How will you know when it’s time to have kids?

About 15 years ago, a good friend asked me how she would know she was ready to have kids. She worried at the time that she was not the kind of woman who swooned over small children. She felt none of the “baby lust” that her cohort seemed to exhibit. I assured her that you don’t have to love all children to love your own.
I was thinking about this advice recently as I read a story in The Atlantic called “To Save the World, My Mother Abandoned Me.” Xochitl Gonzalez tells the story of how her mother left her with her grandparents in order to pursue a career of union organizing and political action. It’s a heartbreaking story of a child whose mother seemed to love other people’s children but not her own.
In researching the story, Gonzalez finds a decades-old article about her mother running for school board in D.C. “The Washington Post reported that she had been ‘involved in a program to increase parent involvement in the New York City school system before coming to Washington,’ and was pushing for the D.C. board to ‘more actively involve parents in policy-making decisions.’ This was in 1981. Back in Brooklyn, I would have been starting kindergarten,” she wrote.
Much has been written about our declining fertility and more young people are questioning whether they ever want to have children. A February 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that 30% of 18- to 34-year-olds without kids aren’t sure if they want any, and 18% say they definitely don’t want any.
Should we reassure people that they will eventually feel the love when they do have kids? It seems like the most natural thing in the world, but for some people, it seems to be a struggle. A recent article in The New York Times by Miguel Macias explains how the author decided to have children even knowing that he didn’t really want any.
“Since my daughter, Olivia, was born, I have cycled through a huge range of emotions. I expect many of them would be familiar to any parent: joy, exhaustion, deep love, confusion, wonder, exasperation, happiness, sadness. But there is another, quieter, emotion that comes up every now and then. … regret.”
Macias says that when he was younger he wanted to be a famous filmmaker and that he thought having children would interfere with that dream. But now that he is in his late 40s and his career is what it is and his partner wanted a child and well, why not? He clearly loves his daughter, but is also not enjoying much of these early years.
One wonders about the wisdom of a man who can’t imagine what it would be like for his child to come across an article years from now about how maybe she was a mistake.
But perhaps there is something useful in this observation: “Allowing myself to accept that having a child may not have been ‘right’ has been humbling and comforting. It has forced me to admit to myself that I will never know if this, or any, decision was the right one.”
And maybe that is the truth. Macias seems unlikely to become anything like Gonzalez’s mother, gallavanting around the country and around the world, apparently doing anything to ensure that she’s not in the same city, let alone home, as her daughter. He seems to understand the obligations that he has to his daughter. And whether or not he finds her a little boring or annoying at the age of 18 months, he seems willing to put in the effort to care for her.
Is it possible to know ahead of time that you are going to be the wrong kind of parent, the one who abandons your child so that you can serve some greater cause? What kind of soul-searching do you need to do before you decide whether to have children? Having kids used to be the obvious choice for most human beings. And some combination of natural instinct and societal pressure used to combine to create parents who stuck by their children.
But today every aspect of child rearing is a choice. Do we want children? Do we want to have them with a partner or alone? Do we want to wait until we are older? Do we want boys or girls? Do we want to play an active role in their lives, or leave someone else in charge? Losing the script of becoming an adult and raising a family of one’s own has has meant that some people who probably shouldn’t have had children don’t. But it also means that many who should don’t, or don’t decide until too late, or don’t know how to behave once they do.
Gonzalez makes this point by noting that her mother clearly viewed child rearing like any other choice an adult might make, particularly among those who were devoted to a particular political cause: “All around my mother, people were being told to give up one life here and start another there. And they did, no questions asked. She must have seen me as just another comrade being relocated for the movement.” My friend, meanwhile, now has three children, and I don’t think she’s looked back. But that kind of clarity is getting harder and harder to come by.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.