Why Dolly Parton decided not to have kids?

Dolly Parton's death news has left the industry in shock, as the legendary country musician has left a legacy filled with her songs, milestones, and philanthropic work but her own kids are not in the list.

The Queen of country, who passed away on Tuesday, August 25, at 80, after a brief battle with cancer, had always been vocal about her decision not to have kids with her husband, Carl Dean, who died last year.

In an interview back in 1980, Dolly told a reporter, as per Page Six, “I don’t know that I want a child.”

Dolly also noted that she grew up with 12 kids and looked after her younger siblings even after her marriage to Dean in 1966.

Her nieces and nephews used to call her “Aunt Granny” and her husband “Uncle Peepaw.”

She further noted at the time, "But if some time if we want children, then we’ll — if I’m too old to have ’em or can’t have ’em for some reason — then we’ll adopt them."

Decades later in a chat with Rolling Stone, Dolly shared that she does not regret having no kids.

“The older we get, the gladder we are that we don’t have them now, because we take care of a lot of other people’s kids,” she noted. “We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go.”

Later, in an interview with The Guardian in 2014, she admitted that she did have dreams of having kids with her husband.

She said, “We talked about it and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be,” she revealed at the time. Now that we’re older? We’re glad. I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work our tour].”

"Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star," she added.

In 2020, she told Oprah Winfrey on her show, “Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom."