Non-Parents Think Having Kids Is Harder Than It Is

There's no such thing as being "ready" to have kids

I’m really backing myself into a corner here because I’ll now have to write a piece on how hard parenting is, but I insist that I’m right and I won’t qualify any of what I’m about to say by writing a caveat-filled three paragraph preamble.

What people mean when they say they’re not “ready”

About a year before my wife and I started trying to conceive, I had a conversation with my mom in which she, in typical mom fashion, asked me when we were planning on having kids. I told her I’m not sure I’m “ready” to have kids and she was both shocked and amused. Looking back at that moment, I totally understand her reaction. My wife and I were two college-educated employed married people with a house in the suburbs. We weren’t drug addicts, we weren’t losers, we had housing and stable incomes, and lived very normal middle class lives. If anyone was “ready” to have kids, it was us.

What I meant when I said that I wasn’t ready was that I existed in a day-to-day paradigm that I had a hard time imagining radically changing. I was comfortable with my life, I had all of my needs taken care of, and making a major decision to upend that existence scared me. That fear put me in a position of indecisiveness, which I verbalized as not being “ready” for kids. My material conditions and personal maturity were well beyond the threshold that needs to be crossed before choosing to have kids.

Lots of people say they’re not ready to become parents, and while I’m sure they would all give slightly different answers on the specifics of why that was if they were asked (e.g. I don’t make enough money, I live in a place that’s not suitable for kids, my career is in a place that cannot be interrupted by pregnancy, my emotional and psychological wellbeing are in a bad place), the fact is that many — perhaps most of them — are in fact ready by any reasonable definition that actually matters to having kids. Some of those excuses are fake; they are superficial answers that are hiding the true reason underneath. Some of those excuses are more legitimate, but they run into the big problem that separates the parents from the non-parents.

Non-parents think raising kids is harder than it is. You simply don’t need much to be a good parent, and you can make parenting work for you and your kids with a lot less than you think. Parenting standards have become too inflated, the expectations are too high, and it creates an illusion of an unattainable goal — a highly-set threshold — that non-parents believe they need to achieve before they are finally ready to have kids. Parents have already had that illusion shattered and understand that you can be a good parent and raise good kids without being a superman or superwoman.

The standards are too high

I have forgotten where I heard this, but someone once said that, in the past, marriage and kids were the cornerstone of a good life. They were the things you did before you set up other aspects of your life like your career. Now marriage and kids are the capstone in life; the things you do after you set the rest of your life — like career and house — before you have kids. This distinction explains a lot of the massive cultural shift from decades ago to now.

Either because the standard shifted to kids being the capstone or because the standards shifted first, resulting in kids being moved to capstone status, the expectation from young adults now is that everything has to be perfect before you can even consider having kids. You’re almost a bad person if you try to have kids before you have every little aspect of your life solved. The job has to not exist, it has to be good and high-paying and you should’ve already moved up the chain a bit with wiggle room to develop further. Your house cannot be an apartment, that’s unacceptable, it has to be a house, and not a crappy starter home, but a big home with a bedroom that can become the nursery and another one that can be the office and maybe another one for a potential second child. That’s not even getting into how big the bathroom must be and how much storage you need and a two car garage for the van you should also have before you get pregnant.

Most insidious are the high standards for mental health. It’s not just that you’re expected to be non-psychotic, you’re expected to be perfect. Most of the people who say they’re not ready are not bipolar or schizophrenic, they don’t suffer from medically diagnosed depression that requires medication, they have never been admitted to a mental health institution. At worst, they have a therapist, possibly one who affirms their neuroses about being psychologically unwell, and sometimes feel sad, maybe get seasonal depression. In other words, they are totally normal people who face the same mental health obstacles we all suffer from.

All of these standards are way too high. These are not the bare minimum prerequisites that must be met before you have kids. These are ideal states that people hope, but may never actually achieve. If you set your bar for when you’re ready to have kids at an impossible level, you will never have kids.

Being a good parent is just not that hard

You need a full time job, yes. You need some reasonable income. But you do not need to have climbed halfway to the top of the corporate ladder to afford kids. I assure you that, while childrearing may be more expensive than it should be (insert your complaint about US healthcare or daycare costs), it doesn’t cost that much. There are millions of people who have kids right now who earn less than you and are doing just fine. Yes, there are also garbage people who have kids they shouldn’t, but there are also millions of totally normal Americans living totally normal lives, working totally normal jobs, shopping at totally normal stores, buying totally normal products, living in totally normal houses, who happen to earn a lot less than you. And they make it work! Their kids get fed and clothed, they go to school, they play games, they get presents, they learn lessons, they grow up normal.

You do not need a huge house. Look at the existing housing stock in the US and realize which of these homes were around during the Baby Boom. These houses are small. They are not the McMansion you think you need. They have 2 - 3 bedrooms max and their bathroom is tiny. There are no walk-in closets and no pantry. The garage does not fit two cars. And people raised 5 kids in these types of homes! My family lives in a house just like this. It was built in the ‘50s and the bathroom sink is so small it looks like a toy sink, but we make it work, and so can you. Kids don’t have to have individual bedrooms, bunk beds are normal.

