The Ambivalence About Having Kids

THE EVERYTHING YEARS • May 31, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

Diana sat quietly in her car, the muted gray light of a Saturday afternoon filtering through the windshield. It was three in the afternoon, the kind of overcast June day that never quite decides whether it wants to rain. The soft patter of it against the glass blended with the distant murmur of laughter and conversation spilling from the house hosting the baby shower. In her lap rested a pastel-colored gift bag from a store she’d stopped at twenty minutes early so she wouldn’t have to walk in without one, its tissue paper rustling softly as she shifted her hands. Her phone sat face-down on the passenger seat, still open to the baby registry she’d scrolled through three times in the parking lot. The scent of fresh rain mingled with the faint aroma of baby powder wafting from inside the house. Her chest tightened with a complex swirl of tenderness and dread. She felt a deep warmth imagining the joy of welcoming a new life, yet an equally strong pull of uncertainty about what that would mean for her own sense of freedom and identity.

“I don’t even know why I’m still sitting here,” Diana told me later that week, describing the moment from the armchair in my office, her hands wrapped around a mug she wasn’t drinking from. “Everyone in there is going to ask me the same question they always ask, which is when is it my turn, and I used to have an answer for that, I used to say soon, and now I don’t even know if soon is a lie I’m telling them or a lie I’m telling myself, and honestly I just sat in the car for I don’t know, ten minutes, fifteen, just staring at this stupid gift bag like it was going to tell me something.”

What I noticed, listening to her, wasn’t indecision. It was two fully formed positions arguing in real time, both hers, both true. One part of Diana wanted the warmth spilling out of that house. Another part was terrified of losing the version of her life she’d spent fifteen years building. Neither part was wrong. Neither part was the “real” Diana waiting to be uncovered beneath the other. That itself was the clinical information.

Diana’s ambivalence was not a simple matter of wanting or not wanting children. It was a layered internal argument shaped by hope, fear, and a life script she’d never quite agreed to. The baby shower’s cheerful atmosphere felt both inviting and alienating at once, which is exactly how the question tends to sit in a woman’s body before she has language for it.

In my practice, I have found that ambivalence about having children is a common and natural experience, deserving of compassionate exploration rather than judgment. I think often of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, the developmental psychologist who coined the term “emerging adulthood” to describe the extended, identity-forming stretch between the late teens and the early thirties. Dr. Arnett’s research reframed a whole generation’s sense of timeline, and I lean on his work constantly with clients like Diana, because so much of what looks like stalling from the outside is actually identity work that hasn’t finished yet, even at thirty-eight or forty-two (Arnett 2000).

The ambivalence about having kids is one of the most common things I sit with in my office, and one of the most misunderstood. The uncertainty pulls from several directions at once: societal expectation, personal desire, relationship dynamics, and a timeline nobody quite agreed to. These mixed feelings are normal, and they shape decisions in ways worth understanding. My hope is that you come away able to work through the internal conflict with compassion and clarity, so that whatever you decide, you decide it as yourself, rather than as a reaction to fear, shame, or a clock you never agreed to.

For deeper reading, I also recommend my related guides on this exact decision, the grief and relational history underneath the choice, and the wider Everything Years archive. For medical or demographic context on egg freezing and fertility timelines, I am grounding this article in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s evidence-based guideline.

In short: Ambivalence about having children is a recognized, normal experience in which genuine competing desires coexist, and the clinical task is understanding what each part of that ambivalence is saying rather than silencing it.

Ambivalence has more than one voice

Speaking clinically, the picture is more textured than a single prescription. What attachment research, stress studies, and cultural-pressure literature consistently point toward is that flourishing depends on having enough safety, honesty, and relational permission to live the life that is actually yours. That is the frame I hold steady with clients when this question opens something raw.

In my work with driven women in their late thirties and forties, the question of whether to have children rarely arrives as one clean thought. It arrives as a committee. There’s the part that remembers holding a niece at three weeks old and feeling something crack open in her chest. There’s the part that just closed a round of funding, or made partner, or finally stopped shrinking herself in a marriage, and does not want to hand any of that back. There’s the part that is quietly, privately afraid of becoming her own mother. None of these parts are lying. That’s what makes the question so much harder than the culture’s tidy binary of “ready” versus “not ready” suggests.

I want to name something plainly, because it gets lost in most writing on this topic: ambivalence is not a symptom to be resolved on the way to a decision. For a lot of the women I sit with, the ambivalence is the decision-making process itself, working as designed. The goal isn’t to silence one part so the other wins. It’s to understand what each part is protecting, and what each part actually knows.

