My daughter stopped breathing the day she was born.
I wasn’t there when it happened. I had gone home to sleep, exhausted from the late night labor, trusting that the hard part was over. My wife experienced those terrifying minutes alone, watching nurses rush in with a purpose that told her everything before anyone said a word. When I arrived the next morning, our daughter was healthy and pink and screaming, and my wife’s face held something I couldn’t fully understand until she told me what had happened in the night.
That was thirty three years ago. Our daughter is thriving now, brilliant and kind and building a life she loves. Whether she has children of her own is entirely her business.
I could not be more at peace with whatever she decides.
The Conversations I Keep Having
If you’re a parent of adult children, you know the conversations I’m talking about. They happen at dinner parties and family gatherings, in church hallways and over coffee with old friends. Someone laments the declining birth rate. Someone else sighs about the grandchildren they’re waiting for. The tone ranges from wistful to pointed, as if our children owe something to the species, to the family line, to us.
I’ve sat through enough of these conversations to know when to nod politely and when to excuse myself for another drink. But lately I’ve been feeling less polite about it.
Because here’s what I’ve learned in thirty-five years of marriage and parenting: the choice to bring a child into the world is the most consequential decision a human being can make. It deserves more than peer pressure disguised as tradition. It deserves honesty about what that decision actually entails.
What I Know That I Didn’t Before
My son lives with an autoimmune condition that may follow him his entire life. We discovered it when he was a teen, during a season when my wife was battling cancer, that season tested every ounce of resilience our family possessed. The specialists who disagreed with each other. The medications that helped some things and hurt others.
He’s doing well now, managing his condition with grace and humor that still amazes me. But I carry the weight of those years in my body. I suspect I always will.
My wife is a BRCA carrier who battled triple-negative breast cancer. On my side of the family tree, we’ve got rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, heart disease and vascular dementia waiting in the branches. These are not abstractions to us. They are the people we loved and lost slowly. They are the phone calls that changed everything. They are the inheritance we didn’t ask for and cannot refuse.
When I hear people romanticize parenthood, I think about all of this. Not to be morbid, but to be honest. Parenthood is not just birthday parties and graduation ceremonies. It’s sitting in waiting rooms wondering if your child will be okay. It’s watching them struggle with things you cannot fix. It’s loving someone so completely that their pain becomes your pain, magnified.
Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. But I would never, ever insist that someone else make the same choice.
The World They’re Looking At
Young adults today are not just thinking about their own lives when they consider this decision. They’re thinking about the world they would be bringing a child into.
I could be wrong about this, but I believe my children when they tell me they’re concerned about climate change. Not in the abstract way that allows us to keep living exactly as we always have, but in the concrete way that shows up in their daily choices. They’ve watched the summers get hotter, the storms get stronger, the headlines get darker. They’ve done the math on what the next fifty years might look like.
I don’t know what conclusions they’ll draw from that math. But if they decided that the most ethical thing they could do is not add another person to a planet already straining under the weight of eight billion of us, I wouldn’t dismiss it as selfish or shortsighted. It strikes me as precisely the opposite.
What Happiness Actually Looks Like
Maslow wrote about self-actualization as the pinnacle of human development. The point where a person has met their basic needs for safety, belonging, and esteem, and can finally turn their attention to becoming who they were meant to be.
My children are just now arriving at this place. Just now finding their footing in careers that matter to them. Just now experiencing the spaciousness that comes from financial stability after years of struggling to establish themselves in an economy that was not designed with their generation in mind.
I want them to make their choices from this place of wholeness, not from obligation to me. I want them to invest in their relationships, their communities, their creative work, their own growth, in whatever proportions feel right to them. These are not lesser pursuits than reproduction. They’re different pursuits, equally valid, equally meaningful.
I find myself thinking about what it means to truly respect our children as adults. It means trusting that they know their own hearts. It means not imposing our expectations onto their choices. It means celebrating their flourishing, whatever form it takes.
What Matters More
Both of my children have found partners who I believe will walk with them for life. When I watch them together, I see the kind of love that makes people better. The kind that weathers difficulty. The kind that grows. Nothing in life could make my wife and I happier!
This matters more to me than grandchildren. That my children are happy, that they’ve found people who see them and choose them, that they’re building lives of meaning alongside someone they love. If that life includes children, wonderful. If it doesn’t, also wonderful. The partnership is the gift. Everything else is just details.
What I’m Looking Forward To
Here’s something I don’t say out loud very often: I’m looking forward to my golden years.
Not with any expectation about grandchildren one way or the other, but with a genuine peace about whatever comes. My wife and I have traveled through some difficult territory together. Thirty-five years of marriage, cancer, a child who almost didn’t make it, a child who struggles with chronic illness. We’ve earned whatever spaciousness we can find in the years ahead.
We’re planning trips we’ve always dreamed about. We’re reconnecting with our own creative work, our own friendships, our own growth. We’re approaching a season that feels less like loss and more like possibility.
And honestly? I think I would be a smashing grandpa. I’ve got the dad jokes, the patience, a fishing addiction, the willingness to get down on the floor and play. But I’ve also learned that some of the best gifts we can give our children are the ones where we simply step back and let them live.
A Different Kind of Legacy
When I think about what I want to pass on to my children, it’s not a genetic line extending into the future. It’s something harder to name. A way of being in the world. A commitment to honesty and compassion. A belief that we can build better places, one relationship at a time.
They’re already living that legacy. They’re generous with their time and their love. They’re building communities that matter. They’re doing the inner work that makes them good partners, good friends, good citizens. They’re making the world a little better for having been in it.
That seems like enough to me. More than enough.
So the next time someone at a dinner party sighs about the tragedy of declining birth rates, I’m going to speak up. Not to argue, but to offer a different perspective. One that respects choice. One that acknowledges complexity. One that lifts the pressure we so often place on our children to fulfill our own expectations.
Whatever they choose, I will be happy for them. And it turns out that letting go of expectations isn’t a heavy lift at all. It’s just love, doing what love does.
I’ve written more about family, generational healing, and creating cultures of flourishing in my books. If these themes resonate with you, I think you might find something worthwhile there. We’re all just trying to figure this out together.
