You don't have plenty of time
Unsolicited note to my 20-something sisters
This letter is not at all about anyone who has struggled to conceive. God forbid anyone reads this that way. Many I know and love have faced the unbearable hardship of infertility, through absolutely no fault of their own. Please skip this post if this describes you. This is a message for the childless 25-year-old women, the women who think they may want kids one day but are “focusing on their careers” now.
This is the message I wish someone had given me when I was 25. I’m not sure if I would have listened, but I still feel compelled to write it.
A frequent refrain among women my age (approaching 40) and within my socioeconomic bracket: I wish someone would have told me to have kids earlier.
I’ve been having this conversation so often lately, with so many different women.
It’s a difficult refrain, because there’s nothing much that can be done about it for us aging millennials—except implore our younger sisters to think about the future.
An aging maternal landscape
There is a troubling, well-documented trend among stable, educated, financially secure American women to put off procreation until it’s almost too late.
The ages of first-time mothers are ticking up dramatically in a short amount of time: In 2011, the average mom was 25.6 at the birth of her first child, and in 2021, it was 27.3 years old (Pew). In 2022, the median age for giving birth hit 30 for the first time, the oldest age on record (NBC). Accordingly, the U.S. birth rate is declining precipitously, partially due to this increase in the mother’s age.
On top of that, the more educated you are, the fewer children you have: Women with at least a bachelor’s degree have, on average, 1.75 children, whereas women without a high school diploma have, on average, 2.99 children (Pew).
Priorities in our most fertile years
In terms of education and career advancement, girls are crushing it.
Women are outpacing men in the number of bachelor’s degrees and graduate degrees awarded. (In 2019-2020, women received 58% of bachelor’s degrees, 61% of graduate degrees, and 53% of doctoral degrees.) Every year, the educational achievement gap between women and men grows wider and shows no signs of slowing (another reflection for another time).
And if you’re one of those women who got a college degree, we’re told that, upon graduation, career success is our top priority. Get a graduate degree, while you’re at it! In fact, get two! In our twenties, we are encouraged to focus on making money. Do not look for a partner and certainly do not think about becoming a mom. I received this message implicitly from culture; it would be a shame and an embarrassment to settle down too early. What was that degree for, if you were just going to be a wife? (Thankfully, I didn’t listen and got married at 22.)
Before you freak out, I’m not about to trot out a #tradwife perspective. I obviously love working and am so thankful for my bachelor’s degree and my job. As a second-waver, I am a huge advocate for advanced education and careers for any women who want them. I continue appreciate the opportunity to have such a fulfilling full-time career. I do not want (and have never wanted, frankly) to be a stay-at-home mom.
BUT. We are encouraged to pursue the marketplace with such intensity in our twenties and early thirties that having children when it’s culturally acceptable will be often be very difficult without medical intervention.
My young sisters, all young women in my circle of acquaintance, please: Think seriously about your priorities in your twenties. Pursue a partner with more seriousness. Your career will not love you back. Your career will not keep you fertile. Your hard-earned wealth may not be enough to purchase the technology needed to reproduce when the time comes.
The choices you make now affect the choices that will be made for you a decade hence.
Ambivalence about motherhood
Along with being told to be sexy and rich, we’re also told to be suspicious about motherhood in general.
Motherhood sounds hard. And expensive. And limiting. And probably a real barrier to taking spontaneous Mediterranean holidays.
Motherhood is indeed all of those things, but it is also so much more. Having children is so much richer and more fulfilling than I could have imagined. It is hard to listen to someone say this. When I was like you and childless, I’d roll my eyes and grit my teeth whenever a new mom, with her strung-out hair and wild eyes, said, “Oh, you should have a baby! It’s so worth it!” She never looked like a woman I particularly envied. So, I get it, my little sisters, I have been there. I know you won’t listen to me, the frizzy mom with deep forehead lines, but I feel like I have to say it anyway.