For thousands of years after the agricultural revolution and right up until the end of the industrial revolution, people lived with huge families in tiny abodes. They often shared a single room, sometimes with farm animals. The parents had sex right next to their existing 6 kids while making a 7th. The floors were covered in straw. Their “beds” were wooden benches or the floor itself. We live in wildly better conditions than our ancestors, yet you’re complaining that the closet space isn’t big enough?!

I’ll let you in on a little secret; you fill the space you have. Whatever storage space you have — that’s the storage space you’ll fill. There will never be a moment when you have spare room outside of a brief second right after you move in. You will avoid making hard decisions like what to throw away and what to not buy and what gift to turn down because you know you can fit all these things. Right up until you can’t. And then you’ll start making tradeoff decisions. If you had less space, the only thing that would happen is that you would accumulate less crap to fill it before the space is full. When it comes to housing and families, you will absolutely accumulate a massive amount of crap. There will be a moment when you have to tell grandparents that they are not allowed to buy anything large. You will have to tell your mother-in-law that it’s not a good idea for her to bring yet another cheap toy from the dollar store every time she visits. That’s garbage you will have to throw away the moment the kid isn’t looking because your space is limited and you have to make a call on what to keep. There is no such thing as a house that is big enough to avoid this issue.

Even apartments are a totally acceptable place to raise a family. There are families in New York city, Moscow, and Beijing. I am originally from Moscow. Most people there live in a Soviet-era apartment that has one bedroom. My parents slept in the living room and my brother and I shared a bunk bed in the bedroom. We made it work! Just like everyone else raising kids in big cities, we made trade off decisions that in no way lowered the quality of life for the kids or harmed them. Just like our grandparents and great-grandparents made it work with 8 kids in a two bedroom house with one bathroom. All these kids already turned out fine or will turn out fine. My point here is that you don’t need these conveniences. They are nice-to-haves that should be treated as optional or aspirational. They are the thing you can work towards by progressing in your career and earning more money and affording better housing, but they are not the bare minimum that you need to start with.

You will not mess up your kids

I would like to address the mental health elephant in the room. You will be a fine parent. Unless you have a substance addiction or a legitimate diagnosable disease that needs serious medical treatment, you will be a good parent. You will not mess up your kids with your neuroses. You will not pass down “generational trauma” or whatever. You will get angry with them and yell at them just like everyone does and they will be fine. You will be too tired to cook and order pizza and they will still grow up healthy. You will not know what you’re doing, and that’s scary, I’ll grant you that. Allow me to let you in on another secret; no one knows what they’re doing. No one knows how to parent. Your parents did not know what they were doing. We’re all winging this thing. There is no instruction manual. Some things are preprogrammed by evolution, but the rest is figured out along the way.

What’s most difficult to impress upon non-parents is that you control very little of your kids’ growth and development. This is something parents themselves have a hard time realizing as well, and it often takes a second or third kid to make them come to this realization, or they may never realize it at all. The fact of the matter is that a lot of this is preprogrammed. They just kind of grow on their own. It’s coded into their biology. They come out small and start growing. You do very little to facilitate that beyond the bare minimum of feeding them. Developmental milestones get hit on their own, you don’t have to teach the kid to do it.

Are you expected to do tummy time and help them learn how to walk and talk? Of course! You can facilitate their development, but I assure you that unless there is a medical issue preventing your kid from walking, they will walk one day. There is no such thing as a child that has zero physical issues that does not eventually start walking. Same for talking. Some start early, some start late, but unless they’ve got an issue a doctor has to be involved for, they will talk. If not for you, then to play with their peers. This continues beyond early childhood as well. Their brain will develop on its own and all you do is support their natural development.

A lot of people are obsessed with intelligence and education. They think that the things they do with/for their kids — breastfeeding instead of formula, Montessori toys, private school, tutors, extracurricular activities — is what makes their kid as smart and as successful as they end up. One more secret; most of this is genetics and randomness. Two parents with three kids can have all three kids turn out about the same, even if they did wildly different things with all three kids. Two parents with three kids can have the first be a personable, outgoing, charismatic charmer, the second a shy, quiet, bookish nerd, and the third a total loser burnout that dies from a heroin overdose at 22 despite raising all three under identical conditions. You kids are highly likely to turn out very similar to you, meaning that if you live a middle class lifestyle, they are likely to live a middle class lifestyle. So if you’re not a loser burnout yourself, your kids will be okay. I highly recommend everyone read Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption. This book changed the way I understand why kids turn out the way they do and helped alleviate a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself.

It’s important to remember that kids are resilient. There are adults walking around today that lived through all sorts of things — moving countries, living through car accidents, being bullied, failing school — and they grew up to be alright. They wake up in the morning and go to work and pay their bills. Their parents tried their best, and a lot of what those kids went through was out of their parents’ control. And if you think that you are one of those kids and you are now too broken to have kids of your own because of the trauma you lived through, consider the fact that there are other people who also went through similar experiences and are now parents. Good parents, fine parents, parents that try just as hard as all other parents. As a matter of fact, your own parents may have been such people, and you may not have even known. Just because you may have gone through something does not mean that your kids will. They will go through their own experiences instead, often ones you cannot control.

