Should I Have Kids?
Producer Claire McInerny experienced an extreme weather event in 2021, a result of climate change, that left her worried about the future. She started channeling her anxiety about the future of our world into another question she was asking herself: should I have kids? In this episode, Claire tries to untangle her feelings around what the world will look like in the future with her desire to have a family of her own.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
NORA MCINERNY: When we’ve done callouts to you all for stories you all want to hear, or subjects you want us to explore, there is one that comes up again and again.
As we talked about it among the team, one of our producers (and my second cousin) Claire McInerny, said that she also is very interested in this topic. In fact, it’s been top of mind for her for almost a year now.
Today, Claire is going to share her anxiety around the idea of having kids. And she’s going to walk us through one of the major hangups she has, and many of you have told us you have, as she makes this decision: the fear around bringing children into a world where climate change is fast approaching.
I’m Nora McInerny and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” … should I have kids?
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CLAIRE MCINERNY: In my experience, there’s three ways people respond to the question: “Do you want kids?”
The first I hear is something like: “Yes! I’ve always wanted them, always envisioned myself as a parent.” These are the people who have names picked out and love imagining their partner in the role of parent. They daydream about making pancakes on Saturday mornings and creating Christmas traditions unique to their little family.
The second response is: “Naw, that’s not for me.” These people are either not interested in parenting or have different goals for their time and money. They might consider it briefly but then they adopt three dogs and go to Italy every two years because they can. And they’re good with that.
The third response doesn’t have a pithy summary. There might be a desire to have a family or a love of children, but there’s also big hangups. Those might have to do with biology, health, their partner or lack of partner, money, politics or a million other reasons.
I have this third response, and it’s fairly new to me.
See, I loooove kids. My friend’s 10-year-old and I have regular dates where I pick him up from school, and we come back to my apartment and bake until his mom is done with work. As a teenager, my after-school job was as a teaching assistant at a daycare. While all my friends worked at smoothie shops or car washes, I was wrestling sunscreen onto three-year-olds and teaching toddlers how to say “All Done” in sign language.
I love their energy. I love how they see the world, and remind me to be more playful. More goofy, and less serious.
Because I’ve always loved being around kids, I always assumed I would have my own. I grew up in Kansas in a big, religious family, so I never saw anyone make a different choice. I assumed I would also be a mom and have a life that looked like everyone else around me.
But now I’m 32, and I’ve learned there are a million ways to live life. All the “shoulds” I grew up with aren’t binding laws – they’re just norms. I don’t have to fit into any norm.
I also live in a time where I have access to birth control and I don’t have a farm I need to staff or whatever people in the 1800s had 15 kids for. So I have choices. Being privileged enough to have a choice caused me to develop some of the hangups I mentioned.
For me, I have now watched close friends and family become parents, and seen the reality of this huge life change unfold. I’ve seen postpartum depression up close. I’ve listened to one parent talk about the tension in their relationship caused by two adults having to manage literally everything about a small human (or humans’) life.
I’m also alive at this particular point in history, where extreme weather events are getting bigger, scarier, and more frequent.
NEWS AUDIO ARCHIVE: “In Williamson County, we are preparing for blizzard conditions. And those are not never words I’ve heard in my lifetime here in Williamson County.”
I live in Texas and experienced one of these in 2021, when a winter storm hit the state and caused a five day electricity blackout that the state’s infrastructure could not handle.
Millions of us were trapped in our homes, with no heat, some without running water, waiting for someone to fix it.
When I emerged from that experience, I was deeply shaken. I had finally seen the realities of climate change up close, and I realized we are all going to experience some sort of climate disaster in our lives. Before that, I had always associated climate change disasters with the wildfires out west or the longer hurricane season for places along the gulf. But after that storm, I realized colder winters or hotter summers in places that aren’t prepared for it are… devastating.
And I started to feel a lot of anxiety about the future. I felt unsafe thinking about staying in Texas long term. I saw the response from state leaders and it was… uhhhh, not good. But I also started having existential anxiety. Would the rest of my life be plagued with crazy weather and political fighting over how to adapt to it?