Something about timing comes up in nearly every first session on this topic. Clients arrive expecting me to help them reach a verdict by a certain date, as though clarity were a deliverable with a deadline. Sometimes there is a real deadline, biological or otherwise, and I take that seriously. But more often, the pressure to decide quickly is itself part of the problem, not a neutral constraint sitting outside it. Rushing a decision this size tends to produce a choice made from whichever part is loudest that week, rather than one that holds up once the deadline’s adrenaline has passed. Slower, in this kind of decision, is frequently more accurate.

Why clarity can disappear around other people’s babies

Diana came back to this in a session a few weeks later, describing a Sunday afternoon at her sister’s house. Her nephew, four months old, had fallen asleep against her chest while the rest of the family cleared dishes in the next room, and she sat very still on the couch, not wanting to move, feeling something in her body settle in a way it hadn’t settled in months. “It felt like coming home to a house I’ve never actually lived in,” she told me, turning her coffee cup slowly on the arm of the chair. “And then twenty minutes later I was driving home and I felt this wave of, like, relief, that I got to hand him back and just be me again, get in my car, go to a Sunday that was mine. And both of those feelings were so strong, and I don’t know how to hold both of them without picking a side.”

What I notice with clients like Diana is that being around other people’s babies can stir up conflicting feelings that cloud clarity. In my work, this often reflects a dynamic called parts polarization, where different parts within us argue for opposing responses. One part might feel drawn to the warmth and connection babies represent, while another part fears the loss of freedom or potential risks parenthood might bring. This internal debate can make it difficult to discern genuine feelings from protective reactions.

I often ask clients to picture the decision like a table with several people seated around it, each with a legitimate stake. One is the part that wants connection and lineage. One is the part that built a career and doesn’t trust the world to let her keep it if she becomes a mother. One is younger than the others, still keeping watch for the kind of household she grew up in. When Diana is standing in a nursery holding someone else’s newborn, every voice at that table starts talking at once, and the volume alone can feel like an answer, when really it’s just a crowded room.

In plain terms, this is why a woman can leave a baby shower on Saturday feeling certain she wants a child, and by Tuesday afternoon, back at her desk with a stack of unanswered emails and a body that finally has room to feel something other than adrenaline, feel just as certain she doesn’t. Neither Saturday nor Tuesday is lying to her. Both are data. The nervous system tells the truth about what it’s holding in the moment it’s holding it, and a decision this size cannot be made from any single moment.

I’d rather frame this carefully than confidently. Across the attachment, stress, and cultural-pressure research, the most trustworthy finding isn’t a guarantee about any path, but a pattern: people do better with enough safety, honesty, and relational permission to choose the life they’re actually in. That’s the thread I follow with clients here.

Parts work for the yes and the no

Diana’s story of feeling torn between wanting children and fearing the loss of her freedom is one I hear often in my work. What I notice with clients like her is that ambivalence often arises because different parts within us hold competing desires. One part longs to nurture and create family bonds, while another protects us from uncertainty and sacrifice. Recognizing these parts as valid voices rather than opposing forces can help reduce internal conflict.

Frances arrived at our first session in October carrying a leather planner she never opened, its pages held shut with a rubber band, the kind of object a person brings when they need something in their hands more than they need something on the page. She’d driven straight from a board meeting, still in the blazer, her badge from the building lanyard still clipped to her bag. Outside, the light was doing that early-fall thing, gold and low and already halfway to evening by five o’clock.

“I’m forty-four,” she said, sitting down before I’d even closed the door, “and I need someone to just tell me if I’ve already missed it, because I have spent the last two years going back and forth so many times that I don’t trust my own brain on this topic anymore, I’ll be completely sure at breakfast and completely unsure by lunch, and my husband has basically stopped asking me where I’ve landed because I think it makes him anxious, and honestly it makes me anxious too, and I know that’s not really a question you can answer but I needed to say it out loud to somebody who wasn’t going to just tell me to relax.”

I noticed how carefully she’d organized her ambivalence into a schedule, as though the feeling itself could be managed the way she managed a department. That instinct, to run the decision through the same operating system that ran the rest of her life, was itself worth slowing down on. It told me Frances trusted competence more than she trusted feeling, which made sense given how far competence had carried her. It also meant the parts of her that were not about competence, the grief, the longing, the fear of repeating her own mother’s isolation, had nowhere sanctioned to speak.

What became clear over the following months is that Frances wasn’t actually undecided about wanting connection and continuity in her life. She was undecided about whether she was allowed to want a form of it that didn’t look like the corner office she’d already built. Once we separated the wanting from the permission, the polarization eased. She didn’t need a verdict. She needed her own system to stop treating one part of herself as illegitimate.

