Men: 35 and still undecided about kids? Read this
If you’re 35 and still unsure about becoming a dad or being childfree, then it’s not too late to make a decision. But it is too late to keep waiting for the decision to make itself.
If you’ve been stuck on this for a while and haven’t been able to come to a conclusion, then it’s worth asking yourself without judgement: are you searching for an answer, or are you waiting for one to present itself?
Sometimes, it’s the former, but often, especially when you’ve tried to figure it out and haven’t succeeded, it ends up becoming the latter.
And that’s okay for a while – it’s not perfect, but at least it means you don’t have to commit to a choice you’re not sure about. And that’s the trap.
Because at a certain point – and age 35 is where this starts to appear on the horizon – waiting to make a choice becomes the choice – and one you can’t undo. In this video, I’ll explain what that means and give you three concrete tips to avoid the trap and actually move your decision forward.
When waiting becomes the choice
First, let’s quickly unpack what happens when you wait too long for the decision to make itself. This is what you want to avoid.
I said that waiting to make a choice becomes the choice. A big part of that – but not the only part – is biology. At 35, if your partner is roughly the same age as you, female fertility starts to drop significantly at this point, and by the time they’re 45, most women will be completely infertile. Male fertility declines too, particularly after age 40, which if you’re 35 now isn’t too far away – sorry!
So 35 is when you can start to see the fertility window getting narrower in the near future. You have a few years of space left to make a decision, but you’re now at the point where you need to use that time proactively, not just let yourself drift. Because if you drift, infertility will make the decision for you. And that’s how waiting to make a choice becomes the choice.
Fertility isn’t the only part of this. There’s something else too, and it matters just as much. I’m talking about your relationship with your partner. The question of whether or not you have kids is something both of you need to answer in order to move forward together. If one of you has decided or is clearly leaning one way and the other is still waiting for clarity to arrive, the relationship can’t really progress. So waiting to make a choice can also become a choice about keeping your relationship in this position of being stuck, and even with the most supportive partner in the world, over time that can cause real tension.
I’ve been in this position myself. I was unsure about having kids for years, and I spent too much of that waiting for something to shift and point me in the right direction. But more often than not, time doesn’t come to the rescue. It just adds pressure. But your choice isn’t between waiting for the decision to make itself and making a decision under pressure that you don’t feel confident in. There is a better option.
Rather than waiting for a shift, or forcing a choice you don’t believe in, you produce the shift you need yourself.
Now if you’ve already tried to reach an answer yourself, I get why you might think this isn’t possible for you. But I’m a fatherhood decision coach, and I can tell you, it absolutely is.
Let’s start right now. I’m going to give you three concrete tips to move your decision forward. Each one invites a shift in the way you think about this decision.
These aren’t designed to make the decision for you. What they do is change how you’re looking at it and enable you to take ownership of it.
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Tip 1: the clarity shift
The first tip is the clarity shift. Making a decision about kids ultimately comes down to figuring out what you want. If you’re thinking ‘thanks captain obvious’, then I hear you. Because the whole reason you’re watching this video is you don’t know what you want and there isn’t any obvious way to figure it out.
But actually, it turns out, there is a way.
When you’re asking yourself what you want, what are you really asking yourself? You’re asking what’s important to you, what lines up with the way you want to live your life? And we answer that by looking at values.
Values are our core beliefs – they shape the way we want to live our lives and the choices we make. We tend to think of what we want as something emotional, instinctive – and on the surface, it is. But go one level deeper. What we want is a reflection of who we are and what matters to us. And there, values are our guide.
The key, then, is to work out what your values are in relation to this decision and which way they point. I’ve actually created a free tool designed to help you do exactly that. It’s called the fatherhood clarity assessment. It’s a quiz-style assessment that gives you an indication of which path you’re more aligned with based on your value preferences. It takes just two minutes, and it’s completely private.
The assessment helps you to answer one important part of the question, but there are two more shifts that matter here.
Tip 2: the reality shift
Tip two is the reality shift. This is about how our brains work when we’re facing important life decisions. When we weigh up a choice, we think about what our lives would look like in either scenario. And that’s when reality gets distorted.
Our minds gravitate towards best and worst case scenarios. Those can be useful for clarifying our fears and our hopes. But the mistake is thinking that those scenarios will define your choice and your life.
Yes, if you have kids, you will have to deal with a screaming baby in the middle of the night when all you want to do is sleep. But you will not be dealing with that non-stop, and it won’t continue for 18+ years.
Yes, if you don’t have kids, there will be quiet weekends where the house feels empty. But it won’t be every weekend, and it won’t mean your life lacks connection or meaning.
It helps to think not just about best and worst case scenarios, but about normal life. What would life look like in either scenario on an average Tuesday? That can tell you something quieter, but just as important.
Tip 3: the perspective shift
The third and final tip is the perspective shift, and this is where a lot of people realise where they’ve been going wrong in this decision.
When you think about fatherhood, your decision-making compass may point in different directions as you consider the various factors, but it still turns on a fixed position in the present. Essentially, you’re asking yourself, do I want to be a dad now? That’s helpful but incomplete.
What if you were to step into the shoes of your future self – say, at 50, 60, or 70 – and look back at the choice you’re making now? Which way would your compass point then?
This perspective shift helps to draw attention to things that may feel important now but may not matter to you as much when you think about your life as a whole. People go wrong when they judge a lifetime decision from a single moment in time.
Right now it might feel really important that your friends or your siblings are having children, and you might worry about being left out, but fast forward 20 years, and short-lived social pressure may not look like the right basis for a decision. Equally, you might be worried that having kids will take time away from your hobbies, but seriously, in the grand scheme of your life, how many zombies do you need to kill in Call of Duty?
You’re right – I take that back.
Look, I can’t say what should matter to you and what shouldn’t. Only you decide that. But time changes the weight of things, and it’s important to account for that when you decide.
If these three tips have started to get you thinking about this decision, then that means you’re already shifting from being stuck to making progress. Now is exactly the right time to be making that shift. If you want to keep going, join my email list, and we’ll keep moving forward with more tips and insight.
Now go kill some zombies.
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