As a woman, that’s pretty much how “the kid conversation” feels.

When I broke up with an ex-partner, he made a last-ditch effort at staying together by saying: “but I wanna have kids with you!”

To be clear: the only time we’d talked “kids” was when we joked “probably not.” I was super busy (and super happy) at work, logging 12-hour days and weekends. I had zero interest in a baby. But when I said this, he countered,

“That’s okay — just have the kids and then I’ll raise them.”

I heard that and thought, “say what now??” Bud, I’m not a broodmare. I’m not going to be a surrogate to my own kids.

And like I said, we broke up.

And yet, bad argument or not, we’re all still left with the overarching question: should I have kids?

STEP 1: KNOW WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO YOU

Religion

When I wrote about marriage, the biggest pushback I got was “religion.” So I’m just going to preemptively clarify:

In order to argue “religion,” you have to believe in it, and people who believe in it aren’t undecided on kids, so don’t need this post. It’s for everyone who doesn’t use religion, and needs discussions outside of it.

Status in Society

If you value social norms, you’ll probably have kids. Because even as childlessness becomes more common, it still isn’t socially accepted.

Psychology professor Leslie Ashburn-Nardo conducted a study where participants read about a fictional person (described as male or female with either zero or two children) and then shared their feelings on them.

What she found was astonishing. When childless, the fictional people were “perceived to be significantly less psychologically fulfilled,” and not only that, but participants expressed emotional reactions such as disgust, disapproval, annoyance, and anger towards them.

Ashburn-Nardo wrote,

“People experience moral outrage when they perceive someone has violated a morally prescribed behavior, something we’re ‘supposed to do’ because it’s what we see as right.”

My ex-partner’s sudden urgency to have kids happened right after his friends started having them. When I asked about his change of heart, he admitted: “everyone else is doing it!”

We may laugh at this, but at least he was honest enough to say it.

But much like “religion,” this argument only works if you value social norms — and some of us don’t.

I don’t owe the world anything. Like, I’m also a talented visual artist but few people know this about me. I don’t owe the world art, and I don’t owe it kids.

STEP 2: REALLY UNDERSTAND REASONS

Fear of Regret

Many people have kids because they “don’t want to regret not having them”— or because others threaten they will.

But, bro — have you heard of FOMO? Because this is just FOMO — “fear of missing out.”

As Linda and Charlie Bloom wrote,

“FOMO frequently provokes feelings of anxiety and restlessness, often generated by competitive thoughts that others are experiencing more pleasure, success, or fulfillment in their lives than they are… FOMO behavior will continue to prevail and diminish the overall quality of well-being, and fulfillment in one’s relationships and life in general.”

And as Gabriele Moss wrote, if “you’re only doing it because you’re afraid of missing out” or “people say you’ll regret it if you don’t,” then you’re going at it all wrong.

But FOMO exists because:

We regret things we didn’t do more than the things we do

As Daniel Gilbert wrote in Stumbling on Happiness,

“In the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean those regrets are “correct!” It’s just how our brains work.

“The psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than actions.”

In other words: our brain struggles to conceptualize and fill the “white space” of not doing something, so we assign it with the biggest negative emotion and then call the thing “regret.”

Fear — even fear of regret — is not a healthy motivator

Because:

Good decisions are made out of love, not fear

Move towards the things you want; don’t just avoid the things that scare you.

Have kids because you’re ready to love — not because you’re terrified of regret or other risks.

Some people do regret kids

They just don’t talk about it.

In 1975, advice columnist Ann Landers asked her readers, “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?”

Nearly 10,000 parents replied on handwritten postcards, and a few weeks later, Landers shared the survey results in an article headlined “70 PERCENT OF PARENTS SAY KIDS NOT WORTH IT.”

Mother Brooke Lark wrote about her experience as a parent saying,

“I am in the smack-dab middle of motherhood and I feel lost. I feel time-sucked and threadworn. I feel like I’m responsible for carrying the world… There is no break. There is no quitting. There is no vacation. There is constant guilt. That reality is sobering and exhausting.”

Here’s more:

Fear of Loneliness

Someone once told me, “not having kids won’t keep you from getting old.”

And to her (and other people who argue that), I just want to point out:

“Having kids won’t keep you from being lonely when you’re old.”

In her last book, I Remember Nothing, accomplished author and mother Norah Ephron wrote,

“In time, of course, the kids grew up and it was just me and Nick in the house on Long Island. The sound of geese became a different thing — the first sign that summer was not going to last forever, and soon another year would be over. Then, I’m sorry to say, they became a sign not just that summer would come to an end, but that so would everything else.”

Children go off and live their own lives. All of us, kids or not, will be left to deal with the sunsetting of our days. I don’t mean to be morbid; I only mean to be honest.

It is our job, not our kids’, to ease existential woes and deal with our death.

Curiosity (“I just want to see…”)

…“how they’ll turn out,” “what they’ll look like,” “my partner as a parent,” etc.

Isabelle Kohn wrote,

“Kids aren’t personal experiments. They’re not mirrors we can admire ourselves in. They’re their own living, breathing people and they’ll look how they look, learn what they learn, and be who they are regardless of us.”

We often think of kids in the theoretical sense, but kids are their own, separate people — not extensions of ourselves.

“Happiness”

Fact: Kids don’t actually make us happier

Since the 1980s, at least two-dozen studies have shown that the quality of marriage decreases once the couple has kids. Studies also show that when kids leave the nest, parents are happier than any other time in their relationship.

University researchers Philip and Carolyn Cowan shared,

“More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.”

Psychologist Ashburn-Nardo shared,

“Meta-analyses of hundreds of studies demonstrate that having children negatively affects relationship satisfaction.”

To be fair, most worthwhile things don’t make us happier in the moment. But I wish we’d stop confusing the two and lying, using the word “happy” when we really mean something else…

“Meaning”

Many people cite their kids as the most meaningful part of their lives, but that doesn’t mean we should. Good parenting means honoring kids as their own people, with their own lives, whose “meaning” is entirely separate from ours — and vice versa.

A new mom once told me, “you either have to make a million dollars, or you have to have kids.”

And an (arguably bad) therapist once threatened: “if you don’t have kids, you’ll have nothing.”

Both times, I stared back thinking that’s a human being.

Kids aren’t here to “fill your life”

They are not here to ease our existential anxiety or distract us from it, and even if we ascribe meaning to them, the responsibility still falls on us.

And secondly: our lives — and days — don’t have to be manically “filled.”

Many people are anxious about this, agonizing over the white space of childlessness.

“If not kids, then what?!” They need to know. They need a box, a marker, a label, a reason, and an explanation as to why — and “what instead.”

And when you don’t offer one, they shovel in their own certainty — “you will!” — trying to reassure themselves by pretending to reassure others.

And maybe they’re right. I don’t have enough emotion loaded into the issue to get defensive or argue otherwise. But I’m still not convinced right now.

And as one woman in her 60’s said,

“That’s just because you think there’s still more time.”

And sure, that’s true, but I’m also not sure I’d care if this was all there was.

I’m also so happy with my partner I’d never ask anything more of him (except the baby, if we do), and I think I’d be totally happy with a life that continued more or less like this until they day I died. I think we all get to that point, mentally and emotionally. We get “okay.” It’s just that some of us have already had kids by the time we do.

In other words: this thing others call “nothing” I see as “contentment.”