A few months later, in a January session, Frances came in without the planner. She’d left it in the car, she said, almost as an experiment. “I keep thinking about the fact that my mother never got to ask herself this question,” she told me, looking out the window at the parking lot rather than at me, which was unusual for her. “She had my brother and me because that’s just what happened next after you got married in 1978, there wasn’t a version where she sat in some office and asked herself if she wanted it. And I’ve spent so much energy being furious that I have this choice and still can’t make it, when maybe the truth is I’ve never actually gotten to want something without a spreadsheet attached to it, and this is the first time in my life the spreadsheet doesn’t work.”

I sat with that for a moment before responding, because it was the most unguarded thing Frances had said in four months of sessions. What I said back was simple: the spreadsheet not working isn’t a failure of the spreadsheet. It’s evidence that this particular question was never going to answer to that kind of logic. Her competence had gotten her everything else in her life. It could not, on its own, tell her what she wanted next. That distinction landed. I watched her exhale in a way I hadn’t seen from her before, shoulders coming down from somewhere near her ears.

This approach is grounded in parts work and nervous-system science. The work of Richard Schwartz, PhD, founder of Internal Family Systems, gives language to what I watch happen in the room: acknowledging and dialoguing with internal parts, rather than trying to silence the inconvenient ones, is what allows integration and clarity to actually take hold. This kind of parts work helped Frances, and it helps many clients like her, explore both the “yes” and the “no” within their ambivalence without judgment or pressure.

If you are moving through similar feelings, I invite you to explore more about this path during life’s transitions in my Everything Years series. Understanding and honoring your internal parts can be a powerful step toward making choices that feel authentic and whole.

How shame distorts the question

Diana’s ambivalence about having children is deeply entangled with shame. What I notice with clients like her is that shame often shifts the focus from genuine desire to a fear of judgment. Instead of asking, “Do I want to be a parent?” the question becomes, “Am I allowed to want this?” This internalized shame can cloud clarity and create a sense of isolation. Brene Brown, PhD, research professor and shame researcher at the University of Houston, gives me language for what I see clinically: shame thrives in secrecy and silence, and it often makes a person confuse public judgment with private truth. In my work, helping clients identify and separate shame from their true desires opens a path toward self-compassion and informed choices.

Here’s what that looks like in the room. A client will tell me she’s ashamed to admit she doesn’t feel the pull toward motherhood that her sister felt, or that she does feel the pull but is embarrassed by how much she also wants her old life back. Shame doesn’t sound like shame when it’s happening. It sounds like “what’s wrong with me,” which is a very different question than “what do I actually want,” and clients rarely notice they’ve quietly swapped one for the other. On a Tuesday afternoon, that swap is the difference between sitting with a real feeling and spiraling on a manufactured verdict about your own character.

Diana’s version of this showed up as a very specific memory she brought into a session in late July. At her cousin’s wedding two years earlier, an aunt had asked, in front of the whole table, whether she and her partner were “finally going to get on with it.” Diana laughed it off in the moment, the way you do at a wedding, but she told me she’d replayed that sentence probably a hundred times since. “It wasn’t even a mean thing to say,” she said. “But it made me feel like my own uncertainty was a character flaw everyone else could see, like I was the only one in the family who hadn’t figured out the assignment.” That single sentence from a relative had quietly become the loudest voice in her internal committee, louder than her own actual desire, simply because it arrived wrapped in judgment rather than curiosity.

What I told Diana, and what I tell most clients carrying a version of this same wedding-table moment, is that other people’s timelines are not diagnostic information about your own life. An aunt’s comment tells you about the aunt’s relationship to family, to time, to her own choices. It tells you almost nothing about what you actually want. Separating those two things, the noise of other people’s expectations from the signal of your own desire, is often the majority of the clinical work in this particular kind of case.

For those considering options like egg freezing as a way to buy time for this decision, evidence-based outcomes provide reassurance that reproductive autonomy is supported by science, and I ground that guidance in the ASRM’s evidence-based guideline on oocyte cryopreservation, which offers detailed context on this topic and, more importantly, gives people options and hope while they do the harder internal work.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, the founder of Internal Family Systems whose work I’ve already leaned on in this piece, has a line I return to often with clients wrestling with shame around this decision: there are no bad parts. Not the part that wants out. Not the part that wants in. Acknowledging every part of yourself, including the one carrying shame, allows you to approach the question of having children with greater honesty and kindness toward yourself.

