Is Having a Child Worth It?

This is the question we should be asking. And right now, it's not—for me, and maybe for you.

“Do you want kids?” is a terrible question. The decision of whether or not to be a parent is infinitely more complicated than the binary this framing pushes us into. Because the act of wanting is not binary, it’s layered and contextual. Part of me wants to lay in bed all day eating ice cream and binge-watching the new season of YOU, but I won’t do that (at least not today!) because there are other things (a shred of dignity?) that I want more.

Here’s a better way of framing the question: What will you need to give up, given your own specific circumstances and needs, in order to have a child, and are you willing to do so?

I’ve been contemplating this decision around children for about a decade. Some might take this as a sign that I secretly harbor desires for a child, except those desires are no secret; I often daydream about meeting a new little person that came from my body. But my desires to not have a child are always bigger. What I’ve learned is that this lingering “what if” is less a sign of my own desires (or lack thereof) and more the very reasonable effect of considering a layered and complex question, compounded by the reality that culture still makes women feel as if they’re doing something terribly wrong if they are not mothers.

Because of my fascination with this question—which in my opinion, has the most disproportionate ratio of importance to coverage—I perk up when there’s even a little bit of chatter on the topic, which there has recently been here on Substack. Last week,

Kate Manne

delved into the many reasons why a woman shouldn’t have children in the US right now (largely in relation to the political landscape, lack of social support, and domestic gender imbalances), and

Miranda July

wrote a short missive based on a discussion that popped up in her chats about the question.

Interestingly, both of these women are mothers. And while mothers have invaluable perspectives on the topic—I especially appreciate mothers who admit that having kids is not for everyone and also requires money to do it comfortably—it’s not necessarily a perspective that feels most helpful for me, a childless woman who’s spent years teetering back and forth. Telling people it’s fine not to have kids while sitting from the vantage point of having had a child just hits differently for those of us without kids. There is an astounding amount of pressure in our very pronatalist culture for women to be mothers and who I want to hear from most are the women who stood up to that pressure, chose a child-free life, and are here to say: jump in, the water’s warm.

As I get older, these women are increasingly harder to find. Most women I know who were on the fence had kids in the end, many citing fear of regret as the reason. Manne wrote a fantastic follow up to her aforementioned piece, about the weaponization of regret (including her own fear of regret when she was contemplating parenthood). In it, she offers data showing that both mothers and non-mothers experience regret to a similar degree and very minimally (under 1%); even the title—”Regret is the Bogeyman of Patriarchy”—made me cheer.

As a young adult of the aughts, the fear of missing out governed my life. My decisions had nothing to do with my actual desires (which were so irrelevant I couldn’t possibly name them let alone listen to them) and everything to do with the fear of not having some theoretical, elusive special experience that would change my life if it ever happened but in reality almost never happened. Thank god as a culture we’ve learned that decision making by way of FOMO is no way to live. To chase the ‘what if’ is to avoid the harder task of understanding then trusting your own personal priorities and needs. And yet somehow we’re still pushed into this mindset when it comes to the question around children.

In my late-thirties, I stumbled on a piece from a child-free writer who said in no uncertain terms that you should not make decisions based on what you think your future self might want (this has since worked its way into my novel, which—no surprise—addresses the question of children at length). Reading this felt like an exhale, like permission. Something in me had always wanted to trust the fact that when I considered children my whole body froze up with dread as if someone had padlocked my entire house and trapped me in it, but so many voices were implying that I might regret it if I didn’t. Oddly, this notion that women may regret not having kids is completely counter to data from child-free women who very much do not regret their decision.

To focus on the regret of not having a child also inherently implies that being child-free is the lack of something, not the gaining of something else, which is untrue. It’s impossible to write about this subject without evoking the Mother of the Question on Motherhood, Sheila Heti. In her book Motherhood, she writes:

How can I express the absence of this experience [not having children] without making central the lack?… Maybe if I could somehow figure out what not having a child is an experience of—make it into an action, rather than the lack of an action—I might know what I was experiencing and not feel so much like I was waiting to act. I might be able to choose my life and hold in my hands what I have chosen and show it to other people and call it mine.

