How to Know When You’re Ready to Have a Baby

Have you been keeping yourself up at night, hemming and hawing over whether you should toss the birth control and get your sex on?

(Yeah, me too.)

To help us out, I wrote down all the advice I offer clients who come to me with that whopper of a question, “Am I ready to have a baby?”

While there’s no crystal ball (or all-knowing in-law) to tell you the perfect time to hop on the path to conception, there are key life elements that should ideally be healthy before you create a human, or adopt.

1. Physical Health – If your health is tenuous it could be difficult to conceive, carry a baby to full term, and then care for the baby when they arrive. To ensure your body is primed for parenthood visit your primary care physician, cut out alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and drugs, and adopt a nourishing diet and exercise regime.

2. Financial Health – If you look at your financial reserves and feel a sense of stability and security wash over you, you’re likely in a good financial spot to have a baby. Having a child fills your life with enough pockets of uncertainty – don’t let your finances be one of them.

3. Emotional Health – Even the most emotionally stable women amongst us are often thrown into an emotional tumbler when they have a baby – ensure you’re at a balanced emotional starting point before conceiving by visiting a therapist to take a look at how your emotional health is doing, and figure out ways to get it to the health status of “thriving.”

4. Romantic Health – If you’ll be tackling parenthood with a partner it’s important to have a robust base of trust, open communication, respect, and overall love with that baby-making-teammate. Have a “relationship overview” talk before becoming pregnant where you look into and discuss every nook and cranny of your relationship, so you can figure out what might need some work, and then dedicate yourselves to putting in that work before conceiving.

And finally, it’s essential to feel like you actually want to have a baby. Many people have a child because society tells them they should, and they check off that box even though it’s something they didn’t want. So, check in with your heart and intuition to make sure you have a burning desire to have a fertilized egg latch on to your uterus.

So, what’s your answer?

Mine is that I’m still working on it – I have the burning desire but still need to boost the health of a few of the fore-mentioned areas.

Keep me posted!