This also started to cloud my thoughts around whether or not I want to have kids. One of the intrusive thoughts I kept having was: “If I have kids now, will I be setting them up to be soldiers in the water wars?! Will they ask one day, ‘Why did my mother have me when she knew humanity was going in a bad direction?’”
I was in this position of I kind of want kids, but should I have them? Is it responsible to have children with the knowledge I have? Is it selfish to have kids, if their lived experiences will certainly be worse than mine?
These questions became so consuming because of where I’m at in life. For one, I’m 32. Which means I am closer to the end of my fertility window than the beginning. So I really feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids before it’s too late.
And two, I finally met someone I would actually want to parent with.
Claire McInerny: Okay. I'm gonna have you, um, introduce yourself. Say your name and title,
Brit: Title?
Claire: Just say who you are in relation to me.
Brit: I'm Brit. I'm your boyfriend. And we live together.
I met Brit in February 2021. At the time, the one-year anniversary of the COVID lockdown was approaching, I had just endured that bad winter storm in Texas, and I was having a mental breakdown that I would score a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10.
When the snow and ice finally thawed, I decided I had enough. I needed to escape my home which was now associated with so much trauma, and I needed something new in my life. I had watched every season of “Grey’s Anatomy,” which is a lot of television, in 3 months, so it was clearly time for me to talk to people in person again.
So, I downloaded a dating app.
I had literally zero expectations for this. I had been chronically single, with short relationships lasting no more than a couple of months, for like six years. So I was very familiar with online dating and the ups and downs of it. This was the first time I ventured into dating with this attitude of, hey, I’m not trying to find anything specific, I just want to meet some new people, have some small talk (yes I was craving small talk after a year of Zoom calls as my main social interaction) and just bring variety to my life.
I found Brit on the app and sent him a message. I liked that he featured some of his art in his profile. He didn’t look like a beefcake tech bro (which is very common in Austin), and I don’t know … he wasn’t trying so hard, he seemed genuine.
That translated to our first few dates. It was easy, we were both ourselves, we wanted to keep talking and getting to know each other.
After a month, I fell in love with him. Our relationship felt like a safe space in my life, where we enjoyed the quiet moments like cooking dinner and playing music for one another, to traveling and having new experiences together. He’s an artist, and introduced me to collage, an artform I now love. He brought joy, and peace, and comfort to my life, and for the first time in my adult life I felt like… wow, I could share my entire life with this person.
So this question of do I want kids became very real. Because if I wanted him forever, I had to know if his version of forever included being a parent.
Claire: I mean, before I ran and got my recorder, we were just talking about like, I'm feeling overwhelmed today. Why? I don't know yet. But I think one of 'em was, we needed to record this conversation and we've only scratched the surface of this topic. Like the first time I brought it up, um, I mean the timing was horrible. What was it? It was like we were brushing our teeth before bed?
Brit: No, we were like laying in bed about to fall asleep. [both laugh] And then by the end of the conversation I was like, wide awake.
This is Brit and I in August of 2022. We had just moved in together and I had just started working on this piece. One of the first things I wanted to talk to him about on tape was recapping the first time we talked about kids. It was maybe six months into our relationship. And yes, like a psycho, I just blurted it out as we were falling asleep one night.
Brit: Can you accurately recap it?
Claire: Okay, so the thing I remember was feeling a little surprised at how timid you were about the idea of having your own kids, because those weren't the context clues I had gotten before. So that was just the … the takeaway I got. Besides my timing, what was your, your takeaway from that conversation?
Brit: I don't know if “timid” is the word that I would use. I'm not sure. I don't know. I guess I get what you're saying. [Claire: Like apprehensive.] Sure. Apprehensive. And I kind of early on, recognized in you maternal qualities, that I liked. And I told you that. And so that makes it sound like, “I want you to be a mother” a little bit.
Claire: Like literally it was like the first month we were dating. One of the things he said was like, you would be such a good mother. And I think that was the thing I filed away was like, oh, he also, because my whole life I've been like, I assume I'll be a mom one day. So when you said that, I was like, okay, he's on the same page. So then we had this talk and you were sharing more like apprehensive feelings and so that's what surprised me.
