aec

I’ve given this question a lot of thought. My husband and I were very ambivalent, and ultimately we decided to have a kid. We currently have a 17-month old healthy child.

I think that whether or not you enjoy being a parent has a lot to do with your life and general context. Here are some considerations:

1. Do you love your job? If your job is your passion, and you get a lot of satisfaction from it, having a kid is very difficult because the kid becomes an obstacle to doing your job. If you don’t love your job, you might find more satisfaction in being a parent. Unless….

2. What are your resources? If you can afford help (daycare, nanny, etc.) or have other support (parental help) you (IMO) are much more likely to enjoy being a parent, especially if you want to keep working at a job you love.

3. What’s your social life like? It’s much easier to incorporate a kid into your life when friends and family have kids.

4. What’s your relationship like? Division of labor gets much harder after kids. I HIGHLY recommend reading/listening to “Fair Play” with your partner.

In general, having a kid makes for a lot of tradeoffs. There’s no avoiding it. So you need to think about what you’ll be losing. How sad does that make you? How much do you expect the joy of parenting to replace the losses?

This is my situation: my husband and I are both self-employed. Our jobs are our passion. We make very little money — we’ve sacrificed a lot just for the pleasure of continuing to do our jobs. We can’t afford daycare. Our parents, who gave a lot of childcare help to our siblings, give us almost none. My husband and I thought that we could just share child chare (each take the kid 3 days/week) and it’d be fine. It is not fine. We are barely surviving financially, and it’s extremely stressful. Being a parent has not brought any increase in joy or satisfaction. Our daughter is amazing, and I love her, but I haven’t felt any sort of earth-shattering love or increased meaning of life or anything like that. Sometimes she’s adorable and makes me smile. Other times she’s adorable and the best place I get to is “I can see how other people like this.” Most days, I think “I have no idea what people like about this. It’s wild to me that people have more than one kid.” I’m sure that will change as she grows. Still, it’s a very hard place to be. This is probably why your friends who have kids seem depressed.

I don’t believe in regret: I believe that decisions are well-made or poorly-made. We made the decision to have a kid very carefully. I didn’t think I’d love it, necessarily, but I didn’t think it would be so generally discouraging and depressing. So far, the “joy” has not balanced out everything else. Again, that will probably change for us once we can both work full-time again.

I’ll add that our daughter is healthy, so we can assume it’s only getting better from here on out. That’s not always the case, and you never know what kind of kid you’re going to have.

This is my last note: I tell people who want to start a business that it’s only worth doing if you absolutely cannot be happy any other way. Try everything you can to be happy without running your own business, because it’s so hard that it’s otherwise not worth it. I think that’s true with kids. If you think you can be happy without having a kid, then don’t have a kid. I don’t think it’s worth it otherwise.