How did we decide to have a kid?

The “why have kids at all?” question feels like the biggest. Once we had one, the decisions to have #2 and #3 were less life-changing.

How did we decide to have a child at all?

We had planned to have children since getting engaged at age 21 and 22. I had been super into the idea of parenting since my own childhood. Jeff felt less strongly about it, but was particularly close with his family and wanted to carry that forward.

Then as Jeff and I had our first real jobs and needed to make lots of spending decisions, I started to think more about the costs of raising children. At the time, my goal was to spend as little as possible and donate the rest, so any expensive project would subtract a lot from the donation budget. After thinking a lot about that (and the fact that it meant other parents would see their children die of preventable illness) I decided it wasn’t morally ok for me to have children.

But I was also really shaken by the idea of not being a parent. I felt sad about the idea of getting old and not having children or grandchildren in our life. (I now think we would have been ok and found lots of meaning in a life without children. But at the time it looked really bleak to me. I think part of it was that I also expected to live very frugally forever, and it felt like another diminishment of our life to also give up children.)

At the time, Jeff and I had separate budgets because of somewhat different proportions we wanted to donate. I was sad enough about it that Jeff sat me down and told me he was going to allocate some of his money to be used for raising a child or for some other personal purpose like vacations, but it wouldn’t be donated. At the time the estimate was something like $200,000 to raise a child to age 18, so that was what he committed to set aside. That night I wrote in my journal, “I’m looking forward to the rest of my life again.”

We had our first child when we were 28.

Factors pushing us to wait longer:

• I wanted to finish grad school first. 
• I wanted to have a job and be eligible for maternity leave (which meant being there a year by the time of the birth)

Factors pushing us to try earlier:

• We wanted more of our lives to overlap with our children’s lives
• We wanted to be younger and more energetic while parenting
• We didn’t know anything about our fertility, and wanted to have time to try various options if needed
• Jeff’s mother was diagnosed with serious cancer around the time we planned to try for a baby, and we wanted her to overlap with her first grandchild. They did have 9 months together. And generally we wanted our parents to have more time as grandparents.

Thing that didn’t affect timing: 

• We were trying to buy a house, but weren’t sure how long it would take so didn’t wait for that. We were renting a bedroom in Jeff’s parents’ house, we moved when the baby was about a year old, and the baby shared a room with us until she was nearly 2. I’m glad we went ahead with non-ideal living circumstances rather than waiting two years.

…….

Deciding to have #2

By this time we had a pretty established pattern of donating 50% of our income (rather than giving away everything above basic expenses, as was my initial plan). Jeff had been working in tech and was paid a lot better than we expected in the early days. Even after donating half, we were still keeping more than the typical American household. Since we thought of the financial cost as the main ethical question in having children, this decision felt fairly easy. We could have a second child without affecting the 50% plan.

And we wanted another.  Our second child was born 23 months after her sister.

Factors pushing for closer spacing: 

• Same factors as above
• Lower cost of childcare, because we could hire one person to watch them both at once for more years
• Possibly more financial aid for college if both of them are in college at the same time

Factors pushing for farther spacing:

• More intense period of parenting two young children.
• Some evidence that it’s healthier for mother and baby if there’s more space between pregnancies (even accounting for slightly older parents) — probably because it takes time to build back nutritional deficiencies caused by the previous pregnancy?

Things that didn’t affect spacing: 

• Sibling relationship — we heard all kinds of anecdotes about what age gap made for the best relationship, and couldn’t find any research.

Two under 2

I got the positive pregnancy test 30 minutes before the call where I accepted a job at CEA. I cared a lot about how much I was able to accomplish at work, and time rather than money became the real crunch. 

I took 8 weeks of parental leave, and then I went back to work and Jeff took 10 weeks of leave (having already taken 2 weeks at the same time as me). 8 weeks actually felt like plenty given that I worked from home and had first Jeff and then an au pair watching the kids elsewhere in the house. It would have been much harder to drop the baby off at daycare / nursery and not see her all day. But as it was, I was glad to be able to put on clean clothes, shut the bedroom door, and not be responsible for any children for a few hours at a time. 

I worked about 30 hours a week for the first year after our second child was born. We had childcare for 40 hours, but the rest of the time I spent on nursing the baby, housework, personal projects, and catching up on sleep.

When I traveled for work, I brought the baby with me. She went to team retreats and conferences. I was glad I had both a baby and a job I cared a lot about, but it was hard. I was exhausted. I was frustrated that I couldn’t be better at my job, but I hadn’t gotten a proper night’s sleep in a year. The first time I slept through the night after A was born was when she was almost a year old — I travelled out of town for a work meeting and got a glorious 9 hours.