Brit: Well, I feel like I did always say I wasn't sure if I wanted to have kids. But I can understand that might not have felt underscored for you. And both things were true to me. I've also, uh, dated women that, uh, didn't give off the maternal vibe, as I imagined it. We don't have to get into that. And I didn't, I didn't like it. I didn't like perceiving a lack of whatever that quality is.
Claire: What do you feel … cuz I don't have nieces and nephews, but you do. And I love them all. I think they're fun. They're all different ages. How do you feel when I'm like, playing with them or playing with the baby or playing with the little kids? Like, do you have any sort of reaction?
Brit: The way we've talked about kids, like the way you talk about your friend Jess is like loving her kids and not liking anybody else's kids. I, I find that a little bit relatable and I think if I had kids, I might be that way. I mean, I don't dislike kids. Yeah. And I think it's cute when you play with my nieces and nephews. Um, but I'm also just like, “Well, I'm glad somebody wants to do that.” [both laugh]
So that’s one difference between Brit and I on this subject. I’ve always felt comfortable around kids so I’m not as intimidated by the day-to-day realities. That first night I brought it up, he told me he always assumed he’d make the decision when he met someone he wanted to be with. If they were passionate about having kids, he would consider it. If they didn’t want them, he’d be fine not to.
Instead, he met me, who has a different answer every day.
Brit: I would say that I'm less apprehensive than when we had this conversation like, was it like eight months ago? Or? It was a while ago.
Claire: What do you, what do you think has changed? Do you think It's like our partnership and feeling like, okay, we would have someone to rely on?
Brit: I think it's, it's definitely that our partnership has, um, grown stronger. Yeah, I think, I think eight months ago I would've still had plenty more questions about our relationship, just cuz it was so fresh. That is a big part of it. Um, but the apprehensions, which I didn't answer your question, it feels like the world is getting more insane every day. And I do understand that for most of human history, having a child was like rolling the dice anyway. I understand that things for most of human history have been rough and tumble. But at the same time, it just feels like things are ratcheting it up and, uh, you have to at least consider it. You have to at least consider that, that things are becoming less stable, you know, and sure things, again, throughout history have not been stable. But historically in our recent history, we're taught to believe that progress and like relative stability is sort of normal when it's really actually very abnormal. And it feels like we're going back to instability. Uh, and I don't know what that means, and it’s because I don't know what that means, it really scares me. And, you know, we're in an apartment that we rent that we're gonna get priced out of next year. And, uh, I'm in a job I don't like.
Claire: Like I can't underscore enough like, we both like work in industries, especially when I was working in a newsroom, that underpay you. And yet in your case you took out so much money in student debt because you needed a master's degree to do architecture and then they pay you so little. And so like the finances are such a real part of that societal instability of like, we work professional jobs, but like if we had a kid, things would get so tight, so fast financially, or like savings would be really hard to do and stuff like that.
Brit: Right. It would be, and I, I think we're already like taking some of the first steps, thinking about this even whether or not we had a kid: moving to a cheaper city as we're discussing.
Claire: I think something I know you've thought a lot about that I'm trying to learn more about is the climate change of it all. So will you kind of talk a little bit about what … you've read a lot, I know a lot of books and stuff, um, about climate change and how that's kind of factoring into your thoughts.
Brit: Yeah. It's funny, that's not like the first thing I say because it's so extremely a part of everything now that it's like, feels so obvious, I don't even bring it up first as like a reason not to have children. I think like for a long time and I'm obviously not gonna be like the climate change expert here and like, get all into it. There was a time I didn't know anything about climate change except what everybody knows. And I thought, oh, I'd like to read some books about this. Um, and I came out the other side, feeling very strange, because you suddenly see that, I don't know how to put it into words. You come out the other side feeling like we're kind of insane obviously for the way we're living, but also that, uh, even if you read it all, you really can't grasp the enormity of it. People think it's just like rising seas, crazier weather, but like, it's just the fact that there's gonna be more famine that's gonna cause more wars. It's gonna be more countries that have like, you know, countries with nukes that their people are hungry. It's like, what? What is it all going to mean? We don't really know.
