The Case for Having Children Sooner

A “I’ll do it next year” kid-procrastinator makes his pitch

This is the second in my Kids and Impact series. You can find the first post here.

In this post I’ll talk about when to have kids and argue that you should probably have them earlier than you think, at least if you are like me – I started having kids in my late 30s.

Let me tell you why. When I was in my 20s, I was very sure I wanted to have kids, but not NOW. I kicked the can down the road and into my 30s using the same logic every year (not NOW! and always questioning “how will having kids affect my impact?”). I had a quarter-to-midlife crisis when I was 30 (we will save that for another post…) that culminated in me moving to Europe and for a while everything was new and shiny. So I thought for the first time that maybe I didn’t want kids - maybe they’d get in the way of my grand lifestyle? But a few years later, I was pretty sure I wanted them again.

All of this back and forth and delaying and not to mention having different partners I wasn’t sure I’d want to pull the trigger with sucked up my 20s and a lot of my 30s until a couple of things happened that changed my life and how I thought about kids in a big way: both of my parents passed away relatively near each other in 2016 and 2017. It was horrible, each one uniquely horrible in the way it is to say goodbye to an individual person you’d have a special and one-of-a-kind relationship to.

But it was also horrible in a way I didn’t expect: saying goodbye to my second parent left me with a deep feeling of emptiness and aloneness in the universe. This was surprising, because I hadn’t lived with my parents or depended on them for anything for the past two decades or so and although we had a good relationship, I had no clue that I actually did depend on them for some sort of…psychological safety? Or in some abstract way did things so that they would be proud, even though they, in their later years, never really grappled with the things I actually did that they could be proud of? I am not exactly sure what the mechanism here is, but I can tell you there were three holes in my heart: one for each parent and a third I hadn’t expected.

I was leaning pro-kid at this time but was generally uncertain about what I considered and still consider the biggest decision of my life, but the death of my parents prompted a turbo-charged urge to create a family of my own and get back to a structure that I didn’t know I wanted or needed.

I talked with my partner; we decided to go for it and when I was 39 I had my first child, a beautiful little girl.

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One painfully obvious thing to me about having kids so late is that you and your kids get less time with older generations in your family, meaning your parents, your grandparents, great-grandparents should you be so lucky to have them, aunts and uncles, etc. Simple, I know, but I never really considered it before having kids and I definitely would have adjusted earlier had I thought about it. When my children spend time with my partner’s parents, not only do the kids and grandparents get a lot of happiness hanging out with each other, but I get a deep feeling of satisfaction watching them interact and getting the warm fuzzies thinking about different generations of family coming together and loving each other.

Similarly, and even worse: every year you wait to have kids is one year fewer you will get to spend time with them. Every year that passes you miss out on experiencing their oldest year to date and they miss out on being with you in your oldest year. It is a year longer that they will mourn you.

The older you get, for both men and women, the less successful and riskier childbearing becomes. When we had our son, my partner was 43 and the chance of a successful IVF round was extremely low. And against all odds it happened! I don’t use the word lightly, or really ever outside of this context, but I feel blessed to have both of my children.

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Having kids earlier also means you are likely to have more energy to do all the stuff you have to do to balance work, children, and everything else that life throws at you. Most people hit peak energy in their 20s and then it slowly declines. You can stave this off with exercise by e.g. raising your VO2max, but there is only so much you can do to fight the clock. And in my lived experience, I can feel that I have less energy than I did in my 20s. When I had my daughter, I was co-founding High Impact Professionals while trying to raise her as well as possible, in addition to all the other life admin that comes up – all on very little sleep. So, having kids later means you have less energy to give to all that you care about, and even though you might get an unexpected boost of energy after having kids, the older you have them, the lower your likely overall energy level.

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I would definitely advocate that you have some explore and be-free time before you have kids. There is a lot to experience in the world and kids do constrain your life in ways you’d expect. But this is not to say you can’t have adventures with them – my kids have already been on more airplanes and to more countries than my parents had in their whole lives – but it won’t come as a surprise to you that life with kids isn’t as free and easy as it once was.

Interestingly, having kids is its own kind of crazy adventure that I underappreciated before having them. From the outside, I thought people who had kids were a bit boring and that having them entailed many mundane tasks like feeding and changing diapers, and it does! But having kids is also like scaling an amazing mountain with variable trailheads. You learn and experience so much, you see the most beautiful things you have ever seen, you make decisions to go one way and you can’t go back. As I age, the “let’s check out that new restaurant” part of me is getting bored and the “let me do normal stuff with my kids” part is more exciting and restores a playfulness in me that had long been withering.

I don’t know where the line is and your mileage will surely vary, but I’d definitely trade in five or more pre-kid years for years with them because they are just so awesome and the years with them are full of more meaning and love than I previously thought possible.

Ultimately, if you tend to kick the can down the road and have some vague plan on having kids later but the time never feels right, I think you should consider having them earlier than you planned on. You are likely overestimating how bad it is to have them right now and underestimating how good you will feel having them over the years you’d otherwise be missing out on. It is hard to take into account the lack-of-a-thing, but hopefully this post has helped.

In the next post, I’ll argue that having kids is good. Good for the kid, good for the world, and good for you. As always, curious for your feedback and experiences as well. And please pose any questions you have about having kids and I’ll consider posting about it. I want my posts to be decision-relevant to readers!