Should We Have Children? How Couples Can Navigate One of Life’s Biggest Decisions

View from my therapy room in Paddington

There might not be a more loaded question in a relationship than this one. Do we have children? Do we want to? Does one of us want to and the other doesn’t? And what does it mean for us if we can’t agree?

If you and your partner are sitting with this question right now, you are not indecisive, or immature. You are doing the honest, courageous work of figuring out what you actually want from your lives, and that takes time, self awareness, and often a safe space to think out loud without being judged.

This post is for couples who are genuinely unsure, couples where one or both people feel unclear, couples where there is a difference of opinion, and couples who want to make this decision from a place of clarity rather than pressure. It draws on the clinical frameworks of two leading experts in this field, Ann Davidman and Merle Bombardieri, as well as current research on childfree couples and relationship satisfaction.

Why This Decision Feels So Hard

The difficulty of this decision is not a character flaw. It is a symptom of how complex and deeply personal this question really is.

In her Parenthood Clarity framework, Ann Davidman, a licensed marriage and family therapist who has been helping people with this question for over thirty years, identifies something that many people find immediately relieving: most people who feel stuck are not stuck because they do not know what they want. They are stuck because they cannot hear what they want underneath all the noise. The noise of family expectations. The noise of social timelines. The noise of fear.

Davidman’s work begins with something radical. Before you can explore what you actually want, you need to clear the decks of everything that is getting in the way of hearing your own desire clearly. She asks her clients to write down every fear, every loaded question, every disapproving comment, every pressure they have ever absorbed about this decision and put them all in an envelope. Not to resolve them yet. Just to set them aside long enough to hear something quieter underneath.

What is getting in the way for most couples tends to fall into a few categories:

Social and family pressure

The assumption that of course you will have children, delivered through offhand comments, pointed questions at Christmas, or the raised eyebrows when you say you are not sure yet. These messages are absorbed over decades and can make it almost impossible to distinguish between what you want and what you have been conditioned to want.

Fear based decision making

Merle Bombardieri, clinical social worker and author of, “The Baby Decision”, identifies what she calls “poison vials”: deeply held but often inaccurate beliefs that distort how people think about both paths. On the parenthood side, these include the belief that infancy lasts forever, or that having a child will rescue a troubled relationship. On the childfree side, they include the belief that you will inevitably be lonely in old age, or that a life without children is somehow a lesser life. Bombardieri’s work helps people surface these beliefs so they can be examined rather than just felt.

Ambivalence being misread as an answer

Many people assume that because they feel ambivalent, they must not want children. Or conversely, that because they can imagine a beautiful life without them, they must not really want them. Bombardieri is explicit on this: ambivalence is not a sign that the answer is obvious. It is a normal human response to a genuinely enormous decision. The goal is not to get rid of the ambivalence; it is to understand what is underneath it.

Partner dynamics

When couples are at different places with this decision, there is often an understandable pull toward positioning, defensiveness, and debate. This can shut down honest reflection in both people and make the conversation feel like a negotiation rather than an exploration.

How to Actually Make This Decision: Insights from Davidman and Bombardieri

Both Davidman and Bombardieri share a key insight: this decision cannot be made from the head alone, and it cannot be made by debating pros and cons lists with your partner. It has to come from somewhere deeper.

Davidman’s approach: live the questions, not the debate

One of Davidman’s most powerful exercises is deceptively simple. She asks clients to spend one week fully inhabiting the “yes” to parenthood. Not to decide anything, not to argue for it, but to genuinely sit with it. To wake up each morning imagining they are going to be a parent. To write about what comes up. Then to spend a week fully inhabiting the “no.” Again, not debating, just being inside that reality.

What this does is bypass the analytical mind that keeps ping ponging between arguments. It gives feelings and instincts a chance to surface. One client described it this way: she had spent years going back and forth in her head, never getting anywhere. When she finally sat with one answer for a week at a time, she started to notice things she had never had space to notice before.

Bombardieri’s approach: separate the noise from the signal

Bombardieri’s five step framework moves people from confusion to confidence by helping them do three things: identify the external voices and myths that are shaping the decision, reconnect with their own values and desires beneath those voices, and begin to imagine what a genuinely good version of either path looks like for them.

Her journal exercise is well regarded. She suggests writing in two different colours: one for moments of genuine excitement or warmth when you imagine parenthood, and another for moments of genuine relief or expansion when you imagine a childfree life. Over weeks, patterns emerge that the thinking mind has been too busy to notice.

Both frameworks share a commitment to non judgment. Neither Davidman nor Bombardieri pushes people toward parenthood or away from it. The goal is genuine clarity, and genuine clarity honours both paths as equally valid.

Before You Debate: Put It All On the Table First

One of the biggest mistakes couples make when navigating this question is jumping straight into debate mode. One person makes a case for having children, the other makes a case for not having them, and suddenly it feels like a negotiation where someone has to win and someone has to lose. That framing poisons the conversation before it has had a chance to go anywhere useful.

