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I just have to stand up for the 40 year olds without kids! I’m not sure why you say they don’t seem to be doing well but I know so many single childfree women in their 30s and 40s who are thriving and are such critical members of their communities! Actually the hardest part is dealing with societal stigma that assumes you are not doing well or as worthy.

Thank you for highlighting this! Coming to this post as someone without kids felt kinda brutal and I almost feel weird highlighting what you said above because we tend not to trust single people without kids when they say these things!

I wish you all the luck in coming to a decision. Feeling stuck in indecision can be so hard and I’ve been there. One thing I wanted to offer is to consider that the responses here are likely skewed because of the nature of this community which I’m guessing skews heavily towards people who decided to have kids. I would encourage you to talk to people on the other side of the decision as well to get a more balanced perspective. It’s good to take the fear out of the decision to have kids, but it’s also helpful to de-mystify the not having kids side as well, which I can represent a bit. Keep in mind there are many people out there who wanted kids and could not have them for one reason or another and yet were still able to create meaningful and fulfilling lives. I have to say, as someone who really wanted kids but life just didn’t turn out that way (I’m 39, single, child-free), I resent some of the comments implying that this lifestyle is inherently less meaningful or that I’m lacking in resiliency. Going against the grain of what society thinks you should do requires incredible resiliency! And yet, there’s a lot that has surprised me about this life in a positive way. Of course there is sadness and a sense of loss about the other life I didn’t have but there is loss with any decision; you are always giving something up (ie that other path). And what’s surprised me is how rich this can life can be. I have really leaned into the freedoms that I have which has given me ample time and resources to pursue travel, hobbies, very close friendships, strike out on my own career-wise.. so many things that I know would be more challenging if I had kids. Someone above said that not having kids means that no one depends on you and therefore, its not a meaningful life. I disagree! I’m a therapist; I work with people everyday who are coming to me for help and I know that it would be much more challenging to do my work if I were sleep-deprived and possibly burned out from being needed all the time. I can also show up on a much deeper level with my friends and family and activism work because I’m very invested in building community outside my own house, which I think can be more challenging when one is having to focus so much of their time and energy on their nuclear family. All of this is not to say that I think my life is better than someone who has children; it’s just to point out that so many of our assumptions about what the single and/or childfree life is like are built on societal stigmas about what makes a woman valuable. And I just wanted to provide some counter-balancing information for that narrative. We don’t need to pit ourselves against each other and try to argue for which life is better when this is such a personal decision and there are challenges (and upsides) on both sides of the equation. And re: the commenters saying they purposefully play up the negatives to their friends who don’t have children. I realize this is coming from a caring place if you are talking to a friend who wants kids and does not have them, but I’m not sure this is helpful. To me, this seems based on unhelpful assumptions about whose life is more enviable. Instead, it might be more useful to learn about what is meaningful in their lives to better understand what’s great about their lives.