It Happens Anyway: What a Planned Child and an Unplanned Child Taught Me About Control
The first time I held my daughter, I had a spreadsheet at home with her feeding schedule, a color-coded list of milestone dates, and a birth plan that I had laminated. By the time my son arrived, three years later, I found myself googling “can a toddler survive on chicken nuggets and pure determination?” at 2 AM while he nursed.
My daughter was planned. Deeply, meticulously planned.
My son was not. He arrived during a year where the word “overflow” was the central theme of our household budget. He arrived two weeks before I started a new job, and three days after we got new neighbors who, coincidentally, owned a very loud dog that barked every time the baby cried.
People ask me if it matters. They look at the way I parent them—the structured playdates for her, the feral chaos for him—and they wonder if the origin story changes the relationship.
I used to think I knew the answer. I was sure the planned child was the easier one. She was the one we had mentally prepared for, read about, and chose. Then I watched her have a complete, hour-long meltdown at the grocery store because the avocado had a “bad texture,” and I realized something important. Planning has very little to do with the child you get.
The narrative we tell ourselves is comfortable. If we plan the pregnancy, we plan the life. We’ll be prepared for the sleepless nights, the tantrums, the school meetings. But discipline problems, learning struggles, and personality quirks don’t wait for an invitation.
I remember sitting in my car in the school pickup line one afternoon, listening to the radio chatter about the “parenting gap” and wondering why my beautifully planned daughter was biting her friend at daycare. Her bite was intentional. She looked the other kid in the eye and chomped down like a tiny, angry alligator. Meanwhile, my unplanned son, who I had barely managed to get shoes onto that morning, was sitting in the backseat calmly stacking crackers.
That moment was a defining one for me. It shattered the illusion of the golden path. The biting wasn’t a result of being unplanned. It was simply the result of being a three-year-old with teeth, frustration, and a poor ability to communicate.
What I’ve come to realize is that the planning isn’t for the child—it’s for the parent. It’s a psychological anchor in the storm. When you plan, you feel like you have agency. You feel like the challenges are a choice. When you don’t plan, you feel a sense of permanent catch-up. Every hiccup feels like a punishment for the lack of foresight.
Here is what I learned in the trenches, holding both of their sticky hands.
The biggest difference is not in the child’s behavior, but in my reaction to it.
With my daughter, every failure felt personal. If she didn’t sleep through the night, I assumed the schedule I made was wrong. When she was afraid of the water, I felt I had failed to “condition” her properly. The burden of intentionality was heavy. I was constantly in a state of self-audit, convinced that because I had chosen this, I had to perfect it.
With my son, I gave myself a break. Since we had “no plan,” there was no bar to exceed. When he pulled every tissue out of the box, I just laughed. I wasn’t stressed about it. I was just living in the mess. That unplanned spirit gave me a kind of parenting grace I didn’t have the first time around. It turns out, the lack of control was the ultimate liberator.
I see this in my classroom, too (I’m a teacher, so I see both sides of this parenting coin).
I have parent-teacher conferences where parents apologize for their kids’ messiness or learning struggles. They rush to tell me, “We didn’t plan him,” or “We were so young.” They think that the context of conception somehow explains the reading delay or the trouble with math. I have to gently shift the conversation. I tell them that biology and timing don’t determine the educational outcome—the daily habits do.
It doesn’t matter if a child was a surprise or a calculated decision. What matters is whether we show up for them on a Tuesday afternoon when they refuse to do their homework. It matters if we stay calm when they forget their lunchbox for the fifth time.
Specific actions matter more than intentions.
Do you know the difference between my daughter and my son in practice? Not much so far. They both need the same breakfast, the same bedtime stories, and the same grumpy morning cuddles.
But there was a time last month where I realized we had shifted. My planned daughter was having a hard time adjusting to the new school year. She was anxious, clingy. My instinct, because of the “plan” mindset, was to fix it. I wanted to create a behavior chart, a schedule, a systematic approach to anxiety.
My son, however, was having a great time, largely because we had no expectations. He just went in and played with the blocks.
That week, I caught myself saying to my husband, “We need to do ‘plan B’ for her.” And he looked at me, puzzled. “Plan B was a back-up pregnancy,” he said. “Now it’s just life.”
He was right. There is no Plan B. There is only the day-to-day grind.
Here is a concrete tip I now live by: The label of “planned” or “unplanned” only has power if you let it frame your parenting. I stopped telling myself the story of the “planned child” and the “surprise child.” Instead, I started labeling them as “the child who needs scaffolding for her anxiety” and “the child who needs more physical activity before sitting still.”
That shift in labels is the practical work. When a child misbehaves, the critical question isn’t “Was this a planned set of genes?” The critical question is, “What is this child trying to communicate right now?”
Does she need water? Is he overtired? Did the classroom get too loud?
If I’m too busy worrying about whether the pregnancy was a mistake or a masterstroke, I’m going to miss the actual signal.
My son doesn’t know he was unplanned. When we showed him the photo of the positive pregnancy test, he said, “Cool, a moon.” To him, it’s just a picture. My daughter knows she was a “plan” because we told her we “drew the blueprint for her.” She thinks it’s a joke.
The truth is, the blueprint doesn’t survive contact with the kid.
So, does it matter? Yes, for about ten minutes in the hospital. It matters for the prenatal vitamins and the birth classes. After that, it matters far less than how you handle the moment they fall off the monkey bars, or how you react when they tell you they hate you for the first time.
I still have the old spreadsheets on my computer. I don’t open them anymore. The data is useless. My daughter started reading at four, but she still refuses to wear anything with a tag in it. My son was late to talk, but he can build a fort that structurally defies physics. The planning didn’t create her strengths, and the lack of planning didn’t create his struggles.
What we do now, today, is all that really counts. And right now, I have to go bribe them both with frozen yogurt to get through the rest of the afternoon. The plan for today is just “survive till dinner.” Honestly, that’s the best plan I’ve ever made.
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