If You Want Children, Make Wise Choices

The common feminist advice given to women to live in the moment, travel the world, go drinking, hook up, and have fun in your 20's and even 30's and then settle down and be a mom when you've had your fill is absolutely terrible advice for many reasons.

1) A woman's fertility is not guaranteed. Waiting until the 30's or 40's to have children all too often means not being able to have them at all. Not naturally, anyway, and often reproductive technologies can't even help. Fertility, unlike travel or luxuries, won't wait. Use it while you have it.

2) Having children doesn't prevent women from having fun, as so many assume. Yes, children tie you down to some degree, but they're not little ball and chains. Your life isn't over when you have kids. In fact, having children helps us realize what really matters about life and have a far richer and more fulfilling experience than any party lifestyle will ever provide.

3) Being irresponsible, drinking, partying, and hooking up are terrible choices regardless of what age you are or whether or not you have kids. They're bad moral choices and also harmful in many other ways.

4) Being a party animal doesn't prepare a woman for being a wife and mother. Quite the opposite. It teaches her to live for her instant gratification and not consider others or the future. It teaches her to resent children as little burdens that stop her from doing what she wants to do. It teaches her to care only about herself. In short, it turns her inward rather than outward and fuels her natural selfishness, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed in a good mother.

5) Partying, drinking, and hooking up make a woman a bad wife, and bad wives are also, by definition, bad mothers. The kinds of habits that cause a woman to be a good wife, to knit her heart with her husband's, and to put others before herself also help to ensure that her children will grow up in the stable, married home they need. Premarital sex undermines marital stability. A habit of selfish indulgence doesn't magically end when the wedding is over. The habits we make follow us for a lifetime.

6) Selfish, irresponsible behaviors like drinking heavily and premarital sex cause disease and reduce a woman's chances of having healthy children. Alcohol kills brain and liver cells. Some STDs can be transmitted to a child, cause cancers of the reproductive organs, or cause sterility. Fertility isn't assured for any woman as she ages, but it's even less sure if she is engaging in behaviors that put her and her reproductive health at risk.

7) Smart, loyal men who want to settle down and have a family don't pick partying women for that role, and for good reason. The 30-something living weekend to weekend just to party or hooking up with a string of different men is not good wife material. So when she finally decides, in her mid-30's, after being all used up, that she wants a husband and children, she is very likely to find she has zero prospects. Men aren't going to marry her now. They're not stupid.

The bottom line is that women who want a husband and children need to plan in their teens and early-20's to pursue behaviors that help further that goal and prepare them to find a good man and make use of their fertile years. They need to be cultivating the kind of character that makes good wives and mothers. They need to be making wise and healthy choices. Those who do the opposite and think they can party like there's no tomorrow will likely find that their family goals never come true, and all because they made poor choices. For good or for ill, we reap what we sow.