Yuen: She’s having kids so her parents can have grandkids

You may have heard that there’s a generation of older adults in grief because their kids decided against having children of their own. More Americans are opting out of a traditional family path, and in doing so, crushing their parents' desperate wishes for grandchildren.

This topic became a front-page article in the New York Times a few months ago, a trend story that launched a thousand Reddit threads. Most commenters were unsympathetic to these Boomers and Gen Xers because, as one critic lamented, no one should ever force their kids to have kids. (Duh.)

For her entire adult life, Minnesota native Courtney Kocak, 41, was one of the decidedly child-free, focused on her busy writing, acting and stand-up comedy career in Los Angeles. But when her mom confided in her through tears that she always hoped to be a grandparent, Kocak did something radical. She listened.

“I don’t feel like I owe my parents this,” she told me about the prospect of having kids. “But on this particular issue, because they’ve been so lovely to me and gave me this great life, I feel compelled to keep the chain going.”

Shortly after that exchange with her mom, Kocak and her husband decided that they would try to have a baby, a choice she wrote about in an essay published by Business Insider. Her change of heart resonated with me because, well, we’re not supposed to admit that external pressures could influence whether we decide to have a child — one of humankind’s most personal, consequential and irreversible life decisions.

The truth is, you could be blissfully sitting on the fence for years until a now-or-never urgency starts to kick in. For Kocak, she noticed many of her peers in Los Angeles started to become new parents. Scrolling through their posts, she couldn’t help but envision what it would be like to have a daughter of her own. She also thought of her own precious relationship with her grandparents, and how that intergenerational bond between elder and child could stop with her.

“My grandmas have passed now, and it brings it into sharp relief: The people you cherish and love so much, they can go at any time,” she said. “I want my parents to have that time, and I want my kids to have that time, too. Grandparents are such a gift.”

Her parents, Mark and Kerri Kocak, are in their 60s, retired from their teaching jobs and living in the small southern Minnesota community of Jackson. They have four kids of their own and envisioned they would have been grandparents by now.

But it makes them happy to see their children are “living their independent lives and not rushing into something they don’t want or aren’t ready for,” the couple wrote me in an email.

“We would love grandchildren, but only if our kids want it for themselves,” they wrote. “A person needs to be up to the challenge. It is an individual choice on whether they desire that challenge.”

For several years, I was one of the undecideds. Reddit has an entire community of like-minded people, known as “Fencesitters,” with 71,000 members and growing. I never felt a strong instinct to become a mother. Being the younger sibling in my family, I never was forced to babysit and certainly never changed a diaper. When my sleep-deprived friends who started families while in their 20s detailed their encounters with breastfeeding and diaper blowouts, it was easy to say, “No, thanks.”

Now more than ever, Americans are saying no to having kids, with a main reason being they simply don’t want them. Recent survey results from a Pew Research Center study show that the share of Americans younger than 50 without children who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percentage points, from 37% to 47%, between 2018 and 2023.

When I was in my early 30s, going hard at my career and married for a few years, I remember my parents annoying me with comments about my biological clock. Their friends started to have grandbabies, and it wasn’t long before they started to pine for them, too. They seemed to be suggesting, “Do it while we’re still young.” Hearing their lamentations made me want to resist even more.

Now that I’m in my mid — OK, fine, late 40s — and the mom of two squirrely boys, I see the point my parents were trying to make. The frailty of my father’s footsteps reminds me that our time together, as three generations, is limited.

My moment of clarity arrived when some of our last remaining childless friends announced they were expecting their first child. Around this time, I also happened to run into my old high school French teacher. I admitted I was tormented with indecision, even as my window of fertility waned.

She said that’s fine, but if I waited too long, the decision will be made for me. “If you think you’re going to regret not having kids, just do it,” she said. (I don’t think you’re supposed to give advice like that anymore in modern society, but I’m glad she did, because it made me question what kind of future would make me happiest. How I interpret her advice years later is: Whatever you choose, make sure the choice is yours. People tend to have the biggest regrets when they fail to make a decision on their own.)

I look at my growing-too-fast kids and feel lucky to be their mom. Maybe in a parallel universe, Alternate Me is posing for a selfie (looking fit in a crop top) at Machu Picchu, also feeling lucky to travel the world with the time, energy and freedom afforded by a life without kids.

Maybe in a third reality, Alternate Me did have kids, and had them early enough to buy a few more good years with healthy, thriving grandparents in the picture, who attended their high school graduations and weddings.

There’s no right or wrong decision about whether or when to have kids, if we’re even lucky enough to control the outcome. (Many of us aren’t.) And it’s OK for would-be grandparents to feel a loss for the grandchildren they never had.

Kocak is wise to recognize that parenting shouldn’t be a go-it-alone affair, and she’s lucky to have some amazing people in her life who can help her and her husband lighten the load. Trust me, childrearing is all-hands-on-deck.

When Kocak’s parents got pregnant with her, it was a surprise; the couple were still in college in Mankato. “But we were still delighted, and she just fit into our lives and was a part of everything we did,” Kerri said. “We have always said, if you are waiting for all the stars to line up before you have kids, it will likely never happen.”

This isn’t a column for or against parenthood. It’s about listening to the voices inside you and what you value most. Courtney Kocak thought about the fabric of society and how much we gain when elders pass down knowledge and stories to a younger generation, a chain she wants to continue.

This realization came to her a bit late, she says, but she knows one thing: If she’s lucky to bring a new life into this world, that child will know that they were very much wanted. And that they will be very much loved.