Can anyone really *choose* to have children?

You can only truly choose not to.

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I always told myself I’d have kids when I turned 30. That’s when my mom had me, and for most of my life, 30 seemed like a big, impossible age that I’d never reach. But as I started creeping into my late 20s, I revised that number. Thirty-five, I told myself. By 35, if I hadn’t already, I’d start trying to have kids.

I turn 32 next month, and am once again having that “woah, too close” feeling that prompted me to shift my timeline a few years ago. Only this time, I don’t feel I have any timeline left to shift. People do, of course, have children after the age of 35, but I’ve always known I wanted them earlier—it’s just hard to get my head around the fact that with each day, “earlier” is turning into “now.”

The upside, however, is it’s always been a question of “when” not “if.” I’ve been confident in my desire for children for almost my entire life (even though in my friend group I’m notorious for not finding babies that cute) (mine will be, though). But on Diem, we’ve recently seen a lot of conversations among those who are more uncertain. How do you even know if you want children? What finally convinced you either way?

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear these questions are the words of Emily Witt, who wrote this about fertility in her book Future Sex:

Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of goals and outcomes, which reduced structural economic, technological, and social change to an individual decision…Are we choosing? My friends who have frozen their eggs do not feel like they have chosen—they want to have babies. My friends who want to get pregnant but whose bodies will not cooperate do not feel like they have chosen. When we were young and in our 20s and on birth control were we really making a choice not to start a family? It never felt like that. It felt more like a family had not chosen us.

Having children, when viewed through this lense, is not a choice—not really. So much has to go right, so many circumstances must fall into place, to allow someone the agency of saying “yes.” You can only truly choose not to. And it turns out, many people have. A 2022 study found an unexpected rise in the number of adults who have chosen to be child-free—30% of women of childbearing age who do not have children. But that isn’t to say that decision is any less complicated.

“I didn’t fit into the narratives common among aspiring parents or the blissfully childfree,” Jessie Van Amburg wrote for Wondermind. “I have zero drive or longing to have a baby. But I don’t dislike children either. I fell into some secret third category no one talks about: the ambivalent undecided.”

Van Amburg says it was ultimately Ann Davidman, LMFT’s book, co-authored with Denise L. Carlini, Motherhood: Is It Meant for Me? that helped her come to her decision, and Davidman shared some of those decision tools with Vox:

1. Begin with deciding to take a designated break (one to three months) from any discussion about the topic with your partner.

2. Accept that indecision is more complex than what’s on the surface and not because something is wrong with you.

3. Stop trying to figure this out by making a pros and cons list. It will keep you stuck.

4. Make a list of three decisions that you’ve made because you knew in your gut it was the right decision for you.

(read the article for the full list)

Someone who has firmly decided to be child-free is fellow Substacker

Emma Gannon

, who wrote thoughtfully about what, then, the rest of her life might look like for The Guardian:

I’ve realised recently the reality of my situation: I will never have these milestones that come with having children. Even though I am sure I don’t want kids, a period of existential worry has crept up on me – the feeling that I’ve somehow already ticked off life’s big moments.

Last year I got married (tick!) and I bought a house (tick!), but then there was a feeling of: what next? I was haunted by a conversation I had with a woman who worked at a beauty counter who, as she applied wax to my eyebrows, asked me if I had children. When I replied no (and that I don’t think I want to have them), she said: “I hope you have enough to fill your life with. Life is very long.”

It’s true—life is long. For Gannon, she shared how she plans to fill her life outside of having children. But this also means you have time to figure it out. Nobody told me 35 was the cutoff—it’s just something I’ve decided, which means the only person applying pressure is me.

What do you think? Where are you on your decision journey? If you decided, how? Let’s talk about it on Diem!

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