I Want a Kid When Everyone Says Don’t—What Working With Children Taught Me
The crayon snapped in half. Not by accident—Alex, a seven-year-old with a stubborn streak and a love of orange, pressed down so hard that the wax gave way with a dull click. He looked at the two pieces in his hand, then at the paper where half a sun was already drawn. His face crumpled.
“I broke it,” he whispered, like it was a confession.
I squatted next to his desk. “You did. That’s kind of annoying, huh?”
He nodded, lip trembling. A real teacher might have said something wise about fixing things, but I’d learned that sometimes you just sit with the annoyance first.
“Can I see?” I held out my hand. He gave me the broken pieces. I pressed them together. “Look, if you hold it like this, it still draws.” I scribbled a quick orange line on his paper. “See? It’s not perfect, but it works.”
Alex studied the line. Then he took the pieces, held them carefully, and finished the sun. He didn’t say thank you. He just drew.
That moment stayed with me. Not because it was heartwarming—it was messy and small—but because I’d watched a child learn something. Not how to fix a crayon, but how to keep going when something goes wrong. And that is exactly why I want a kid even though everyone I know tells me not to have one.
My friends are not subtle. “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” they say. “Sleep is a memory. Money disappears. You’ll never have a free weekend again.” They list facts like I’ve never met a child. But I spend forty hours a week with children as a teaching assistant in an elementary school. I know what I’m getting into. I’ve been peed on, bitten, ignored, screamed at. I’ve cleaned up vomit and glue and glitter and tears. I’ve also seen a kid figure out how to tie his shoes after three weeks of practice, and the look on his face was better than any paycheck.
So when my friend Claire says, “But you hate noise. You’re always exhausted,” I don’t argue. She’s right. I am exhausted. But the exhaustion I feel at work isn’t the same as the exhaustion I feel after a day of doing nothing. It’s a tiredness with texture. It clings to you, but it comes with tiny, uneven victories—like the moment Alex didn’t throw the broken crayon across the room.
Part of me expects to be told, “You’ll change your mind,” which is what everyone says when you’re a woman in your late thirties without a child. They say it politely, but it’s still an eraser. Last week at my mother’s birthday, my aunt pulled me aside and whispered, “You know, kids are a lot of work. Are you sure?” I said, “I help twenty kids a day. I’ve never been more sure.” She patted my arm and looked at me like I was explaining why I wanted to jump off a bridge.
But I’m not naive. The work I do with children is temporary. I can hand them back at 3:30. A parent doesn’t get that luxury. And that’s where the real uncertainty lives. I know how to manage a classroom, but I don’t know what it’s like to manage one small human at 2 a.m. while also paying a mortgage and holding a marriage together. I know that much.
Still, what I’ve learned in this classroom has shifted how I think about raising a kid. The first thing is that children don’t need perfect conditions. They need tolerable frustration. The crayon broke, but it wasn’t a catastrophe. I didn’t rush to fix it—I offered a workaround. That’s a practical skill I see on paper every day: kids who never stumble never learn to balance. So if I have a child, I won’t be the parent who jumps in the moment a block tower falls. I’ll say, “That was loud. Want to build it again?” and let them figure out the base needs to be wider. It’s small, but it matters.
The second thing is that language matters less than we think. I used to assume that explaining things calmly would solve every problem. But I’ve watched teachers talk a dysregulated kid through a calm-down corner and then seen another teacher just sit nearby, saying nothing, letting the kid settle in their own time. Sometimes the child is looking for a cue, not a lecture. So if I become a parent, I’ll do less explaining and more being. When my kid is furious about a carved pumpkin that isn’t perfect, I’ll say, “It’s still good,” and then hand them a marker to draw on the orange peel. That’s the kind of adjustment that costs nothing and teaches everything.
But here’s what I struggle with. Everyone’s warning isn’t entirely wrong. I see kids who are genuinely difficult. There’s a girl in the second-grade class who has what we politely call “big feelings.” She screams when she has to transition from free play to math. She throws her shoes. Her parents are exhausted, and so are we. I imagine having that kind of child at home, where the relief is not coming at 3:30. I wonder if I’d hold up. I like to think I’d be patient because I’ve practiced, but practice with a colleague beside you is different from practice where you’re the only adult in the house.
That uncertainty doesn’t go away. But I also have a memory from last month: the same girl, after a particularly noisy meltdown, sat in my lap and pointed to a picture of a dog in a book. She said, “My dog has ears like that.” Her whole body softened. The anger wasn’t gone—it was just underneath, for a minute. And that minute was enough to remind me why I keep showing up.
I’ve decided to start trying. I haven’t told anyone except my husband. He said he’s nervous, too. We’re not pretending it will be easy. We’re not saying “everything happens for a reason.” We’re saying, “Let’s see if we can build a life that includes a tiny person who might break crayons or scream at math transitions.”
Maybe we’ll find out I was wrong. Maybe raising a child will be exactly the misery people describe. But I doubt it. Because I’ve already seen the part that other people don’t mention: the way a child learns to hold a broken crayon and keep drawing. That’s not a reason to have a kid. It’s a glimpse of what makes the exhaustion worth it.
The bell rang a few minutes after Alex finished his orange sun. He handed the paper to me as he packed his backpack. It was just a picture of a sun, a house, and a stick figure, all tilted slightly to the left. He didn’t say, “I fixed my crayon.” He said, “You can keep this.”
I put it in my drawer, under a stack of permission slips. Some days I look at it and feel sure. Some days I look at it and think about the probability of toddler tantrums in a Target. I don’t have a neat answer, and I’m done expecting one. I’m just carrying the drawing home, next to the memory of holding two orange pieces together with the sticky hands of a seven-year-old, and deciding to try anyway.
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