Most of our lives, we live under the weight of an illusion that there is a right way to sequence life. This idea is basically what success should look like. We are taught to optimize our lives, to live with maximum efficiency, and to delay making major decisions until we feel ready, believing that this careful and measured approach reduces uncertainty. But procrastination often increases stress, followed by disproportionate levels of self-deception when things don’t go according to plan. It’s only when we don’t align with others that we begin to question these preconceived notions.
Nowhere is this clearer than when deciding when to start a family: Delay until you’re stable, but don’t delay too long; Be thoughtful and deliberate, but don’t miss your window. As a result, individuals are held accountable for outcomes over which they cannot fully control.
The cost of getting it right
Take Maya for example. Maya is 34 years old and sits in a fertility clinic after months of trying to conceive. What’s surprising is not just the uncertainty of the situation, but how he feels about how he got here. For years, he prided himself on careful and responsible decision-making. He is involved in the construction of a careerchoosing a partner whom he trusted and expected to be “ready” enough in his life to support a child, both emotionally and financially.
His decision to delay was deliberate and according to what he was told would lead to responsible success. Only now, in the context of the difficulty of conceiving, is a competing narrative emerging that suggests she may have waited too long. His family plays it straight, but the message doesn’t originate there. It reflects the broader cultural tensions she has navigated over the years.
Cultural double bond
Over the past few decades, Western culture has changed in ways that appear progressive on the surface, but introduce a complex psychological bond. Previous generations were more likely to frame parents as something that can coexist with instability, given that financial and emotional foundations develop over time.
The latest messaging emphasizes the opposite sequence with stability at the fore. At the same time, however, the old warning about expecting too much hasn’t gone away. The result is a double-bind in which individuals are told to delay until they are fully prepared, while also being responsible for the biological consequences of that delay. This creates a tension where no matter what decision is made, it can be felt as a wrong decision.
Over time, this tension does not go away. It becomes internalized and shapes how we value our time and our sense of readiness. It begins to build safety and preparedness more broadly.
Safety, stability and the nervous system
Time is often shaped by our sense of security in the present. Many adults now approaching parenthood have grown up in times of rising living costs and predictable career trajectories. These conditions affect not only conscious planning, but also how nervous system experiences security. Reprints require expansion, but expansion is less likely to occur when environment feels vague.
In this context, delaying parenthood is not simply a matter of preference or priorities; it reflects an adaptive response to our perceived circumstances. So, what appears externally as a delay is often an internal reflection of a sense of insecurity.
When psychological time coincides with biological time
Fertility declines with age, and while reproductive technologies expand the possibilities, they are still limited. For people who have delayed parenthood until they feel ready, this can cause a painful separation. They did what they had to do. They tried to fix it. So when fertility becomes difficult, it doesn’t just feel like bad luck. It can feel like something has gone wrong. Not only with the body, but with the very plan of personal existence.
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Emerging self-awareness
In this context, external comments such as “You should have started earlier” carry more weight than they otherwise would. Was this calculation wrong? Were we too naive? Why did we wait so long again? Re-evaluating past decisions forces the mind to re-evaluate and imagine alternative timelines that could lead to different outcomes. However, this idea bias ignores the wider context in which decisions are made.
For Maya, even though she realized she was doing her best, given the information she had, she still couldn’t rest there. This is because cultural narratives tend to frame the journey to parenthood in binary terms: the right time and the wrong time.
Moving away from a single timeline story
The concept of a proper timeline is limiting. Our cultural narratives tend to collapse these differences into a simplistic model of right time and wrong time, which then encourages retrospective self-criticism when things go wrong.
Keep the full context
A more accurate psychological understanding requires the maintenance of multiple complexities. Decisions about when to have a baby are made by our environment, relationship dynamics, cultural messaging, and internal states of readiness, all acting together to form a psychological composite rather than a discrete decision. Therefore, decisions are made within the constraints, not outside of them.
Maya did not delay because she misunderstood what was at stake. He made this decision based on the information, circumstances and pressures that existed at the time. The task now is to identify the point at which things went wrong, but to recognize that no version of time fully resolves uncertainty. What needs to change is not the decision of the past, but whether we continue to bind ourselves to old, simplistic rules that fail to account for the complexities of our lives.
Throw away the rulebook.
