Being ready for parenthood involves more than just the ability to conceive or adopt. Financial stability, emotional and relationship readiness are important factors to consider. Parenthood can bring out both the best and worst in a person, and it’s important to be prepared for the challenges that come with it. Seeking counseling before having a baby can help improve emotional readiness. It’s also important for both partners to be equally ready and willing to support each other in parenting.
There are many parents who argue that you are never really ready to be a parent. To some extent this is true. You absolutely cannot predict or anticipate all the hardships along the road to parenthood, or the incredible joys you may experience because of your children. Such joys can be tempered by frustration, exhaustion, and a feeling that you’ll never get this parenting business to work right. The feeling is common to parents of infants, toddlers, grammar students, teenagers, and sometimes even adult children. No matter how hard you try, you can expect parenting to be full of successes and failures.
There are some preconditions for being ready for parenthood. It is true that most people may be able to have children, but the ability to conceive or adopt is not directly tied to being ready to be a parent. There are many things about yourself that you should look into carefully to find out how far you are along the road to being “ready.” These include consideration of the practical and financial aspects of your life, your and your partner’s emotional health (if you have one), the health of your relationships, your partner’s equality in wanting children, and your physical health.
You may feel ready to be a parent, but what does your bank account say? Having a child costs money, from the beginning of the pregnancy through the life of the child. Expect to spend at least $10,000 US Dollars (USD) in the first year of your child’s life, and much more if you plan to use daycare. These costs are likely to increase; Nursery can replace nappies, twin beds replace cots, and once a child is kindergarten age, don’t forget the many costs of things like school clothes, school supplies, after school if needed, tutor if needed and participation in extracurricular activities. Extra expenses crop up along the way, such as braces, where even with dental insurance, you could be paying USD $4000-6000 for a few years of orthodontic treatment.
When a child turns 18, your busy days aren’t necessarily over. Tuition fees, even at state schools, continue to soar. Some financial experts suggest you should start saving for college before you have kids, given the projected rising expenses for post-secondary education. There’s also a trend toward kids returning home after college, which could mean you help your kids continue to meet and pay for living expenses long after they’ve been considered legal adults.
Another financial consideration when analyzing whether you’re ready to be a parent is the financial loss you may incur after the baby is born. Can a parent afford to stay home or work from home? If not, how much will your income be reduced by childcare? Some parents find that a person’s income only matches the costs of child care, effectively cutting their income in half. So the question of whether you can afford to be a parent should be based on the analysis of what your income will be after the birth of your child.
Don’t be discouraged if your current income level suggests you’re not quite ready to be a parent. If your goal is to want to have children, use the present tense to get more job training so you can work higher-paying jobs, or use a few years of work to save money for the unavoidable and usually unanticipated expenses that come with parenthood. By improving your financial situation now, you can certainly become more ready in a couple of years.
It would be great if financial stability was the only prerequisite for becoming a parent. It can be the easiest to cope with with hard work, additional education, and thrift. Emotional readiness can take a little longer to figure out, and having stable emotional health isn’t always immediately achievable.
Why is emotional health so important to parenting? Most parents can respond very quickly. Parent children can easily bring out the best in you, but also the worst. If you suffer from a short temper, don’t expect that you will never unleash it on your children. Children have a remarkable ability to make us behave childishly ourselves: They can frustrate us to the point that we’d probably prefer a long-term confinement in a padded cell. If you suffer from rapidly changing moods, you can reasonably expect your child to inherit this trait.
Some people feel compelled to have children in order to do a better job of parenting than their parents did. This is a noble aspiration, but you have to ask yourself if you’ve ever had to deal with how you were a parent. Much of what we learn from bad, mediocre, or even good parenting becomes what’s called our core belief structure, the things we often don’t notice exist but guide our behavior. Trying to reclaim the past by being a parent now suggests that many aren’t ready to be a parent, unless you have fully analyzed and dealt with that past.
Therefore, emotional readiness may mean getting counseling before deciding to have a baby. Just as you want to offer your children financial security, you also want to offer them emotionally stable parents. If you haven’t gotten there yet in your pre-parenting life, take a few years to work with a therapist to get there. We all know that high pressure situations can make us act in the worst possible way and parenting can definitely be called a high pressure environment at times.
