Don’t wait to have kids

“Don’t wait to start having kids” was the best advice I ever received as a newlywed. While conventional wisdom says to put off parenthood for a couple years to focus on your marriage or your household finances, the truth is that you will never be fully ready and there are serious costs to waiting.

First, and most practically, you never know if you will even be able to have kids. One in six couples struggle with infertility, a risk that only increases with age. According to the National Institutes of Health, women in their 30s are about half as fertile as they were in their early 20s, suffering an even steeper decline after they turn 35. If you waited and weren’t able to have kids, you would always wonder whether things might have been different if you had started earlier. Sadly, that is how I ended up getting the advice in the first place: An older friend suffered it first-hand.

Second, the longer you wait, the fewer children you may be able to have. Nearly half of Americans want three or more children. But building a family takes time. If a couple waited until they were 30 to start having children and had them at the average rate (4.2 years apart, according to The Atlantic), they could only have two before each subsequent pregnancy became high-risk. Even at a brisker pace—a child every two years—they could still only have three. Having four or more children will generally require starting sooner.

Third, the odds are that you will never feel financially ready—and for good reason. According to the most recent report from the USDA, the average family will spend well over $10,000 a year per child—and that’s not even including college costs. If couples waited to have kids until they were able to save away $30,000 every year to cover their ideal family size, they would never get started. Kids aren’t luxury goods, only affordable for a small, select few. It is worth keeping in mind that, while the Great Depression did send fertility rates cratering, our great-grandparents and their parents were still having many more children then than we do today. Americans need to recover the art of industry, thrift, and making ends meet that got our ancestors and their families through far more financial hardship.

Fourth, if you’re married, then you and your spouse are ready for children by definition—that’s what marriage is for, after all. You do not need further indeterminate years after marriage to “get to know one another” or prepare your relationship for the introduction of children. If anything, waiting too long could prepare you for just the opposite: childless complacency. Nowhere else more than childrearing will you get to know the true mettle of your spouse and learn your total dependence on her and God to survive the trials of parenthood. Nowhere else will you get to practice what the old prayerbook tradition called the “mutual society, help, and comfort” that marriage was ordained for.

Fifth, and on this same subject, you are going to need every ounce of strength you and your spouse can muster to make it through the sleepless nights that often come with newborns. While you used to pull an all-nighter to cram for an exam (or perhaps, less virtuously, to game all night), you will now do so with far greater frequency to make sure your child is sleeping safely during a sickness, or taking them to the emergency room for the umpteenth time in the middle of the night. Or, like me, you may find yourself unable to help in any other way than letting your spouse sleep in while you take over after a rough night. Fatherhood is a young man’s game—as motherhood is a young woman’s.

Sixth and finally, your parents and grandparents will never be younger, either. The sooner you start, the more likely they will be strong enough to help you raise your children, and the longer they will get to know them and watch them grow up. These decisions compound generationally in ways that many people don’t anticipate. On my side, where multiple generations didn’t have kids until their late 20s or early 30s, not one of my grandparents lived to meet any of their great-grandchildren. However, thanks to the difference just a few years per generation can make, every single one of my wife’s grandparents lived to love and hold our children.

I think most people would gladly trade an overextended honeymoon and the hypothetical of financial security for a chance to meet their great-grandchildren. Nothing is promised, but Lord willing, I want to meet mine.