A Baby Maybe

For anybody considering becoming a parent, I’d like to recommend this excellent book:  A Baby? Maybe:  A Guide to Making the Most Fateful Decision of Your Life by Elizabeth M. Whelan. 

When Adam and I got married we were both undecided about having children, and I think we both leaned towards the negative.  The first thing that started steering us in the other direction was a vacation we took with our close friends and their 18 month old son.  We spent a week in the Bahamas with them and saw firsthand how they were able to integrate their child into their lives and continue to do fun, adventurous things, even if it did mean lugging around a lot more stuff.  We thought to ourselves, “We could do that.”

Then, a friend of Adam’s recommended this book to us.  He picked up a copy and we read it together (back in the days when we had time for him to read out loud to me ).  I don’t remember it too clearly, but the book was mostly a series of interviews the author conducted, asking people about which choice they made, why, and whether they had any regrets.  Adam and I came away with three new and life-changing ideas about this decision:

1)  The decision to become a parent is unique – unlike any other you will make in your life – and so it must be approached slightly differently.  There are two things that make it unique.  First, you are creating a new human being with free will, so you have much less control over the outcome than with other choices.  You never have perfect information, but in this case, you will always have doubts and confusion because you have no ultimate control over what your child will be.  You can’t make a pro-and-con list.  You will never feel like you’ve analyzed the options and know what to expect.  You cannot really know what to expect.

2)  The second thing that makes this decision unique is that it is irrevocable.  Most choices you make in life can be reversed.  Sometimes there is a lot of pain involved, but you can say, “I made a mistake.  I’m going to go back and fix it.”  When you have a child, you can never change the fact that you are a parent.  Even in the worst cases where you might give the child up for adoption, the fact that you created a human being is going to alter your life forever.  But, more likely, you will spend the rest of your life as an active parent and there is nothing you can do to change that.

3)  The regret principle applies.  In the interviews in the book, the people with the most regrets were the ones who defaulted into a choice, whether it was to have children or not to have children.  That included people who had kids because it was “the thing to do” after they got married, and people who never had kids because they just never got around to it or couldn’t make up their minds.  This taught us that we needed to make a conscious decision one way or another.

Once we recognized these three principles, we both knew we wanted to have a child.  It was strange how it became so obvious after these revelations.  I think we both had been in the “wait and see” mode, figuring that we’d know if and when the time was right.  The third point really woke us up.

The book is out of print, but you can find used copies at Amazon.  The thing that prompted me to write about it is that I recently heard Leonard Peikoff recommend the very same book on his podcast.  (Unfortunately, I didn’t write down which podcast it was.)  The person who told us about the book was not an Objectivist, so I was quite shocked and pleased to hear that Dr. Peikoff also recommended it.

A Baby? Maybe is not a book that will convince you to have children.  It is a guide to how to approach the whole issue.  It gives you a framework for your thinking.  And it uses an inductive approach by starting with real people and their decisions, and using those facts to come up with some general principles.