Everyone Told Me Not to Have a Kid — Here’s What Teaching Has Taught Me About Raising One
The first time someone told me not to have children, I was at a dinner party with a glass of red wine halfway to my mouth. A friend I’d known since college said, “You two are still thinking about kids, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Honestly, I don’t know how anyone can look at the world right now and choose that. Between the economy, the climate, the endless school shootings — it’s almost irresponsible.”
The whole table went quiet. A few people nodded. Someone said, “You’d be up all night and broke. There’s no village anymore.”
I put my glass down and said something polite about how I wasn’t sure. I drove home feeling like I’d been caught considering something foolish, like adopting two Great Danes with my credit card limit. But the strangest part was, I didn’t feel like they were wrong exactly. I felt like they were describing a different version of parenthood than the one I see every day.
I teach third grade. I’m around kids from about 8 a.m. until 3 p.m., and I have spent the last six years watching them do the hard, messy, unglamorous work of being small humans. I’ve seen Marcus, who will absolutely lose his library book, whisper the right answer to a shaking classmate because he knows he’s been somewhere that lost too. I’ve watched a girl with her shoe stuck in a puddle laugh good-naturedly while the rest of the class crowded around her to help pull it out. I’ve cleaned up vomit, stomach bugs, and tears over Minecraft server arguments. I have also stood in a hallway for twenty minutes with a kid who was sure his mother would die in a car accident because she was five minutes late. He talked, and I listened, and then she arrived.
I don’t say this to make parenting sound noble. I say it because the people at that dinner party have probably never been inside a classroom for more than a school tour. They see children as abstract symbols of future doom. I see them as people in progress — loud, exhausting, sometimes infuriating, and absolutely worth being around.
That’s why I want a kid. Not because I love Baby Yoda or because I want to hold a newborn and feel complete. I want one because I know what kids are actually like at their worst and their best. I have sat through tantrums that lasted twenty minutes because a pencil had to be a specific color. I’ve been called the worst teacher ever for asking someone to push in their chair. And I’ve also had a child write me a note that said, “You helped me not be scared about the tornado drill.” That’s the real deal. That’s what I want to be around — not a fantasy baby who sleeps on cue.
But there is something the dinner party people aren’t wrong about. We don’t have a village. My parents live in another state. My partner’s family is smaller and further. We have good friends, but almost none of them have kids themselves. That is the part that scares me — not the climate report, not the inflation rate, not even the horror stories about middle school adolescence. It’s the quiet evenings when you are exhausted and have no one to hand the child to for an hour. It’s the possibility of raising a small person in an enormous empty apartment with just the three of us.
So we’ve been working on that problem, because that is a concrete problem. It’s not a vague existential dread. It’s a logistical one, and unlike the news cycle, it can be solved with small steps.
First, I stopped letting people’s generic warnings stand. When a well-meaning cousin said, “You won’t ever get your independence back,” I asked her, “What part of independence are you most worried about?” She thought and admitted it was actually just that she couldn’t imagine waking up early on a weekend. That led to a conversation, not an argument. When another friend said, “You know you won’t sleep for two years,” I didn’t agree or disagree. I just said, “That’s probably true. We’re planning to take shifts.” Turns out, most people don’t have a developed argument against a baby. They have a feeling.
Second, we started building our own version of a community. We met our neighbors two doors down — a couple with a four-year-old and a newborn, who were just as exhausted as we expected to be. I offered to read to their toddler while they made dinner. They offered to give us a grand tour of the pediatrician business in town. We set up a text thread with two other couples who are also considering kids, and we now pass around second-hand car seats and relevant articles. It’s not a village yet, but it’s a porch light on the street.
Third, I stopped waiting until I felt ready. I’ve never once felt ready for a school year, and I’ve survived eleven of them. I have learned the only way to get good with kids is to spend time with kids and make mistakes. The first time I taught a kid to tie a shoe, I did it wrong and had to ask a retired teacher to show me the proper method. That was humbling. It also taught me that you don’t have to know everything on day one. You just have to be willing to say, “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together.”
I think that’s the thing the dinner party crowd doesn’t see. Children aren’t a threat to a stable life; they’re a force that breaks apart your false stability so you can rebuild it in a more human shape. I’ve seen it in the parents at my school. Not the ones who have flawless houses and perfect kids — they don’t exist. The parents who seem okay are the ones who made peace with being disorganised, who ask for help when they’re underwater, who drop their kid off late and just say, “We had a rough morning” without apologising for being human.
I don’t know exactly how this will go. I won’t pretend to have arrived at a calm place of certainty. I still have moments where I read the news and think maybe I ought to give up on this. But then I remember that I’ve spent years telling kids, “We can’t control everything, but we can control how we treat each other.” I can’t control the economic downturn or the political climate. I can control whether I show up to school tomorrow with patience. I can control whether I leave a plate of food for my neighbor when her newborn is keeping her up. I can control whether I ask for help when I am the one falling apart.
That doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me feel able.
So while everyone tells me why I shouldn’t — and some of their reasons are fair, and I will probably remember them at 2 a.m. during a colicky crying fit — I’m still going to try. I’m going to try knowing that I might be too tired, might be broke for a while, might lose my temper and have to repair it. I’m going to try because I’ve seen what happens when twenty adults share a classroom with six-year-olds. There’s a lot of mess, and there’s a lot of noise, and every so often, one child lights up because they understood something they didn’t before. That doesn’t fix the world. But it’s a good enough reason to be in the world.
I’m not going to have a solution by the time my dinner party friend asks again. I’m just going to have a story. I’ll tell her about the morning I spent helping Marcus find a lost tote bag, and how he finally found it under his desk, and how his whole face smoothed out and he said, “I knew you would help me find it.” That’s the thing about being a teacher. You get to be the one who helps with the small things. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get to be that person for one kid at home, too. Even when everyone says not to.
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