I Was On the Fence About Having Kids. Here’s What Changed My Mind.
At the children’s museum, my niece disappeared under a bench. She was four, clutching a stuffed otter, and she had decided, for reasons she was not prepared to explain, that she was not leaving. Not for snack, not for the car, not for anything.
I tried the usual adult moves. I offered a bribe. I used a warning. I got down on the floor and tried to reason with her. Nothing. She just sat there, a small lump of fur and feathers, gripping that otter like it was the only solid thing in the world.
Finally I called my sister, half embarrassed. “She won’t come out.”
“Tell her what’s next,” my sister said. “Not why, not the plan. Just the immediate next three things.”
So I crouched down and said, “Okay. We’re going to stand up, walk through the big blue door, get in the elevator, and then go outside and find the car. And when we get home, you can have string cheese.”
She stood up.
It was that simple. Not because the string cheese was a brilliant motivator, but because I had given her something she didn’t have: a sequence. She wasn’t being stubborn. She was stuck in the fog of transition. Leaving a place she loved felt like stepping into a blank space. I had been asking her to go from one thing to nothing. No wonder she refused.
At the time, I was the friend who said “I love other people’s kids, but…” I was firmly on the fence about having my own. I had a good list of reasons. Sleep, money, freedom. The fact that babies are boring and toddlers are exhausting. I liked children in small doses, with an exit strategy, preferably with a glass of wine afterward.
That afternoon under the bench didn’t make me want a baby. It made me want to understand what was actually happening in those frustrating toddler moments. Because for the first time, a child’s irrational behavior had felt rational once I looked at it differently. She wasn’t giving me a hard time. She was having a hard time.
That phrase is overused now, but it was true. What looked like defiance was actually uncertainty. Young children don’t have a well-developed sense of future. When you say “It’s time to go,” they hear an ending. They don’t automatically know what comes next. So they dig in. Their brains are not being difficult on purpose. They are literally missing the ability to project themselves into the next moment.
The fix, I learned, is not to explain why we have to go. It’s not to say “because mom said so” or “we can’t stay all day.” That’s abstract. What works is naming the next three steps in boring, exact detail.
Now, when I see a child refusing to leave the playground, I don’t say “time to go.” I say, “Here’s what’s about to happen. We’re going to put our shoes on, walk to the gate, and then you can push the button at the crosswalk.” If there’s still resistance, I add one more concrete detail: “And when we get home, you can pour the goldfish into the bowl.” It sounds almost dumb, but it works. It gives the child a map.
A few years later, I had a daughter of my own. I had spent enough time around other people’s children to stop waiting for a magical feeling. I didn’t have an overwhelming sense that I was meant to be a mother. I just had the sense that I could tolerate not knowing what I was doing. That felt like enough.
The toast incident happened at 7:18 in the morning. She was two. I had cut her toast into squares. She wanted triangles. The square toast, already visible on the plate, could not be unseen. I made a triangle. That only made things worse. She cried not because the triangle existed, but because the square had ever existed. It was a broken world, and I was the one who broke it.
I remembered the bench. I didn’t say “it’s just toast.” I didn’t say “let’s make another one.” I crouched down and said, “You wanted triangles. I made squares. That is annoying. I’m sorry. We can fix it.”
She stopped crying. Not because I fixed it, but because I named the problem. When adults jump straight to solutions too quickly, children often feel unheard. The repair matters less than the acknowledgment. “You’re right, that’s irritating” works better than “let’s just fix it” in so many moments. It’s counterintuitive. But it quiets something.
I started using the same approach when I volunteered in a third-grade classroom. One boy stared at his math sheet, pencil put down, eyes flat. The teacher didn’t say “try harder.” She said, “You’re stuck on the first problem. Let’s read it out loud together.” He read the first sentence. Then the second. Then he wrote an answer. It wasn’t magic. It was the same sequence. She named what was happening, then gave him a single step.
What changed my mind about having children wasn’t some sentimental moment. It was learning that difficult behavior often has an internal logic. Once you start looking for it, children become less scary. They are not small impossible adults. They are people who don’t yet have the tools to say what they need. So they show you with their bodies, their silence, their refusals. The job of the adult is not to control them. It’s to translate.
If you’re on the fence about having kids, I think the question isn’t “do I love children?” It’s “can I stand being useless for twenty minutes while they cry?” Because sometimes that’s what happens. There is no sequence that fixes everything. Some mornings the toast is wrong and there is no fixing it. Some afternoons the museum is too good to leave, and no amount of string cheese can change that.
I still have moments where I wonder if I would do it all again. But it’s not the kind of wondering I used to do. I used to sit at a dinner table and watch a friend’s toddler scream through a meal and think, “I could never handle that.” Now I understand that handling it doesn’t mean ending the screaming. It means sitting near it, saying the next thing out loud, and waiting.
Some days it works. Some days we sit under the bench together. That’s okay. I’m not on the fence anymore. I’m just on the floor, telling a small person what’s about to happen next.
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