What If You Don’t Know Whether You Want to Have Children?
Not knowing whether you want children can be tender, complicated, and made harder by other people’s assumptions. This essay offers a compassionate set of questions to help you separate social pressure, relationship concerns, fears, hopes, and your own developing sense of what feels true.
One of the most often-asked questions I hear in my therapy practice goes something along the line of:
“I’m just don’t know if I want to have children. What do I do? How do I know for sure? How do I decide and what if I make the wrong decision?”
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It’s a question that comes primarily from my 20- and 30-something female clients, but I have plenty of couples and men who ask these questions, too.
Ambivalence about having children is a tender, complex, and often confusing place to be in, a little bit akin to having a giant, wickedly tangled big ball of woolly yarn that may or may not have an answer in the middle of it… if only you could get it untangled!
So today’s blog post is for anyone who’s possibly ambivalent about having children and asking themselves the above questions. To help you untangle your own messy ball of yarn and arrive at some clarity about your ambivalence, I’m going to ask a series of questions, the same questions I might use for any of my therapy and coaching clients.
And if you’re one of my readers who’s not ambivalent about having children , maybe you’re crystal clear you do or don’t want them, or maybe you even have children already , I still encourage you to read the post to learn some inquiries and questions that might help out someone you know and love who is feeling ambivalent and very confused. Consider it a cheat sheet to help you know what to empathetically say and ask the next time your little sister/friend/college roommate vulnerably discloses that she’s possibly-maybe ambivalent about having kids…
So grab yourself a cup of tea and keep reading…
Beginning With Compassion
Before we dive into the list of inquiries I’ve crafted to help you untangle the wicked, wooly ball of your possible ambivalence about having children, I want to pause for a minute and acknowledge how tender, complex, challenging, and potentially isolating being in the position of asking this question may feel.
Not being sure if you want to have children is a question that, at least until recently, hasn’t gotten much airtime or validation from society collectively. In many parts of the world and in many parts of this country, it’s still a basic assumption that “of course you’ll want to grow up and have children, right?” Wrong. Or, at least, wrong for some.
Increasingly, more and more men and women are choosing to not have children for a variety of reasons. But still, many of these men and women find that their decision flies in the face of collectively-assumed biological normalcy and social conditioning.
Largely, we still hold some pervasive and big assumptions that having children is a default and many people assume that if you don’t want children, there must be something wrong with you/you can’t have children/the choice is forced/it’s a sad decision/you’ll change your mind/you’ll ultimately regret it/your partner/spouse will resent you/you’re an outlier, etc etc. Heck, even Pope Francis reified this belief and not-so-subtly shamed those who don’t want to have children by calling them selfish earlier this year. Sheesh.
With all due respect to the Pope, in my personal opinion, wanting children is not a default assumption and, moreover, not wanting children is neither a selfish act nor does it mean anything at all is wrong with you if you don’t want them.
Ambivalence is the experience of having mixed or competing feelings about a meaningful decision.
In plain terms: You do not need to force a quick answer just because different parts of you are saying different things.
But the reality is that all of these collective and personal judgements (both conscious and unconscious) may make it increasingly difficult for you as an individual to tease apart what it is you truly want when it comes to having or not having children. So if you’re feeling confused about the decision to have children, if you’re feeling ambivalent and don’t know how to make sense of it, I want to invite some compassion around this.
The decision of whether or not to have children is a big important question and I applaud you for asking it and taking the time to get curious about what it is you truly want versus what it is society or others say you “should” want.
So with that said, let’s dive into a list of inquiries that might help bring greater awareness to any confusion or ambivalence you may feel.
Questions That Clarify Ambivalence
The following list of inquiries includes many of the questions I pose and explore with my therapy and coaching clients who are exploring the why and whether want to have children.
The questions aren’t designed, necessarily, to help you “solve” your ambivalence or decide conclusively if you do or don’t want to be a parent (though if that’s what you get from reading these, great!). The questions are, however, designed to help you deepen your understanding of your ambivalence and confusion, to help you strengthen your own self-awareness around what’s contributing to an obviously important question, and to help you make contact with different parts of yourself that have something to say about this issue.
I strongly encourage you to crack open your journal or load up a new Google doc sheet and actually, literally write down the answers to these questions. Taking the time to write your responses versus just thinking about them can often yield deeper insights. Let’s begin:
Relationships, Loss, and Meaning
You Are the Expert of Your Experience
Look, in no way shape or form do I have an agenda for you or anyone else out there around whether or not you want to have children. I am not the expert of your experience. Neither are your parents, friends, co-workers, or even the possibly well-meaning lady at your friend’s wedding who tells you, “You absolutely must have children, surely you want to, don’t you?!?” Nope. Neither them nor I can ever be the expert of your experience and tell you what you “should” do about your ambivalence about whether or not to have children.
You are the only expert of your experience and the only person who can arrive at the answer that feels good and true and right for you when it comes to having children.
I hope that the list of questions in today’s article brought some measure of clarity to any of the ambivalence you may be sitting with in regards to having or not having children. Of course, this list is only a starting point so if you would like even more help teasing apart and processing the question of whether or not you want to have children and all of what this might mean for you.
Social conditioning refers to the beliefs and expectations a culture, community, or family teaches us about what we should want.
In plain terms: It can be hard to hear your own voice when familiar messages tell you that one life path is the default.
Q: Is it normal to be unsure about having children?
A: Yes. The essay describes this question as tender and complex, especially when social expectations make uncertainty feel isolating.
Q: How can I tell whether my feelings are mine or social pressure?
A: Write through the questions about what you learned, what you fear, and what you genuinely feel pulled toward.
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Q: Should I make a decision quickly?
A: The essay does not prescribe a timeline. It encourages curiosity about what you need physically, financially, logistically, and relationally to clarify your feelings.
Q: What if my partner and I feel differently about children?
A: Explore whether the idea of parenting with your partner is part of the ambivalence and what relational issues may need attention.
Q: Can I have a meaningful life without children?
A: The essay explicitly invites you to consider how you might craft meaning, purpose, nurturing, and care in many forms.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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