Books about whether to have a baby

September 17, 2018 6:34 PM

I'm contemplating whether I want to have a baby in the next three to five years. Obviously, it's a lot of work. It also seems interesting. How do I decide if it's worth it? Looking for books relevant to thinking this through.

I have little experience with kids, especially young ones. I'm trying to figure out how to get that experience, to see if I even like kids, but setting that aside, I'm not sure how to weigh the huge responsibility and workload of raising a kid against the freedom of... not doing that

I currently have essentially zero responsibilities (no pets, etc), and I don't know how I'd deal with having a kid to take care of. [I don't want a pet. I'm not that into animals. I might want a kid.] I have a partner; we're talking about the idea of having a kid together, but I need to know if I, personally, even want a kid. (He's "probably not", but willing to talk about it.)

I've read "Expecting Better", and loved that it cited research. I'd like to find a book about deciding whether to have children that brought in research as much as is relevant and in general thinks clearly and carefully about the decision.

posted by triscuit to Human Relations (14 answers total)

Best answer: Maybe Baby was good for me (reluctant partner). Variety of essays from across the spectrum of decision making.

Once I had come to “yes”, The Danish Way of Parenting was good for me, since a lot of my intrinsic motivation is coming from “doing parenting” in a more optimal way than I see other people doing it.

This is all pretty speculative, though; we’re still six months out from it being an outside-baby.
posted by supercres at 6:38 PM on September 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If I were looking for books to help me decide, I might try (1) memoirs about raising kids, to better understand the joys and the meaning other people have found there, and (2) parenting books about specific problems, to get a feel for what the conflicts are like.

I am not sure that interacting with other people’s babies is good for forecasting whether you will like interacting with your own. I say this because as a person of fairly repressed/awkward physicality, I never knew what to do with other people’s babies, but lost that inhibition pretty quickly with my own. (It came back when my kid got older, sadly, and I am once again bad at baby.)

However - what might give you some idea of how tolerable you will find infancy is to take a babysitting gig for a friend’s kid. Bonus for an overnight gig. The loss of sleep can really be killer for some people. I had a mostly good sleeper and it still made me a real harpy.

Even if you hate it, though, infancy isn’t that long in the grand scheme, so if you are still inclined it’s not unreasonable to try anyway. The later stuff that winds up being hard... beyond the barest family history risks, you really have no way of forecasting any of that, at all.
posted by eirias at 7:23 PM on September 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

My understanding is that the psychology of happiness research comes down pretty clearly on the side of not having children. Here's an abstract on that, in case you can't access academic papers.

I personally think it's a bad idea to have children unless you can't envision being happy without them.
posted by metasarah at 7:44 PM on September 17, 2018 [12 favorites]

"It seems interesting" doesn't strike me as sufficient reason to have a child. It *is* interesting but it's also extremely mundane and the first couple years are not only super hard, they can be super boring.

Although no child is like your own child, I would also think that you need to spend more time around children. It is also quite expensive so factor that in.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 8:00 PM on September 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

Sheila Heti's Motherhood is a novel, but it's entirely the narrator thinking about whether she wants to have a baby in her late thirties, when her boyfriend's not that psyched about it and she's profoundly undecided, and she's not sure how she even wants to make the decision. I'm probably making that sound dreadful, and it's not research-based in any way, but I'm thinking this through myself (though as a single person) and it hit on some things that I'd never been able to articulate before that I've been finding helpful.
posted by jameaterblues at 8:02 PM on September 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Best answer: What really helped me was actually a handful of old metafilter questions along the lines of "what's great/terrible about having a kid" and "what did your parents do that made them awesome". The great sounded pretty great, the bad sounded manageable, and the things good parents did were things I could do.. I'm sure they are in my favourites - if you want links mail me and I'll find them when I'm not on my phone. That and a lot of self awareness.

The other thing that really helped was reading up on only children. Many myths are out there and have been debunked and siblings don't guaranteed a BFF or anything. Ours is an only for many reasons, but part of it is that we wanted the experience of a child without it totally running our lives for a significant period of time. It's really working well for us and I think it's an option that's really overlooked. Feel free to me mail me if you want some of the things we considered about onlies.
posted by jrobin276 at 10:53 PM on September 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Regretting Motherhood - A Study by Israeli sociologist Orna Donath is a fascinating read, extensively researched. It focuses on a group of 23 Israeli women from different social backgrounds, who volunteered to discuss their experience.