I often try to capture the experience of not having a child, so I can hold it up and appreciate it as its own full thing. Waking up to the birds out my window, laying in bed until my thoughts untangle and my body is ready to move. Having space and time to make sense of the world through writing so the chaos of living isn’t piling up in my chest like a sink of dirty dishes. Walking through the park mid-afternoon, laughing out loud to whatever podcast I’m listening to, stopping at the library for a new book, calling a friend on the way home. Then of course there’s the uncertainty and anxiety and sometimes all-consuming depression of figuring out how to structure my life, what “the point” is to existing without the neat goal of keeping another person alive. Then there’s the thrill of it, too.

Many people (mostly men) imply that I just don’t “get” it. They think they’ve experienced the life I’m talking about because there was a time in their life when they didn’t have children either and they think, without a doubt, a life with children is better. But not only do I not trust the limited emotional landscape of most men, the child-free life of my twenties is not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the grueling pursuit of building a nest of meaning on one’s own terms over time, finding peace in solitude, and the ongoing effort to see and understand others through the continuous exploration of self. Some say your priorities change when you have a child, which I both believe and find terrifying. I’ve spent the past decade figuring out what drives me, what I need to stay sane, what genuine satisfaction feels like versus the blinding pursuit of other people’s validation, and the last thing I want to do is flip all that on its head.

If I would have fallen into a stable, loving relationship in my early thirties, I might have slipped thoughtlessly into motherhood before I had a chance to ask myself what I specifically wanted and valued. At that time, I was barreling towards “having it all,” but kept getting stuck in the relationship part. The biggest reason I didn’t have kids in my thirties was because I was not in a serious relationship and I didn’t want kids enough to do it on my own or spend all my free time dating. When, at forty, I found myself in a stable relationship with my partner, the question of children was suddenly much more real and urgent.

By that point I’d grown comfortable with the idea that I wasn’t going to have kids and the freedoms that decision opened up. I wasn’t about to turn my life around on a whim. And yet since it was finally an option, I began considering it (obsessively) anew.

I needed data. Though I was in my forties, I gave myself a year to make sure Ben and I were a good fit. Then another year to make sure we were good at cohabitating. Then I went back to a full-time job in tech to see how it felt (ie. if I would fall into a cavernous depression) since I’d have to work full-time if I had a kid. Everything was fine, but I daydreamed constantly about going back to part-time work so I had more time for my writing. My partner and I work well together but my brain spirals on logistics and I knew, despite his intentions, I would handle all logistics when it came to a child. My office in our cramped, shared home became my sanctuary and the idea of sacrificing it to a small baby felt like hell. A long phone call or an impromptu walk with a friend gave me life, as did a week in the woods to work on my novel, which I did regularly. Every now and then when I saw a particularly cute baby girl with curly hair and chubby cheeks I would think: I want a baby! Then Ben would look at me, head tilted, eyes knowing, and I would laugh because we both knew I did not want a baby enough to be happy having one.

It almost sounds too simple when I say it out loud: If I were rich I would probably have a kid. It’s funny that this feels icky to admit, as if the desire for a child should float beyond practical needs, everything else sacrificed and rendered insignificant. But if nothing else, money buys time and time is everything. If I didn’t have to go back to full-time work and could simply write instead this would be a different decision. There is so much subtle and overt pressure on women to prioritize motherhood that we’re quick to give up what may not seem like “must-haves”—sleep, exercise, time with friends, time alone, work we love—pleasures our mental health often relies on.

There’s been a wave of books about divorce from women around my age, largely about the freedom a woman can experience after her children are a bit older and she extricates herself from her terrible heterosexual marriage. I have a hard time reading these because, yes, it does sound terrible. The narratives resolve as their children grow older and more autonomous, the women leave their marriages, and they craft a life for themselves, on their own terms, outside of the patriarchal structure we smoosh women into. A woman’s mid-life in this context can seem incredibly freeing. But only because we assume the years preceding it are suffocating. In reality, we should remind ourselves that there’s an option to be free at any age.

I spent a long time trying to figure out this essay and there’s so much more I could write; I’ve cut thousands of words already. But everything when it comes to this decision is so wildly personal and circumstantial. The best we can do is trust how we feel, now, in our most honest moments. Crafting a life of one’s own without the structure of raising a child is deeply challenging and not for everyone, but neither is having children. As someone who, at 43, remains child-free I’m happy to report that from this vantage point, I’m very happy with my decision—the water’s warm.

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