We really don’t know. At least I sure don’t! But climate change is one of the hangups I have. I get very stressed out when I think about how my life is going to look different as I age because of it, and then I kind of lose my breath when I think about what the world is going to look like decades from now.
Months ago, I was walking our dogs in the morning and listening to NPR, and I heard a story about new homes being built out West, in Arizona or Utah or something like that, even though there are concerns about getting enough water to these new subdivisions. Like…. the city in question wasn’t positive they could get water to this location and still the homes were being built.
I thought about that story all day. I thought about how stupid it is that developers have more of a say than…the water department? I thought about how things like this are probably happening in other places too, because the desire to make money often wins over us being a little bit uncomfortable. And by uncomfortable I mean we can’t buy a four- bedroom house in a state where there is a massive drought.
It’s stuff like that that causes me so much anxiety. I don’t feel super hopeful. I look around and see greed overtaking common sense, and part of me wonders if it’s downright dangerous to have a kid.
I know this is very doom and gloom. But I know so many people who have similar outlooks when it comes to climate change.
Personally, I feel like I’m giving climate change the drama it deserves. I feel like I’m being smart and cautious by recognizing the poor choices we are making as a society.
But my mindset really shifted when I talked to Joellen Russell.
Joellen: I'm a distinguished professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and I am an oceanographer and climate modeler. I use robot floats, supercomputers and satellites to try and tell the future.
And studying the ocean’s role in climate change is super important as I learned from Joellen. Burning fossil fuels like we have for decades, puts more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Joellen: And when you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you're basically putting a thickening blanket around the earth like your down sleeping bag. The more down, the more loft, the warmer the bag is. And that's what's happening. About the same amount of radiation is coming in from the sun every year, but less is getting out. And that less is getting out is the whole planetary system basically melting. Now a fraction of that, about 3%, goes into warming our atmosphere, which is what we feel. A fraction of that goes into melting ice, like in Antarctica or Greenland or Glacier National Park, which is about to become a national park. And most of it 93%, is warming our ocean. But the big thing is, and this affects every nation well, it will affect everybody, but anybody with the coast is sea level rise. The warmer the water is literally makes the molecules more excited and they take up more room. The more the warmer it gets, the more the sea level rises, that has started to accelerate. So around Antarctica, most of the ice shelves actually have feet underwater, grounded on the bottom of – on land, basically. It's below the ocean surface. And so what we're finding is that those work like doorstops, they basically stop the ice from sliding into the ocean. They're called buttresses. And when you erode them, when you melt them, like putting an ice cube in hot cocoa, when you melt it, it slides faster. Those are adding water to the ocean, which also increases sea level rise. So nuisance flooding, whether it's in Norfolk, you know, with our biggest naval base, or Miami, these are places where we expect everyone will have to adapt. It may be that your skyscraper, you know, big apartment building or whatever in Miami, will have to turn the first few floors into parking garages just in case, because it's not just about the daily flooding. It's also about what happens when you put a storm with big wave surge on top of a higher sea level. It's going to come in further. It's going to do more damage. It's going to be much more widespread.
So this is what I expected from the interview with a climate scientist — a detailed, scientific look at exactly how we are all gonna be screwed.
But of all the scientists I found on Google, and who responded to my emails, I interviewed Joellen because she’s also a mom. More specifically, I found Joellen through a group called Science Moms, which is a group of climate scientists and mothers from around the country that educates the public on solutions to our climate crisis.
And as I was poking around their website, I noticed they didn’t have a tone of impending apocalypse, but instead, hope. And Joellen herself, is the most hopeful person I’ve talked to about climate change.
She grew up in rural Alaska and knew early on she wanted to be a scientist. Which made her assume that she’d have to make a lot of sacrifices, including a desire to be a mom.
