When Did You First Have "The Kid Conversation?"

When I began interviewing the childfree by choice this was one of the questions I would ask couples. Some would say this conversation happened very early in the relationship. Others would say that they assumed they would be parents until a point, years after their marriage, when they began to challenge that assumption and talk seriously about whether or not they would have children.

the Episcopal Church in North America, acknowledges "child-free monogamy" and encourages couples to have the "kid conversation"

I also heard stories from parents who told me that their children’s marriages were at risk because one spouse wanted children and the other didn’t. In these cases, I wondered: If we encouraged young couples to have the kid conversation before marriage, could we lower divorce rates?

Back when we were counseled before our marriage (by my uncle, a protestant minister), children in marriage were presumed by most faith communities. That was in the late eighties. But today, when close to 20 percent of women in the United States may never have children, can we continue to make this assumption? I don’t think so.

Which is why I went looking for guidelines for counseling couples before marriage. Many of the guidelines I found assumed parenthood, encouraging couples to discuss how they might choose to raise children and handle their faith education and how they might manage disagreements and manage money.

I was only able to find a few guidelines that encouraged couples to discuss to what degree children were important to their lives. One set of guidelines, excerpted from Nolan and Kirkpatrick, Living Issues in Ethics and used by the Episcopal Church in North America, acknowledges "child-free monogamy" and encourages couples to have the "kid conversation" but, as I would find, guidelines that do so remain scarce in our faith communities.

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