A slower way to listen for desire

Clinically, I try not to overstate what we know. The honest synthesis, across attachment science, stress research, and studies of cultural pressure, is that no single path produces certain well-being. What helps is enough safety, enough honesty, and enough relational permission to live the life one has actually chosen. That is the principle I lean on when this becomes hard for someone.

Part of what makes this decision so disorienting for the women I work with is that it collides directly with an extended developmental stage most of them were never taught they were still in. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, describes emerging adulthood as a distinct developmental period, not a delay or a failure to launch, in which identity exploration continues well past the twenties for a large share of people in industrialized societies (Arnett 2000). If you are forty-one and still actively negotiating who you are and what you want, that is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It may simply mean your identity work is still live.

Jennifer A. Silvers, PhD, and Tara S. Peris, PhD, both researchers who study the neuroscience of this developmental window at UCLA, have written about how the reward systems, tolerance for ambiguity, and social support structures that mature during this period continue shaping decision-making capacity well into a person’s thirties and forties (Silvers and Peris 2023). I find this genuinely clarifying to bring into the room with clients, because it means the discomfort of not-knowing has a developmental logic to it. Your brain is not malfunctioning when it can’t produce a clean verdict on a decision this large. It is doing exactly what a healthy, still-integrating brain does with genuine ambiguity. I’ve watched this land for clients like Frances almost physically, a kind of relief moving through her shoulders the first time I explained that the discomfort she’d been treating as a personal failing was, developmentally speaking, right on schedule.

There’s also a quieter, related finding worth naming here. Susanne Buecker and colleagues, in a large cross-temporal meta-analysis, found that loneliness has been rising among emerging adults over recent decades (Buecker et al. 2021). I bring this up not to alarm anyone, but because I regularly see this thread tangled into the childbearing question for my clients: some of what looks like ambivalence about children is actually a longing for the kind of durable, daily-life connection that used to come built into extended family and neighborhood structures, and doesn’t anymore. Not every woman who feels the pull toward motherhood is actually asking a question about parenting. Some are asking a question about belonging.

Both/And: Wanting a Child and Wanting Your Life As It Is

In the vignette about Diana, her ambivalence about having children reveals more than just indecision. What I notice with clients like Diana is that ambivalence often signals deeper values or fears in conflict. It becomes a boundary conversation, a way to explore what feels safe or risky in relationships and life choices. In my work, I help clients name these internal tensions and consider what boundaries they need to protect themselves emotionally. For Diana, addressing her ambivalence meant recognizing her need for self-determination alongside her desire for connection. This process often brings clarity and compassion, allowing clients to move forward without pressure or guilt. Ambivalence, when treated as a boundary conversation, becomes a vital tool for self-understanding and authentic choice.

This is where I ask clients to practice a kind of sentence I don’t think our culture teaches us to say out loud: I want a child, and I also love my life exactly as it is. Both parts of that sentence can be fully true at the same time. It is not a contradiction to resolve. It is not one truth wearing a disguise to trick the other. Diana, months into our work together, finally said something close to this out loud in session, and I watched her shoulders drop about two inches when she did, as though she’d been bracing against having to choose which half of herself to disown.

Before Diana tries to decide, I also ask her to notice the conditions under which each answer appears. Does wanting a child become louder after a warm afternoon with nieces, after a pregnancy announcement, or after imagining a future holiday table? Does not wanting a child become louder after a sleepless week, a conflict with a partner, or a memory of being parentified too young? Those patterns are not trivial. They are clinical data. In my work, I want clients to collect them without turning every feeling into a verdict. Over several weeks, the question often becomes less about forcing certainty and more about recognizing which longings remain present when fear, shame, and urgency have had room to settle.

One more clinical question I would ask Diana is this: who gets quieter when she imagines each path? Sometimes the answer that seems most dramatic is actually the one that pleases the family system, while the quieter answer may belong to the adult self trying to emerge. That distinction deserves time. Holding both the wanting and the not-wanting without rushing to collapse them into a single answer is, itself, the work. It is not a stalling tactic. It is the most honest posture available to a person facing an irreversible decision without a guaranteed outcome on either side.

The Systemic Lens: Whose Timeline Is This, Actually

No woman arrives at this question in a vacuum, and I think it does a disservice to pretend the ambivalence is purely internal. Diana’s baby shower was not just a social event. It was a room full of implicit messaging about whose life plan was on schedule and whose was not. Frances’s board meeting, the one she drove straight from to her first session with me, was its own kind of message: be excellent, be available, be endlessly capable, and figure out the family question on your own time, quietly, so it never interrupts the excellence.