The most interesting section for me was an in-depth review of the reasons that the subjects had given for having children, and the ways in which some of the assumptions they’d started with had panned out very differently.

The book is based on her 2015 paper, Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. Full text is available here.
posted by freya_lamb at 12:47 AM on September 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

Here’s a research paper on new mothers in support groups.
posted by CMcG at 1:16 AM on September 18, 2018

All Joy and No Fun might be the kind of thing you're looking for -- I haven't read it personally, but I saw it featured somewhere (npr or the blue, maybe?). Not so much about the decision to have kids as looking at the effect of parenting on parents.
posted by geegollygosh at 4:17 AM on September 18, 2018

Best answer: I am currently in a similar position and have been looking around for related books/materials. I listened to a couple of episodes of the Is Childfree For Me? podcast, which were interesting, and they really rate the book The Baby Decision by Merle Bombardieri. I have downloaded it and plan to work through it with my partner over the next year. I also saw in this article (which contains some other interesting links as well) that the author has started running workshops on the same subject, although currently only in the Boston area.
posted by amerrydance at 6:18 AM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I don’t think the research is one-sided at all, and I think it’s wrong to say that researchers generally agree that parents are less happy.

And happiness is not the only metric. A recent scholarly analysis I read reported that parents tend to be less ‘happy’ in the first few years compared to non-parents, but that parents had higher values for ‘satisfaction’ and other nebulous concepts that psychologists attempt to quantify. This article gives a more nuanced approach, and links to several peer-reviewed studies.

I do agree with the sentiment that this should be a “fuck yes” type of decision, as discussed previously on the blue. As in, don’t try to conceive unless both of you answer the question ‘do you want a child?’ wih an enthusiastic ‘fuck YES!’.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:02 AM on September 18, 2018

Every child should be born because its parents couldn't live without it. Kids aren't an experiment or project, they're people.
posted by masquesoporfavor at 7:20 AM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I hate to be the person that says this kind of thing, because it's not exactly helpful, but I don't think anyone can know what it really feels like to be a parent until they become one (especially if you end up having a kid with special needs, which is always a possibility). And parents have all sorts of different experiences, of course. Maybe your baby will be more easygoing; maybe she will have colic that keeps her screaming for hours. Maybe when she's a teenager, she will get straight As and follow all the rules; maybe she will skip school and, say, steal your prescription drugs. Maybe you'll have a really close relationship with her as she gets older and becomes an adult; maybe you won't. (How much of that is nature and how much is nurture, I don't know.)

Then there are the variables that are more on your side of the equation -- how much support you have from your employer, how close your relationship is to your own parents and how geographically close they are to you, what your own personality traits/faults are and how those change or don't change when you become a parent, how present and how helpful/not helpful your partner turns out to be, and so on...

So don't put too much pressure on yourself to only be able to make the perfect decision if you do the perfect research and expose yourself to the perfect combination of opinions and experiences. (One issue I actually would read up on, though, because it's something I never thought about before I became a mom and now it is my life: the default parent. There's a lot of writing out there about it.)

I never wanted kids, and then around age 30 I suddenly did -- it was so sudden that I feel like it was a hormonal thing, like my body was deciding for me. I mean, that sounds silly, but I had never, ever wanted kids and then suddenly it was "I WANT TO HAVE A BABY!" (And then soon we did.) Not that you always have to listen to your body -- I mean, I love babies now and feel strong twinges of baby fever now and then, but I am 100% sure in my mind that I don't want another kid, so I just ignore them.
posted by trillian at 9:07 AM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Many years ago Salon Magazine ran an in-depth series on having kids: who had them, who'd wanted them, who would do it again, who regretted it, how people felt about pregnancy. It was extremely nuanced and took no sides, which was perhaps the most remarkable thing about it. I remember one woman talking about how disgustingly carnal she thought childbirth way. Another dove right in, and crossed her fingers and her experience with parenting turned out well. Still another, for various convincing reasons, regretted it. Anyway, if you can find that series — after a long look, I couldn't — I heartily recommend it. It remains the most honest series of assessments of choosing/or not to have children that I have ever read, and the overall effect was like having a really good conversation with a reflective friend.

Around the same time Salon ran that series a pair of books came out talking about marriage and family that were part of a brief wave during that time of people suddenly talking more honestly about these issues. I haven't read either, but they might be worth a look. The first was from the woman's point of view, and is called "The Bitch in the House." The second, a rejoinder, is called "Bastard on the Couch."
posted by Violet Blue at 6:51 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]