Joellen: I never expected this to be my life. I expected to end up alone. I'd never find a partner who really wanted to hang out with somebody so obsessed. That meant I wouldn't really be able to provide for or have sweethearts, babies, in my life. I have a great Aunt Mary Ellen, who's passed now, but she was a geologist and a mathematician, and was the first woman engineer at Boeing, and she never married and never had children. So I had a model for what that might look like. And she had an amazing life. And I love her so. But I got lucky, because the world has more room for women scientists than I thought. And now with these sisters of mine in Science Moms, as well as all the other colleagues I have, you know, around the world and across the country, it's amazing. The world turned out to be a much more amazing place than I thought it was. Everybody asks, “So how can you be a climate scientist and smile and laugh and giggle about all this?” I'm like, “Because it's better than I thought.” [laughs]
And her hope extends to the climate crisis as well. She works in a field with a lot of smart people who have ideas and solutions to this huge problem. She truly believes that we can fix it, and we keep planet Earth safe and habitable for humans.
Joellen: Here's the thing about climate change. I bet you didn't know that the U.S. has already gone from over 21% of carbon emissions to 13 now. Yeah. Not only that, but we've cut our emissions by over 20%, and we very likely will cut our emissions by 50% by about 2034. Half. So we're in an innovation race. And I just think we as moms and potential moms, I think we need to keep our eye on the prize, which is better living. I don't want to just give a bunch of companies money to, you know, rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. I don't want greenwashing. I want real progress. I want measurable metrics that where we can reward companies with our business and our help when they're doing good things. And I want to boycott the ones that refuse to change. For us, we can engineer our way. This adaptation game. We're rich and we're clever and we have all these universities. I mean, everybody's working on how to live that better life. I don't see the U.S. actually suffering much. I don’t. I do see that we're going to have to learn to share, because there are a lot of other countries that are not going to be able to adapt as quickly as we do. And I keep thinking, though, that the best thing, the best way to raise all boats at the same time is to accelerate that tech development, which we can then once it gets cheap, like solar panels, etc., then more and more people can take advantage, right? It's that virtuous kind of cycle where you drive the price down by adopting it early here in the U.S. when we can afford to be innovative and then eventually it gets so cheap that everybody does it like, well.
Now, I live in Texas, where the elected officials have always and still prioritize the oil and gas industry. I spent almost ten years working in local news so I was always aware of the conversations happening in state politics. Personally I hated it, because it was predictable. There was no willingness to learn and discuss how to make life better for constituents, it was just the same arguments over and over. You either fell on one of the issues or the other. There was no nuance. No innovation.
Watching state politics up close absolutely contributed to my feeling of hopelessness around whether or not we will save our own planet. Joellen told me about a lot of initiatives and changes happening around the country already. And she truly believes we will cut our emissions to a point that will keep us from a Mad Max type battle situation over drinking water. Or maybe we’ll avoid those wars Brit mentioned earlier over food.
But I’m still skeptical, and I told her this. All these solutions she’s excited about from academics and scientists would have to be embraced by political leaders – and I don’t know if I have faith in them.
Joellen: And what's part of that too, is and I hate saying this because it's a little mean, is most of the folks who are 60 plus never had anything like climate change in school. They really have not learned the facts. You know, all the people on TV seem to all they ever talk about is what we're fighting and who we don't like and how wrong everybody is. And I keep thinking, why are they talking ever about what we got right? What is improving, what's on the way so that everybody will know what the cookie cutter is like? I want to apply that to my life. I want to apply that to my town.
Joellen: It’s not a miracle. It's just regular people making wise decisions for their prosperity and for their great grandchildren's prosperity. And one of the things I keep thinking is, “Yes, you should have babies.” [laughs] And the reason is because they're our hope.
Joellen: I am deeply committed to nobody should have children unless they want them. But we're also telling people that they shouldn't have them because it's too ugly and dark and that we're doing bad things to ourselves. And I think that's not right there. Come be in our village. There's room. And we need those babies, because they're– they're the ones that will step over us and up that hill. They will. I see it every day. Our students here at the University of Arizona just … they're amazing.And I just am so thrilled by these amazing kids.
Joellen helped me realize I’m giving power to the less innovative people. I’ve been standing in front of the politicians and seeing no progress. But I haven’t turned around to see the army of people who actually know about this, who are fighting for it. Who have come up with solutions and have plans for saving the planet.
She chooses to face the direction of hope and progress. And I realized … I’ve been scared to do that.
