The #1 thing that helps you decide if you want kids
I spent years trying to decide if I wanted kids. It’s not just that I was unsure, it’s that I was torn between two possible versions of my life.
I thought I knew why I was torn – I had certain fears about both options, practical concerns, and a general feeling of not being ready to make the decision – but I was missing something really important. In fact, I was missing the most important thing.
When you’re trying to decide if you want kids, the key word is want, but too often we end up circling around it because working out what you want feels impossible. It’s like grasping around in the dark for an object you haven’t been given a description of.
But there is a tangible way to work out what you want. Through your values. Your values are your core beliefs. For this decision and many others, they can act like a lens through which you can actually see what you want, and from there you can make an informed choice.
There are ten values that are really important in this decision. How you weigh them indicates whether you’re more aligned with fatherhood or being childfree.
In this post, I’m going to share these ten key values, explain how they shape the decision, and share a free tool I’ve created that gives you an indication of which path you’re more aligned with based on your value preferences.
Ten key values
First, let’s look at the ten key values in this decision: connection, freedom, responsibility, independence, commitment, spontaneity, legacy, autonomy, nurture, and privacy.
Five of these values are more aligned with fatherhood, and five are more aligned with being childfree:
Fatherhood-leaning: connection, responsibility, commitment, legacy, nurture
Childfree-leaning: freedom, independence, spontaneity, autonomy, privacy
Now, this is about alignment, not exclusivity. Fatherhood-leaning values aren’t exclusive to dads, and childfree-leaning values aren’t exclusive to those who are childfree. But in practice these values do tend to fit more comfortably with one path or the other, especially when taken together.
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How values shape the decision
At the start of this post, I said that when I was trying to decide whether I wanted kids, I was torn between two different versions of my life. I thought I knew why that was, and the issues I was looking at on the surface did matter, but there was something deeper going on too: those two different versions of my life arose from values conflicting with each other.
When you’re finding it difficult to choose between fatherhood and being childfree, very often under the surface there is a value conflict driving your uncertainty. You feel torn in two different directions because you hold values that, when it comes to this decision, don’t comfortably co-exist.
But here’s the shift that changes the equation: if you don’t know what’s causing the conflict, then you’ll stay stuck. If you can find out what is causing it – specifically the value conflicts that are driving it – then you can weigh the trade-offs clearly and start to make an informed choice. You’ll no longer be grasping for an object in the dark – you’ll be able to see it right there in front of you. That’s what makes a decision possible.
The good news is you don’t need to spend weeks trying to figure this out because I’ve created a practical, structured tool that will give you a clear picture in just two minutes. It indicates which values are important to you in this decision, where conflicts between them might be causing uncertainty, and which path your values align more with.
The fatherhood clarity assessment
It’s called the fatherhood clarity assessment. It’s a quiz-style assessment – completely private – that asks you some straightforward questions and behind the scenes it does some clever analysis that will give you detailed insight into where you stand in this decision and why.
The assessment doesn’t tell you whether or not you should have kids – that’s your choice. It does give you valuable information to inform your decision.
The assessment asks you to respond to each of the ten values by answering how important they are to you.
Once you’ve submitted your answers, the assessment logic springs into life and begins a multi-step analysis, which generates your overall alignment, your fatherhood score and childfree score, and your value hierarchy. This gives you something that’s very hard to get just by thinking it through in your head – structured results based on a clear framework.
Take the assessment here to get your results.
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