From child-free to a backseat full, how do we decide how many children make up the ideal family for us? “That is partly determined by your personality,” says psychologist Dagmar Versmissen, who specializes in all questions or problems that may arise in the perinatal period.
Deciding whether to have children, let alone how many, is a more fraught question today than it was a generation or two ago. Going childless by choice no longer has the stigma it used to have and various social changes – from high housing prices to the ambitions of women in the workplace – mean that families today are smaller than in the past. According to figures from the Federal Planning Bureau, a Belgian woman had an average of 2.54 children in 1960. In 2022, that figure was 1.52 children.
Usually two
How people decide what the “right” number of children is for them happens in a variety of ways, as the four families in this article show. “But in our region of the world we usually go for two children,” says psychologist Dagmar Versmissen. ‘Almost half of the families consist of two children. It is a system that partly maintains itself. Many today’s parents grew up in a family with two children and copy what they know.’
While two children is the norm, one’s decision about what the “right” number of children is is often influenced by a number of factors. ‘How you approach life is determined by the interaction of your personal style with what the environment offers you,’ says Versmissen. ‘Your personality influences your life choices. Someone who grew up as an only child can consciously decide to do things differently. While someone else experienced the same situation as wonderful.’
Pie chart
In addition to our personality and what life brings us, some people decide entirely on intuition how many children they want, while others are guided by reason. “It is good that people today take more time to think about their desire to have children,” says Versmissen, who is also co-author of the book Pink clouds and tequila (Pelckmans), about what becoming a mother really does to you.
‘If you know that research shows that mothers of one child are happier than mothers of more children, or than women without children, then it is good that people think about what suits them best as a person or as a couple. That happened today more than forty years ago. But overthinking things can also drive you crazy. You can go through a hundred scenarios, but in the end you don’t know what your child will be like, or whether you will like parenthood.’
‘I sometimes have people who have doubts about a child fill in a pie chart of their lives. It helps to clarify priorities. What roles do you take on, where do you get your happiness? How will your role as a partner, girlfriend or sports person change when you have a baby? What do you need to take on the roles that make you happy again in the future?’
‘If you make a conscious choice, you can fall back on it on days when everything goes wrong and you think: why did I choose this? In all the chaos of life, it can be comforting to know that you have made a well-considered choice. That doesn’t mean you have to stand by your life choices every day. No matter how happy you are with your family, it’s also okay to feel like you want to be alone sometimes. The book Sometimes I want a child highlights that feeling beautifully, and that also applies to a second or third child.’
Who decides?
What if a couple disagrees about how many children they want? ‘In heterosexual relationships I often see that the man lets the woman decide, because she takes on most of the care tasks in the relationship. It is different, for example, with an impactful fertility process, or if your first child is a crying baby. Then it is often the man who says: we will not do this a second time, because it has a major impact on our quality of life. Your desire to have children can therefore change under the influence of circumstances.’
‘Sometimes one partner is stiff and the other still wants to try. The person who then gains the upper hand must be able to recognize that his or her partner wanted something different. At such a moment I like to invite partners for a conversation together, because it is very important for your partner relationship that you allow each other’s feelings of loss or fear and that there can also be room for sadness.’
