What Do Parents Really Think About People Who Can’t Decide If They Want Children?
Last month, at our end-of-summer neighborhood BBQ, I was wiping cherry popsicle juice off my 7-year-old’s cheek when my friend Lila sank down onto the patio step next to me, popped a seltzer, and said she and her boyfriend of three years had split the week before. The breaking point? An ultimatum: decide whether you want kids by your 35th birthday, or we go our separate ways. Lila’s 34, and she’s been stuck on the fence for six years—half the time she daydreams about a tiny kid following her rescue cat around the house, the other half she loves her quiet 10pm reading nights, her ability to pick up and go on a trip last minute, and can’t imagine giving that up for anything.
Before I could answer, my neighbor Jen, who has two teens and hosts the BBQ every year, carried over a platter of half-eaten hot dogs and dropped it on the table. “Wait, you’re stressed about people judging you for not knowing?” she said, wiping grill grease on her faded jeans. “I didn’t know when I got pregnant the first time. I just did it because everyone I went to college with was starting families, and my mom kept bugging me. Half the mornings I’m standing at the sink doing dishes I think ‘what if I’d just said no?’ Doesn’t mean I don’t love my kids more than anything. It just means I never got that 100% sure feeling everyone talks about.”
Before Lila could respond, Mike, a dad of a 3-year-old who lives two houses down, wandered over with his kid perched on his shoulders, both of them covered in charcoal ash from the grill. He chimed in right away: “Me and my wife went back and forth for four years. Four years. Everyone acted like we were being unreasonable. My grandma kept asking when we’d ‘stop being selfish’ and give her great grandkids. We went to couples therapy for a year just to work through it, and people thought that was crazy—why do you need therapy to decide if you want a baby? Turns out, we both had messy childhood stuff we were working through, and we needed to sort that out before we could decide. We had our kid last year, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, but I get why some people never decide. Indecision isn’t a flaw.”
I sat there listening, my canvas shoe sticky with popsicle juice, my kid off chasing the dog through the rose bushes, and I realized how disconnected the online conversation about this is from what most actual parents think. The viral narrative always says parents are the first to judge: you’re selfish if you don’t want kids, irresponsible if you have them when you’re not 100% sure. But that’s not what I hear from the parents I see at school drop-off, at soccer practice, at these messy backyard BBQs. I decided I wanted kids pretty young, before I turned 30, and I still have days where I see a post from a childfree couple hiking through the Rockies and think, what if that had been me? That doesn’t mean I regret my choice—it just means it’s a big choice, and big choices almost always come with a little doubt.
What I’ve learned from these conversations is that the best advice for people on the fence isn’t the generic stuff you see online. Instead of spiraling over whether you “should” want kids, try small, concrete tests to see what it actually feels like. Skip the 2-hour playdate where you get to hold the cute baby and hand them back when they start crying. Ask a friend with a toddler if you can stay with them for a long weekend. Help get the kid up at 7am, clean up the cereal off the floor, sit through a 2-hour tantrum about the wrong color sippy cup, and go to bed at 9pm because everyone’s exhausted. Do the same with a couple who has elementary kids, and one who has teens, because the experience looks totally different at every stage. If after that you still don’t know, that’s okay. You don’t have to hit a certain birthday or meet someone else’s timeline to make a choice that fits you.
And if you’re a parent talking to a friend who’s on the fence, skip the unhelpful lines people always use. Don’t say “you’ll change your mind” — that’s dismissive of whatever they’re feeling right now. Don’t say “if you’re not sure you shouldn’t do it” either, because most of us weren’t fully sure when we had kids. Just tell them the unglamorous truth. Tell them you forget your kid’s snack for field day at least once a semester, that you lock yourself in the bathroom to get five minutes of quiet, that you cry after parent-teacher conferences when your kid is struggling and you don’t know how to help. Then tell them you also get those small, good moments that make the tradeoff worth it for you, but if that tradeoff doesn’t sound worth it to them, that’s not a bad choice. It’s just their choice.
After the BBQ ended and everyone had headed home, I walked Lila out to her car. The fire pit was still smoldering, my kid was already passed out on the couch inside after running around all day. She said she always assumed that once you became a parent, you’d judge anyone who didn’t have that clear certainty about having kids. I told her what Jen had said earlier that night: the only people who get a vote in this are you and whoever you’re sharing a life with. Right now, Lila’s doing what she said she’s going to do: she’s not talking about the decision with anyone for three months. She’s going on that weekend trip to the coast she’s been wanting to take, she’s going to finish her pottery class, and she’s not going to let anyone rush her. We don’t know what she’ll decide when the three months are up. And that’s fine. Indecision isn’t a mistake. It’s just being honest about how big this choice really is.
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