The systemic pressure comes from several directions at once. There’s the medical system, which frames fertility almost entirely around a countdown clock, useful information delivered in a way that triggers panic rather than planning. There’s the workplace, which in most of the United States offers no structural accommodation for the realities of building a family, so the decision gets privatized into something a woman solves alone, at night, usually exhausted. And there’s the extended family, spoken and unspoken, carrying its own hopes and unresolved history about what family is supposed to look like.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think the answer is to blame the system and absolve the individual decision of any personal meaning. Both things are true. The pressure is real and it is distorting. And the desire, whichever direction it points, is also real and worth listening to on its own terms. Untangling the two is some of the most important work I do with clients on this question. It’s the difference between asking “what do I want” and accidentally answering “what would disappoint the fewest people,” which are not the same question even though they can sound identical inside a person’s own head.

There’s a related systemic thread I mentioned earlier worth returning to here. Susanne Buecker and colleagues have documented rising loneliness among emerging adults in recent decades (Buecker et al. 2021), and I see the downstream effect of that in my office regularly. Many of the women I work with grew up with more geographic mobility and fewer nearby extended family members than their mothers did, which means the informal, built-in village that used to soften the early years of parenting largely doesn’t exist for them. That absence changes the actual math of the decision. It is not irrational to ask what having a child would look like without a nearby grandmother, a sister down the street, or a neighborhood that knows your name. That is a legitimate systemic constraint, not a personal failure of planning.

For Frances, the systemic thread showed up as an assumption she hadn’t examined: that wanting a family meant she’d have to choose a lesser version of her professional life, because that was the trade her own mother had described making a generation earlier. Once she named that assumption out loud, she could test it against her actual circumstances, her actual partner, her actual industry, rather than treating it as settled fact inherited from a very different decade.

Embracing Uncertainty: The Path Toward Clarity

As I think back to Diana sitting across from me, her eyes reflecting both hope and hesitation, I am reminded that ambivalence about having children is more common than we often admit. Her story is an invitation to lean into the discomfort of uncertainty rather than rushing toward a definitive answer. In that quiet space, Diana began to explore what motherhood might mean for her identity, her relationships, and her future. It is a process that takes courage and patience.

Frances, for her part, did not leave our work with a tidy yes or no either, and I want to be honest about that rather than manufacture a clean ending. What she left with was a clearer relationship to her own ambivalence. She stopped treating it as a malfunction and started treating it as information still in the process of resolving. That shift, on its own, changed how she carried the question. It stopped running her life from the background and became something she could set down at dinner and pick back up on her own schedule, rather than something that ambushed her at random moments in the middle of a workday.

What I want you to take from both of their stories, if you’re reading this on your own version of a Saturday afternoon or a Tuesday at your desk, is that the goal was never certainty. Neither Diana nor Frances arrived at a place where the ambivalence fully disappeared, and I don’t think that’s the honest promise to make to anyone reading this. What changed was their relationship to the not-knowing. It stopped feeling like evidence that something was wrong with them and started feeling like information they could work with, slowly, on their own timeline, with people who could hold the complexity alongside them rather than rushing them toward relief.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A woman who makes peace with her ambivalence, who can say both halves of the sentence out loud without flinching, tends to make whichever decision she eventually makes with more stability than a woman who forces a premature verdict just to make the discomfort stop. The forced verdict often comes undone later, sometimes years later, when the silenced part finally gets loud enough to be heard. The slower path costs more up front and less on the back end.

If you find yourself relating to either woman’s experience, know that you are not alone. Exploring ambivalence thoughtfully can lead to greater self-awareness and a clearer sense of what feels right for you. For those moving through these complex feelings, I invite you to explore more in The Everything Years, a newsletter and course designed to support you through life’s pivotal decisions. You can also read more about this path in my blog post, Don’t Know If You Want to Have Children?, or in this companion piece on the grief and relational history underneath the choice.

If you are ready to talk through your thoughts and emotions in a safe, supportive space, I am here to help. Feel free to reach out to schedule a consultation. Together, we can make sense of your ambivalence and move toward a decision that honors your whole self.

Research & Evidence

The framework in this article is grounded in peer-reviewed research on adult development, attachment, and mental health. Selected references:

• Arnett JJ (2000). Emerging adulthood. A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. The American psychologist.
• Silvers JA, Peris TS (2023). Research Review: The neuroscience of emerging adulthood , reward, ambiguity, and social support as building blocks of mental health. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.
• Buecker S, Mund M, Chwastek S, et al. (2021). Is loneliness in emerging adults increasing over time? A preregistered cross-temporal meta-analysis and systematic review. Psychological bulletin.
• Costa PT, McCrae RR, Löckenhoff CE (2019). Personality Across the Life Span. Annual review of psychology.

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