I married at 22, but we waited eight years to decide to have a child. I am thankful that we had this luxury of time, so many childless years together, but I also wish that I hadn’t waited so long to choose children. Our family may have taken a different shape; we may have spaced our kids out more; we may have had more children.
There’s an odd preoccupation in our culture with “readiness,” as if it were a universal truth. But “readiness” is never defined. We’re given the vague, unhelpful advice to “wait until we’re ready” to get married or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re “ready” for that kind of responsibility? You won’t. You’ll never be ready. Aside from choosing a good partner, there’s no amount of preparation that will make child-rearing easier or smoother or simpler. You become ready through the very act of being married and raising children. Lord willing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occasion and put fears of “readiness” to rest.
Do whatever you can, in your twenties, to investigate your desire to have children. If it is a priority for your life as a whole, make it a priority in your twenties. Start planning now. Start arranging your life accordingly.
The joy of children is immense and lifelong. It’s an eternal decision. Better to start pondering it now that you have reached an age of maturity—or, if not that, at least the age of your peak fertility.
Willful ignorance about biology
Ladies, life is short. We’ll all be dead relatively soon. Your fertility has a discrete timeline. Everything goes downhill, and fast, after 35.
Quick refresher: You’re born with a fixed number of eggs. That number decreases as you age and falls precipitously after the age of 35. Additionally, it’s not just the quantity of eggs that declines but the quality. So even if you still have some eggs at 37 and 38, they’re not the most fit (i.e., less likely to end up in an actual baby). Pregnancy, even if achieved after 35, also faces many more adverse outcomes after that age (including increased risk for miscarriage, premature birth, birth defects, and stillbirth, to name a few).
Our bodies are at odds with our career ambitions and our delayed (or nonexistent) marriages. Pretending like this isn’t the case is an immense disservice to women. Hoping that science and technology will save us and give us children whenever we want them is putting stock in a false savior. IVF, for all of its incredible advances, still only has a success rate of 34% for moms aged 35-37 and 22% for moms aged 38-40.
I’ll always remember coming across a passage in Michelle Obama’s memoir, in which she writes with frank regret about waiting till she was 34 to try to conceive.
After suffering several miscarriages, she and the former president had to conceive both of their daughters via IVF. She wished someone, anyone, had talked with her seriously about this timeline. “The biological clock is real,” she wrote. “I think it’s the worst thing we do to each other as women, not share the truth about our bodies and how they work and how they don’t work.”
Tell your little sisters. Tell your young cousins. Don’t deflect. Don’t say “you have plenty of time.” Be gracious and honest. It is the least that we can do for one another.
“Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other ... When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
— Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” (1975)
In sum, my beautiful young flowers:
Decide, as early as you can, whether you want children.
If you do, prioritize finding a partner as early as you can, which will give you more child-free years, so that you can…
Have a kid before you turn 30.
With great love and genuine affection,
That old nagging mom you know
Thanks for this. As a nearly 42yo mom of seven, with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, I can’t tell you how many women my age and older I’ve spoken with who wistfully (or frantically, as the case may be) look back on their 20s and 30s and wish they had done differently. Looked for a marriageable man sooner (like way sooner). Been open to children sooner (like much sooner. Peak fertility is early to mid-20s, ladies). I sometimes regret my higher ed degrees, but I never regret my marriage and children.
Your comment about envy was insightful, too. So much of the narrative we’re sold is based on how we view others, usually other women. It’s unfortunate that we’re so short-sighted: how women look, the stuff they own, the places they go, the siren look of youth and individualism. The frazzled new mom of today at least has the potential to be the 80-something grandma or great-grandma. Maybe she would look with fondness on a career, too, but certainly not the same way she would cherish loved ones as she ages. No, marriage and children don’t happen for everyone (see your opening note to the post; good qualifier). But when they do, they grant literally lifelong gifts. That more young women would learn this, and learn it now.
Thank you!