Everyone Says Don’t Have Kids. I Want One Anyway. Here’s How I’m Thinking It Through.
The birthday party was for a one-year-old, and the living room looked like a small storm had passed through. Sticky fingerprints on the coffee table, a crushed goldfish cracker in the rug, and the birthday girl herself sitting in a high chair with pureed sweet potato smeared up to her ears. I was helping a mother of three find a clean diaper, and she laughed in that tired, hollow way parents sometimes do.
“I love my kids,” she said. “But if I’d known how hard this was going to be, I honestly don’t know if I’d have done it.”
I smiled and nodded. I’ve heard that version of the warning dozens of times over the last few years. It comes from friends, from my sister, from a cousin who once told me that having a child is “signing up for a lifetime of worry with no guarantee of anything in return.” Sometimes it comes from people at work who assume I’m childfree and get very encouraging when I don’t contradict them.
But the truth is, I still want a kid. I’ve wanted one quietly for years, and right now the volume around me is getting loud enough that I have to figure out why.
I’ve been a preschool teacher for seven years. I know the realities of children in a way that people without kids often don’t. I’ve been bitten, thrown up on, screamed at, and told I’m the worst teacher in the whole entire world because I said it was time to wash hands. I’ve also watched a four-year-old struggle for ten minutes to zip his own jacket, then burst into proud laughter when he finally did it. I’ve seen a shy three-year-old say “thank you” without being prompted for the first time. I’ve held a sobbing child whose grandmother had just died and didn’t know why she was crying so hard.
So when people warn me about sleepless nights and loss of freedom, part of me understands. It’s not abstract. But another part of me feels like they think I have no idea what a child actually is. I might not know what it’s like to have my own, but I’ve spent thousands of hours building block towers and negotiating over snack portions. I’ve done the emotional labor. I’ve done the physical labor. I know that kids are not just “worth it” in some simple, sentimental way. They are exhausting. They are also fascinating, like watching someone slowly grow a soul from scratch.
But the warnings don’t stop at exhaustion. They get bigger. “How can you justify bringing a child into this world?” a colleague asked me last month. “Between climate change, school lunches, housing prices, the cost of diapers—it feels irresponsible.” She wasn’t being cruel. She was genuinely concerned. And I hate to admit it, but I left that conversation feeling dizzy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it is irresponsible to want a child right now.
So I started doing what I do in a lot of uncertain situations: I made a list. But not a pros-and-cons list, because that felt too crude. I made a list of what I actually want and what I’m actually afraid of.
Under “want,” I wrote things like: To watch someone learn how to ride a bike. To tell stories that become inside jokes. To see what kind of person this hypothetical child would become. To feel connected to the future in a tangible way. To have a home that feels full, not just quiet.
Under “fear,” I wrote: That I would be a tired, cranky, mediocre parent. That I wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure. That the world would become even harder than it already is. That I would end up resenting the child. And, underneath that, the quieter fear that I wouldn’t be able to keep them safe.
Once it was all down, I realized something important. Most of these fears are not about the child. They’re about the circumstances of modern parenting—things that aren’t anyone’s fault, but that many people are now expected to handle alone. I see it in my classroom every year. Parents drop off kids at 7 a.m. and pick them up at 6 p.m. They work full time, but they still have to arrange meetups and make lunches and remember appointments. They don’t have villages; they have overlapping calendars.
That’s not the same as a reason not to have a child. It’s a reason to go in clear-eyed.
So I tried something. Instead of just thinking about motherhood, I spent a weekend helping my friend with her eight-month-old. Sleepless nights, crying jags, the unbelievably boring work of watching someone try to grab a toy for the fiftieth time. I also saw the moment she first rolled over, and my friend looked at me with this exhausted, unguarded joy. I didn’t feel like I was seeing a romanticized version. I was seeing the real thing. And I still wanted it.
That doesn’t mean I’ve made a decision. I’ve started asking different questions: not “Should I have a kid?” but “What kind of life would I want to give them?” Not “Can I afford it?” (I can, barely, which is better than many) but “Can I afford it without becoming someone who resents them?” Not “Is the world bad?” but “How would I handle my own anxiety about the world without transferring it to them?”
These questions are more useful. They don’t have easy answers, though.
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from teaching is that children are not projects or warnings. They’re people from day one. And people aren’t born into perfect worlds. They’re born into imperfect ones and they figure things out as they go. My grandmother was born during a world war. She had four kids anyway. Every generation makes a choice about the future under pressure. The question is whether my desire is strong enough to carry the hard parts.
Right now, I’m still wondering. I’m also still standing by the sandbox at recess, watching a four-year-old try to get a truck unstuck from a mud patch. He’s not frustrated. He’s looking at the problem with absolute seriousness. Then he picks up a stick and begins to dig. He’s not asking whether it will work. He’s just trying.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that point of childlike certainty. But I’m slowly learning that wanting a kid, when you’ve examined it and let other people poke at it and you’re still standing there, is not the same as pretending the world is safe. Maybe that’s enough for now.
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