Dear Fencesitter,
Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.
That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”
But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough.
Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.
Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.
So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world?
