearoa summit in June on how to launch a startup with zero budget.

Here are her top tips for launching a startup and growing that community without paying for it:

1. Find the gap, not the category: In other words, don’t say what you are, say what you replace. So I wouldn’t say ‘I’m a child-free community’. I would say ‘I’m the space for child-free people who are lonely to find friends’.
2. Talk to the pain, not the product: I talk a lot about child-free friendships and the shift that happens when a lot of your friends are having children, and you’re not. The grief about those changing friendships. I talk about that rather than focusing on how to use the platform.
3. Be someone, not something: I talk about my lived child-free experience a lot. How I found shifting friendships quite difficult. People want to see who is behind what you’re building. Who are you? There are so many people building things these days; you need to have personality behind it so that people can build that trust.
4. Community first: I’d been building my community for four years before I launched my platform. Build community before you focus on your campaigns, and before you focus on the product, because you really want people to resonate with the problem you’re solving.
5. Crowdfunding: To build the first iteration of my platform, I could use crowdfunding because I already had the community. I had 100 people pay about $300 to pay for that first build. In return, they get free subscription for life.

Hero image: Ōtautahi entrepreneur Danni Duncan. Photo by Kylee De Thier, No Sad Cowboys talent agency.

Source URL: https://metropol.co.nz/living-child-free-danni-duncan/

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