9 Reasons You Should Have A Baby This Year If You’re Young And Married By Joy Pullmann for The Federalist
Growing a family may be the number one contribution you can make to a happy life for yourself. And you only have about a quarter of your adult life to make it happen.
Considering how many children I would like to have when I am 50 has brought me to the conclusion that I want as many as my husband and I can responsibly care for. So far we have five. When I was a teen and in my early 20s, nobody told me how fulfilling and meaningful I would find having children. So I suspect nobody has told most other young people either.
Easy confirmation of this can be had in the latest fertility data, at a record low during an economic boom, shocking demographers who have speculated money is a key reason people don’t have kids. So I don’t think refusing kids is about money for many people, especially for college-eduated, well-off women like me, who are having fewer children than poor women are despite our better resources. According to Lyman Stone’s analysis, about half of currently married, childbearing-age American women will not have as many kids as they want. I think this “accidental” infertility is more deeply about choices and narratives than money.
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he truth is, children are a reliably excellent investment in your long-term personal development and happiness. And you only have about a quarter of your adult life to make that investment. That, in a nutshell, is why, if you are young and married, you should consider having a baby this year. Here are nine reasons why that’s true.
1. Your Future Self Is Begging You To
Strangers frequently make kind and even wistful supportive comments about the size of my family. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a Boomer say “I wish I had more” while looking at my squirming shopping cart.
It’s not just the grandparent types. A childless mid-40s professional acquaintance told me privately that she wishes she could trade her career for some kids, and that her dogs can’t fill that hole. It’s physically too late for her now, and that loss gives her constant pain.
She’s a lot more in touch with reality than today’s advice columnists, who regularly receive messages expressing such anguish from women in their late 30s and 40s who see that their chances of building a family slipping away. Rather than validating their loss, typically the columnists brush it off. These women deserve better. Their pain is real, and it’s real to an increasing number of people. If you can choose now to not face this regret later in life, it’s a wise choice.
A handyman my husband follows on YouTube put this up as his 2019 Christmas message, which sums this all up better than I can. Trust him, and trust me: Your future self will thank you a million times for having children now. So do it.
2. It Will Loneliness-Proof Your Life
“Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions,” found a 2017 study. In a 2019 article, Kay Hymowitz gave other extensive examples of the loneliness epidemic across the industrialized world.