Try to be realistic and honest with yourself about how you respond to crises in your day-to-day life. Parenthood has been called a series of small and sometimes large crises. While there are mitigating factors, like the sudden realization of how wonderful your child is, you’re in crisis mode from the moment you hold your beautiful baby in your arms. Evaluate how much you can control your emotions when you’re tired, and expect that many of your parenting decisions can be made when you’re tired. Analysis of job performance for a stay-at-home parent suggests that such parents work the equivalent of two and a half full-time jobs. Are you ready for so much work?
Individual emotional health must be compared to the health of your relationship with your parenting partner. Parenthood impacts marriages and partnerships. If you look at your current relationship and find an environment of constant arguing, no eye to eye contact or, more seriously, emotional or physical abuse, do not bring a child into this environment. Some people believe they will be able to save a failing relationship by introducing children into the mix. This is rarely the result of having children.
In fact, you can expect tension in even great relationships to increase when partners or spouses become parents. Statistically, the divorce rate increases after children are born, and spouses or partners have much less time to work on their problems around the clock. It can be difficult to have the same level of intimacy that occurred in your pre-baby relationship. Both parents may be too tired to do much, but they say goodnight to each other.
It is also helpful to analyze whether each spouse is equally ready to be a parent. If one spouse isn’t ready, the couple isn’t ready. The best parenting requires full effort from both partners, a willingness to support each other, and an equal sharing of the workload. A partner who is “convinced” into having children by the other partner may feel resentment, annoyance, or pure anger once a child arrives on the scene. This can obviously draw the ire of the spouse who may have to take on more of the parental workload without support. It’s a bad mix, which can lead to unhappiness in a marriage and less than perfect parenting.
When assessing emotional and relationship readiness, do so honestly. Weigh what you’re giving up as a couple, the strength of your union (or the support of your friends and family if you’re going to be a single parent), and equal or nearly equal availability of partners and spouses. Make an effort to bring the children into healthy and stable relationships. If these relationships don’t exist yet, consider going to couples counseling to discuss the issues present in your marriage and the topic of willingness to parenthood.
You analyzed and worked on your financial situation, your emotional readiness and relationship readiness. These are big steps in becoming ready to be parents. Another part of the picture that deserves just as much attention is your health. Are you a smoker, heavy drinker or significantly overweight? This question applies to both parents in determining readiness. If so, take some time to commit to losing weight and breaking these habits.
The mother’s health requires further thought. Does the mother have any medical conditions or take any necessary medications that could impact the health or development of a fetus? Before trying to get pregnant, check with your doctor or an obstetrician to discuss the impact of your current health on your pregnancy.
Follow your doctor’s recommendations to make changes to your current health whenever possible to minimize the risk of having a child with health problems. Parenting is hard, but parenting a child with health or developmental issues is even harder. Work on physical readiness just as much as you work on emotional and financial readiness to be a parent.
There’s no specific checklist for all the things you need to do to be ready to be a parent, but there are a few conditions under which most would agree that you’re not ready. These include the following:
You want a child because you want someone to love you: yes, your child will love you sometimes, but he will also need you more. Parents tend to give more love in thought, word, and deed than they will ever receive. If you’re looking for love, don’t expect a child to become that source. Are you in a relationship with an abusive person or someone who abuses drugs and/or alcohol — many children can attest to the horror of growing up in an abusive home or with parents who are addicted. Kids deserve better. Do you think getting pregnant will sustain a relationship or not end it – don’t use the children as relationship repair, or to keep someone from leaving a relationship. Everyone else does – even if friends are having babies, that doesn’t mean now is the right time for you. Evaluate the advice above and make a decision based on your circumstances. You hope that parenting will make you give up bad habits: give up bad habits first, instead of waiting to get pregnant or have a baby to do so.
Perhaps you’re reading this advice and are already well on your way to expecting a baby. Don’t despair. Many of the above recommendations can be implemented now. If you feel like you have some emotional work to do, there’s no time like the present to get started. Improve your physical health. See how you can create a more secure financial future for your child. Request couples counseling if you need it or sign up for parenting courses. If you are unexpectedly (or by choice) a single parent, work on having support systems in place or support groups that can help you with the additional challenges of single parenting. Even in a child’s early years, you can still prepare to be a parent, not just for your child, but for a child’s entire life.
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