Before you argue your position, try something different. Sit together, and take turns just naming everything that is in you on this topic. Not to convince the other person. Not to defend a position. Just to put it all on the table.

What do you genuinely feel drawn toward? What are you afraid of? What messages have you absorbed from your family, your culture, your religion, your friendship group? What do you imagine your life looking like at sixty? What are you grieving, in either direction?

Your partner does the same. No rebuttals. No reassurances. Just listening.

This is often the conversation couples have never had before, even after years together, because the stakes feel too high to just be honest. But it is exactly this kind of honest, exploratory conversation that creates the conditions for a decision that both of you can actually live with.

This is also where couples counselling can be genuinely useful. Having a skilled third person in the room means neither of you has to manage the conversation while also being in it. You can both just be honest.

What the Research Actually Says About Childfree Couples

If you are leaning toward a childfree life, or already there, you may have absorbed the cultural message that you will eventually regret it, end up lonely, or miss something essential. It is worth looking at what the evidence actually says, because the evidence is more nuanced than the cultural script.

A 2023 systematic review by Stahnke, Cooley, and Blackstone, published in The Family Journal, examined fifteen peer reviewed studies across four decades and found a consistent positive association between being childfree by choice and life satisfaction. The research challenge here is worth naming: for a long time, studies lumped together people who were childfree by choice with people who were childless due to infertility or circumstance. When you separate those groups, the picture for those who chose a childfree life looks markedly different from the cultural assumption of regret and emptiness.

Research by sociologist Amy Blackstone, author of Childfree by Choice, found that childfree couples consistently report strong relationship satisfaction, partly because they have more uninterrupted time and energy to invest in each other. A study from the Open University in the UK found that childfree couples reported stronger romantic connection and less stress related conflict than parent couples, a finding that holds up across multiple studies.

Older adult women who had chosen a childfree life also reported high levels of life satisfaction in a 2020 qualitative study by Stahnke, Blackstone, and Howard. What came through in their interviews was a sense of active investment in their lives, resilience, and strong social networks. Were there moments of navigating stigma? Yes. Was there pervasive regret? No.

None of this means that childfree couples are happier than parents in some straightforward, competition style way. The happiness research on parenthood is genuinely complex. Parenting comes with its own profound sources of meaning and joy that are different in kind, not just quantity, from what childfree people experience. The point is simply this: a well lived childfree life is a fully realised, deeply satisfying one. The cultural story that says otherwise is not backed by evidence.

How Childfree Couples Build Shared Meaning and a Full Life

One of the things that gets less attention in these conversations is how childfree couples actually structure a meaningful shared life. Because children do create built in rituals, routines, and social scaffolding, couples who are childfree by choice often need to be more intentional about building theirs. Research and clinical observation suggest that the ones who thrive do exactly that.

Investing deeply in the relationship itself

Without children as the organising principle of the household, childfree couples often develop a rich friendship and companionship with each other. This can be one of the most sustaining aspects of a childfree life, but it requires intention. Couples who do this well tend to protect time together, keep growing, stay curious about each other, and resist the drift that can happen in any long partnership.

Building chosen family and community

Research consistently shows that childfree individuals are more likely to invest in and rely on chosen family: close friendships, nieces and nephews, colleagues, neighbours, and community networks. These relationships do not happen by accident. They are cultivated deliberately. Many childfree couples describe a richness and flexibility in their social world that they find deeply nourishing.

Anchoring life in shared values and purpose

Childfree couples who report the highest wellbeing tend to have a strong sense of what they are for, not just what they opted out of. This might look like shared creative projects, meaningful work, advocacy, travel, care for aging parents, mentoring younger people in their fields, or contribution to community. What matters is that the life is organised around something that feels generative and worthwhile, that it has a story the couple is writing together.

Embracing legacy on their own terms

A significant source of meaning for many childfree couples is reconsidering what legacy actually means. Legacy is not only biological. It lives in the people you influence, the work you leave behind, the care you extend to others, and the community you help to build.

This Conversation Belongs in Your Relationship, Not Just Your Head

If you and your partner are navigating this decision, or have been avoiding it because it feels too fraught, too painful, or too uncertain, you do not have to do it alone. This is one of the conversations that couples counselling is genuinely well suited for.

It is not about a therapist telling you what to do. It is about creating a space where both of you can be honest, where the conversation does not default into debate or withdrawal, and where you can actually hear each other and yourselves clearly.

If you would like to explore this together with support, I would love to work with you.

[Book a session with Brisbane Couples Counselling] https://clientportal.zandahealth.com/clientportal/brisbanecouplescounselling?_gl=1*pjqcq7*_gcl_au*ODY5MjA3NzU4LjE3NDU4MDcyMTMuNTU2NTE1MjQwLjE3NDU5OTk1OTUuMTc0NTk5OTU5Ng

Michelle Janssen is a couples counsellor and PACFA Clinical Member based in Paddington, Brisbane. She has a Master of Counselling and specialises in helping couples navigate complex relationship decisions, including the children vs childfree question, using evidence-informed approaches.