What makes a good parent boils down to being present and loving your kids. That’s about it. You can’t really do much beyond that. You can feed them all organic foods and they will turn out about the same as if you were to feed them a bunch of junk food. No one accidentally abuses their kids. If you love them, they will do great. You will do great. You will try to impart wisdom and they won’t internalize it and have to learn their own lessons, just like you did. You will make them dinner and they will refuse to eat it. You will encourage them to get good grades and they will come home with a bad grade. You will move them to a good neighborhood, but you won’t be able to choose their friends for them. A lot of this is out of anyone’s control, so stop using things that you cannot control as a grading rubric.

There’s nothing left for you to do and time is ticking

When I finally crossed the mental threshold to wanting kids, it wasn’t any kind of epiphany or singular episode. It was more like a slow, gradual realization that I don’t have anything else to do. My life was pretty well set up. I worked and earned money. I worked out and walked my dog. I played video games and binged TV shows with my wife. We went on vacations a couple times a year and splurged on a big purchase once in a while. What else was there to do? Was this what I was going to be doing until I die?

It’s not like I’m likely to become some super accomplished famous author or anything. It’s not like I was spending my days bettering myself or perfecting a craft. I wasn’t trying to become CEO or the number one pickleball player in America. I was just kind of existing, the same way most people do. And I hate to be crude about it, but that’s where you’re at too. You’re not going to go down in history, buddy. What’s going to be left behind after you die is a Minecraft world on a server that gets shut down after a missed payment and a Sims family you’ve been genetically modifying for generations that will never be played with again. What else are you going to do with yourself?

To some this may seem like an awful argument. I’m supposed to have kids ‘cause I’m bored?

Kids are a wonderful, magical miracle. In many ways, the entire reason any of us are alive is to procreate, that is what we have been programmed by evolution to do. The sense of fulfillment and joy that you get from having kids is indescribable. There is a good reason that parents would never go back to being childless if they had the choice. They couldn’t imagine life without their babies because children give your life meaning and purpose.

I think that once young people establish themselves to a certain degree, they sort of lose drive and direction. There’s nothing else to accomplish. Sure, you can expand your Lego collection or become a VP with a corner office, but then what? You go to work to buy Legos, you relax at home to go to work. How many concerts can you attend? How many countries to visit is enough?

Children are the ultimate project. They are a multi-year investment with a massive upside payoff. There is no piece of furniture that you can build that will be as hard to make and as satisfying to finish as your kids. There is no job title and responsibilities you can obtain that compares to the title of parent and all its associated responsibilities.

There are no parents who are suffering from existential dread. No sleep-deprived dad is experiencing ennui. There is no question about who you are or what your purpose is. All those reflective questions and their associated anxieties melt away the moment your day gets filled with back-to-back laundry/dishes/naps/diaper changes/daycare/school/soccer/gymnastics/what’s for dinner. The reason having kids is supposed to be the thing you do now is because there’s nothing else to do. The alternative is endless introspecting, staring in the mirror or up at the sky and wondering what your reason for getting up in the morning is. For a parent, that question is always answered.

Lastly, I would like to remind you that time is ticking. You’re not getting any younger. Getting pregnant is hard, much harder than you have learned through absorbing modern media, which focuses way too much on accidental pregnancies and doesn’t do a good enough job explaining the statistics behind conception. If you are on the fence or if you are in a relationship and you both think “maybe just one, maybe one day” — that day is now. Do not put it off. Later is not a better time to do it. Best case scenario: you look back your past self and think of them as silly. What were they waiting for? What were they afraid of? Worst case scenario: you regret not trying to have kids sooner. It turns out you can’t have any, or you have one and can’t have any more no matter how badly you want them. There is no third option where you have a kid and regret it.

Having kids isn’t that hard

Once you become a parent, you realize that it’s just not a big deal. I mean, it’s a huge deal, it totally altered your entire life trajectory, but you still get up in the morning in the same bed and make the same coffee. Once you have kids, your all the expectations you put on yourself get lifted. I would never show my kids TV quickly becomes OK, just one more episode of Bluey. The fears of doing the wrong thing disappear and you’re left just worrying about how to entertain a toddler for the next three hours while it’s too cold to go outside. The concerns that you’re not “ready” end up seeming so silly in retrospect. Not ready for what? Loving my own children?

After you have kids, it turns out that you didn’t really need all that much. There wasn’t a lot to get ready for. They have a roof over their heads and their bellies are full and they have a place to sleep. They have a present, loving parent who is trying their best, and that’s about it. Not much more to it, I’m afraid. The rest is minutia, details that get worked out over time. Specifics to discuss with other parents, problems to complain about. But that’s once you become a parent. Before you’re a parent, this seems like a whole other world. A totally alien existence that’s scary and confusing. It all seems like so much, so much that you’re not ready for. And then you get there and the illusion is shattered. There’s not much here. Just a diaper pail that needs to be emptied and a permission split that needs to be signed. Very little to get “ready” for.