How I Stopped Worrying About Starting A Family (And How You Can Too)

If you're worrying about starting a family, how you might cope, whether you're going to enjoy it, here's my way of tackling those worries and spoiler alert: no, it isn't about just not having kids.

My worries before becoming a parent

I'm Helen Cammack and I am a parent and a parenthood facilitator and educator, which means that I help couples who are thinking about starting a family to make strategic plans for parenthood so that they can take practical actions before they have kids to de-risk parenthood and ultimately be glad that they chose it.

But I wasn't always a parenthood facilitator and indeed I wasn't always a parent.

I didn't want to be a parent until my thirties.

In my twenties I was full of rage and principles. I really felt that becoming a parent would ruin my life, would stop me from having a career. And I was kind of outraged really about how this fell to women to do a lot of the work around parenting, and I felt like it was just not me. That was never going to be me.

In fact, I lost a 10-year relationship because we weren't on the same page about becoming parents at that time. And then in my thirties, I was really indecisive. I actually dreaded discussing the future with my partner.

I hated holidays because that was the time when we had lots of time to discuss what we were going to do in the future. And I just wasn't sure whether parenthood was going to be for me.

And he knew that he wanted to have kids. So it was a really difficult time because I didn't want to say goodbye to that relationship, but also I had this huge ambivalence pulling me in two different directions.

And a lot of it was due to the fact that I had a great life, a great childfree life. I enjoyed my career. I wanted to carry on doing things like travelling, being able to afford going out to restaurants and having a nice social life.

So I was really indecisive. I actually really couldn't choose what I wanted out of life.

And please don't let anybody tell you that if you're not certain that you want to be a parent, that you shouldn't be a parent. I totally believe you don't have to be a hundred percent certain.

And in fact those people who say that they are a hundred percent certain either probably don't have a great childfree life. Or they're not really aware of all of the challenges of parenthood. They're not fully aware of the reality.

Now after a period of real indecisiveness I made a decision. Yes, I was going to be a parent. But I was still ambivalent. I was still anxious about parenthood. Yes we had decided that we wanted to have kids together. But I still had a lot of mixed feelings about it. I was worried about whether I would be maternal enough. I was worried about whether I would be a competent parent. I had a fear of being really trapped in parenthood and not able to get out of it, and not able to do any of the things that I loved about my current life. And I had a big fear about regrets.

And all the time that we were trying to get pregnant, I had all these really mixed feelings. Every month when my period came, I felt sadness that I wasn't pregnant. But I kind of also felt relief that I didn't have to face this right now and that I still had a bit more time as a childfree person.

And then of course I felt huge guilt that I was even having these feelings of relief.

It was a hard time and it was really hard because we went through five years of infertility. And then finally I was still in this really difficult space of mixed feelings about being a parent and lots of worry about being a parent when we entered the adoption process. We decided we were going to adopt and at that point, I probably was at peak anxiety because I knew that adopting a child was actually going to be even more challenging than having a child biologically.

And all this time, my mixed emotions about parenthood affected my life profoundly in almost every way.

It affected my ability to focus on pretty much anything. So it was affecting my career and how well I was doing at work and how able I was to really press forward with my career because I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen in the rest of my life. It affected my relationship because I wasn't quite sure where that relationship might go If we decided not to have kids, or if we decided we wanted different things. And it affected my decision making about things like buying a home or moving abroad or taking job opportunities that came up. Everything seemed to be reliant on, would I or wouldn't I become a parent? When would it happen? And how was my life actually going to change as a result of it?

So then we entered the adoption process, and this was actually the turning point for me.

How I began to stop worrying

Now in case you don't know about the adoption process in the UK, you need to get assessed, which involves talking to a social worker and them writing a really big thick report about you and your suitability to be a parent of an adopted child. But also preparation classes. There's six to 12 months of preparation and learning that goes into adopting a child in the UK.

We both became way more self-aware we began to reflect on our childhood. We were forced to do this by talking to social workers, having deep conversations, almost therapeutic conversations with the social worker we were assigned. We had to share our perspectives about parenthood and really dig deep into what our feelings were and our worries, and start to set goals for parenthood. From our self-awareness we started to set ourselves goals and understand what each of us wanted to really get out of it.

And we built up knowledge about parenthood, in this case, adoptive parenthood. We started volunteering. We started to get some real experience with children which was actually amazing and very eye-opening. We started to understand how it was for parents, especially parents of adopted children, what the worst case scenarios might be, what had affected those children... we started to have realistic expectations about what parenthood was going to be like.

And we strengthened our support network. First of all, we strengthened the support that we were going to give each other because we talked through everything as a couple and really got to know how we could support each other. And we mapped our support network, our friends, our family, our community, so that we could understand who could support us and how we might need to strengthen that support.

And we optimised our environment. We made our home much more suitable for a family. And we set up our work to be more compatible with parenthood. We started to have conversations with our employers and our freelance clients so that we could understand how work could work through parenthood.