I used to look at my friends and acquaintances who have kids as slightly naive. I know, this is so judgy and rude but here we are. I would think, “Don’t you all feel any anxiety about this? You’re going to personally contribute THOUSANDS of dirty diapers to a landfill, send your kids to an education system that is under resourced, hope you yourself don’t suffer mental or physical illness because of birth because our health care system does not make it easy for moms and then maybe GO BROKE IN THE PROCESS? Have you thought about all of THAT pregnant Instagram friends?”
*deep sigh*
I do have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and I am a Libra, so it is exhausting in my head because I am always considering all sides of an issue. I don’t really understand “following my gut” — I often am overthinking anything my gut has to say. But I have been thinking about this question for a year now. I’ve been writing a lot about it and interviewing a lot of people. I talked to my friends with kids and without. I talked to lots of professors. And I interviewed all those people because I think I was looking for answers.
But it was the conversation with Joellen that actually shifted something in me. It wasn’t her personal experience that convinced me of anything, or any facts she shared that swayed me one way or another.
It was simply her saying, “If you want kids, I think you should have them.”
I have been focused on all of the shitty things going on in the world, and assuming they would make the life of my potential child worse. So I wanted someone to give me rules to follow. Like, having a kid means you don’t care about climate change.
Turns out, nobody said that to me. So many things contribute to climate change – things bigger than me and my womb, that people with way more power need to address.
But I think I wanted a rule, because then I could feel like I made the “right” decision, that I made a moral choice.
I now know there’s no rules. People who study climate change don’t feel like not having kids is a solution. Plenty of climate scientists have written about the joy of having kids despite this reality.
And it’s not just climate change that makes me weary about becoming a parent. It’s money, bad systems here in the U.S., and a general lack of passion about having a baby in my arms right now.
I constantly go back and forth. Some days, I can imagine how becoming a mother and having a child would make my life bigger and more meaningful. Other days it sounds overwhelming and suffocating.
I thought this back and forth meant that I wasn’t sure about what I wanted. But after talking to so many people, I learned this is normal.
My best friend has two kids, and has been a mom since she was in her early 20s. Every time I talk to her on the phone, she expresses how much she’s craving a trip just the two of us where she doesn’t have to be in mom mode. And then every time we’re on a trip like that, she tells me that she desperately misses her kids.
Nothing is great all the time. Nothing is horrible all the time. And nothing lasts forever.
I’ve been asking the question, “Should I have kids?” And maybe this is obvious to you all, but after months of working on this essay and talking to dozens of people, I realized the question I’ve been asking myself is wrong. The question should be: Do I want them?
When I ask myself that question, I am flooded with so many different feelings. I love kids. I’m scared of parenthood. I want my life to be filled with love and connection. I also want simplicity and peace.
I have no idea if any that fits together. But whether or not I have kids, I think life will always be filled with contradictions and complicated feelings.
This past Christmas, we spent time with Brit’s family, including his nieces and nephews. One night, we went to his sister’s house and for an hour all the adults all sat around the kitchen table talking and watching her 15-month-old play with spoons.
BRIT AUDIO: “Well, KB is going back and forth between the kitchen island and the dining room table. She has a drawer on the kitchen island that has a bunch of spoons in it. And she is collecting them and bringing them to my mother.” *baby babbling and Brit’s mom saying “thank you” as she receives spoons
Watching a baby play with spoons feels like watching the leaves on a tree blow in the breeze. It’s a bit meditative. It’s a simple joy that I don’t often experience.
The softness of her little, fragile life made me feel soft. And that’s got to be why parents feel scared. I guess all my fears about climate change have come down to that. I recognize that being human is so vulnerable, because I live it every day. I see how the world has punctured and deflated me. I don’t want to force that on to anyone else.
But I’ve also laughed at a baby handing her grandmother spoons. I’ve found a stranger on the Internet and given him my heart. Being soft has brought me so much joy, despite the danger of it being ruined.
So… do I want kids?
Yeah, I think I do.
Am I ready for kids? Am I ready to lean into hope? Am I ready to have faith?
I’m getting there.