This was the toughest time in terms of our kids’ needs. There was not much down time for us. I’d look at our housemate lying on the couch reading on weekends, and I’d feel envious of having the kind of weekend where you can just do whatever you feel like. I’d look at other parents at the playground and think “They look like they’re having an easier time than me,” and then remember “Oh right, they don’t have two kids under 3.”

It was also an ongoing physical drain on me. For five and half years solid, I was either pregnant or breastfeeding or both. That was a long time to wonder how the food I ate and medication I took affected someone else’s health.

At the time, a friend in EA was trying to get pregnant. I was tempted to tell her, “Don’t do it. You’ll regret the hit to your work.”

……

But at the same time, I also seriously considered having a third closely-spaced child. 

I felt pretty good at parenting. I had learned so much, and I kind of wanted to keep applying it. And I liked the idea of having more children and eventually grandchildren. (a la Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.)

But I didn’t feel good about the effect on my work, or about extending the most intensive years of parenting. Eventually Jeff and I decided we probably wouldn’t have a third child. I gave most of the baby clothes away.

Deciding to have #3

Periodically I would have a dream that I was pregnant or had a third child, and in the dream or when I woke up I’d think, “Wait, that’s not right. We weren’t going to have another one.” And I’d wake up relieved to find it wasn’t real.

But after a few more years, I had a dream that I had another baby. And this time I woke up and thought, “Yes, that’s right. That’s what I want.”

Throughout that day I thought, “Really? Is that what I want?” When I got home I told Jeff about it, and we spent the next four months thinking and talking about “Really? Is that what we want?”

After four months, we decided we did want it. Our third child was born when the other two were seven and five.

…..

In our case, the third time around was actually the easiest. (Which is not to say easy!) 

Unlike with the first baby, we knew what we were doing. Unlike with the second baby, the older kids were big enough to not need constant supervision from us. Some of this was luck that none of them had particular medical needs, and the third baby had an easy-going personality. (It’s not always like this — I know another family with three kids whose children’s temperaments got more difficult each time.)

…..

The third baby was a hit on my work time, but not as bad as the first two. Part of it was that we used a Snoo and got better sleep than before. We paid for 40 hours of childcare a week, but I used it better and got more work done during that time than I had the last time.

Factors in being willing to have more

Pregnancy and birth were not particularly bad for me. I’d heard some people took years to be willing to give birth again, but about ten minutes after L was born I thought “Would I go through that again?” and answered myself “Yes.” (Although by the third time I was distinctly glad I never planned to do it again.)

Our older kids were healthy, and they had been no more than moderately difficult in terms of temperament. They were also good friends for the first five years or so, and we liked the idea of them having another sibling to have that relationship with.

They also seemed to be having a pretty good life (though one has a more anxious temperament than the other) and we liked the idea of another person getting to have that kind of life.

A lot of the work I put in with the first two was related to breastfeeding, and I was more willing to formula-feed if needed the third time. Our income had continued to grow, and I was more willing to spend money on things like childcare.

Rolling the dice

Before we had kids, Jeff and I tried to guess at the risk of our kids having serious physical or mental health problems. Obviously you can never know for sure, but we looked at ourselves, our first-degree relatives (parents, siblings) and second-degree relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins). Out of these ~40 genetic relatives, one had severe lifelong mental health struggles, one died by suicide, and two had serious medical problems even as young adults. 

I think this is a decent method to estimate the range of outcomes you’re probably looking at, especially if you have a lot of genetic relatives. Of course the closest genetic relatives (the parents) are more predictive than less close relatives.

My expectations were also shaped by living with a host father in Denmark who had an adult son with severe autism. He could communicate a few words, but couldn’t do basic things like use the bathroom or heat up food without help. He lived in an institution but came over for occasional visits. One night he smashed a glass table as we sat watching television, but he couldn’t communicate why. During his childhood, caring for him had been a big job, and it had been difficult for the family to go anywhere with him. His father clearly loved him and valued being in touch, but it also seemed really difficult for everyone involved. 

So with each child, we thought hard about the chance that our child could have serious needs that would take a lot more time and effort from us. For Jeff, this is the thing tipping the balance toward not having more than three. For me, it’s more about the time cost.

Things other people said that influenced me

One was from a mother of two who craved another baby. But she said she realized she would always crave another baby no matter how many she had, so she had to use some other method to decide the right number of children for her family.

Another was from a mother of three grown children. She said she and her husband felt raising children was the most important and meaningful thing they were doing in life, so they decided to do more of it. (Also from her: “People will tell you that three children isn’t really harder than two. …And those people are lying!”)