And finally we made an actual practical plan. Not only a time off work plan (who was going to take time off work), but also how was work going to actually work for us? How were we going to change our working patterns? What our support was going to look like, what the childcare plan was going to be for when we became parents and all of those jigsaw pieces that need to fit together. We figured that all out, we sketched it all out.

And we worked out whether we could afford it or not. We created a financial plan and understood how our finances were going to work. And through all of that work that we did, our confidence grew as we knew what we could handle. And we ended up adopting two siblings at the same time. Now we were never going to do this at the beginning of the process, we thought we can only handle one child. But actually we ended up adopting two siblings together.

They were aged four and two at the time. It was a massive thing to take on. But by that point, it had made us much more confident about how we would do it, how we were supported, and what that would feel like for us as parents.

What about you?

So I'd like to ask you, how do you feel about having kids? Are you raging against the machine? Are you thinking the world is unfair? The world shouldn't be like this. It's really unfair that time is ticking and I have to decide this soon. You know, it's unfair that the onus is largely on women or it seems to be, and there's a need to decide quickly. There's a need for sacrifices. Are you raging?

Are you indecisive? Are you just not sure about whether this is for you and you haven't made that decision yet? Maybe because your life is good. And because parenthood would be a risk for you and would risk what's good about your life. That's okay.

Or are you ambivalent? Are you being pulled in two different directions towards being child-free and having more adventures in that way and also perhaps towards having kids, but knowing that you can't do both of those things, but you're being kind of stretched between them.

Or are you decided that you do want to be a parent, but you're anxious about it because it's unknown. You might feel that you might not cope. You might not enjoy it. You might regret it. It might be bad for your relationship.

It might stop you achieving the things that you want to achieve at work.

Do you have FOMO? Do you have this fear of missing out? Because you think if you don't have kids, you will miss out on all the new experiences, things will pass you by. You maybe won't be involved in something that most people do experience.

How do you feel? Is it rage, indecision, ambivalence, anxiety, FOMO? What are all of those feelings that are affecting you? I totally get all of these feelings and I've felt most of them. But you don't need to adopt a child and to go through the adoption process to move past these emotions.

How can you stop worrying?

Well, you can, like we did, first build your self-awareness. Face up to and name your fears and understand where they come from. Do they come from your own childhood? Discuss them with your partner and get that awareness of where each other is coming from, and how you can understand each other a bit better.

Secondly, you can build your knowledge about parenthood. There is a knowledge gap when you're not a parent you just don't know what parenthood is like. You don't know very much typically about. The childcare system. You don't know very much about how parents manage their work. You don't know very much about the costs of kids. If you can build up your knowledge, then this can help you really understand what you're letting yourself in for and some of your fears will reduce through knowledge.

Thirdly, you can build your team around you. Build not only the support that you're going to get from your relationship. But also map your support network. Understand what support you have and haven't got and work out how you're going to strengthen that. How are you going to fill those gaps?

Fourthly, you can create the right environment to have children. You can think about how your workplace is actually going to support you. Is it going to be the right place for you to stay and have kids within that workplace. Or is, or do you actually need to change where you work? Or change how you work in order to have kids? And the same goes for your home and your location. Lots of people do think that they're going to move house, move location when they do have kids. But actually it becomes a lot harder to do that when you've got a lot of other things to think about when you are a parent. So getting in the right environment before you start can be unbelievably helpful.

And just generally creating a plan. A plan that is goals led. It starts with what you want to achieve and how you want to feel. And your plan needs to be sustainable for you. It needs to not lead to you burning out. It needs to cover your work, your childcare, your domestic life and your money, because it needs to be affordable for you and sustainable for you. So all of these things need to come together to create at least the outline of a plan about how you're going to manage parenthood.

And lastly, if you can do all of this, you can then make really well formed decisions about whether to be a parent or not, knowing what it involves for you, when to be a parent, how to get that timing right for you, and how to be a parent, whether that is in the so-called normal way, or whether that's through alternative pathways, such as adoption, surrogacy, et cetera.

So all of those steps are how you can stop worrying, start taking action, learning about yourself, learning about parenthood, taking those actions to build your team, create the right environment and create an overall plan that describes how you're going to manage parenthood so that you can make really good decisions that you will not regret.

So, what can you do next?

If you want to take action on this, the first thing that you can do is to sign up for my free mini course, "12 steps to plan parenthood", which just goes into more detail about all of the 12 steps that form my structure for how to create your strategic parenthood plan.

They are teeny tiny episodes, which you can listen to in about an hour.

And it's available as an audio course, so you can listen to it easily when you're doing the washing up or you're on your way to work. It will help you to know exactly what to do to de-risk parenthood, stop worrying about it and start putting into action some of the key things that you need to do to plan the family life that you actually want.