When Considering Parenting, Think "Quality" Over "Quantity"
Why "We Can Afford It" Isn't Good Enough
I was sitting across from a young woman the other day.
She came to my office seeking approval for a medical cannabis card to help with her symptoms of PTSD.
When we talk about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, we often go straight to imagining horrors on the battlefield: endless gunfire you can’t escape, life-and-death split-second decisions, witnessing those close to you suffering horrifying final moments, among other things.
We tend to think in terms of “service-related” PTSD and forget that trauma comes in many forms.
Deaths of loved ones. Childhood abuse (of all kinds). An existence that requires day-in and day-out hypervigilance just to survive—like being on the streets.
My client fell into the latter category. She suffered traumatic stress from the life she was thrown into.
Childhood sexual and physical abuse from her caregivers. Homelessness. Multiple stints in psychiatric inpatient facilities. Officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder and psychosis as well. You get the idea.
She had three children to care for, all under age nine. Through all this, she managed to hold down a part-time remote job.
Today, in my office, she was desperate for a better way to cope with her past and the imprints it left on her body.
The psych meds she’d been given had wreaked havoc on her mood, her metabolic health, and what was left of her sanity.
I asked about her children.
“Whooo. Three under nine? You’ve got yourself a handful.”
“He wants more.” She looked to her left at the gentleman seated next to her.
“More?” I said as I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. I thought to myself this woman is in no position to be expanding her family anytime soon. Not for her. Not for the children at home. Not for the proposed children to be.
“Yup.”
“Why is that? Three not enough?”
“God told me to go forth and multiply,” he said.
“Mmmm, okay. I mean, as long as you can take care of them all.”
I’m nothing if not real with my clients—to a degree.
“Yeah, I can. I work at [makes good money job, redacted, like many things these days].”
“Ah. Okay.”
I wanted to close my laptop and have a tough heart-to-heart. Or at least leave them with something to consider that they hadn’t yet.
But my role was not to lecture her or her companion on the socioeconomic and neuropsychological aspects of rearing healthy children.
In other words, just because you can feed, clothe, and house a child doesn’t mean you’re ready to raise one.
You may earn enough money to support a budding human, but that doesn’t mean you have the time, the patience, the emotional intelligence, or the breathing room required to give a child the other half of what they need to survive and thrive: safety, attunement, patience, leadership, emotional connection. The list goes on.
And in this situation, my client was in no position to offer that to a new baby. Let alone the ones at home. Let alone herself. Of course, to the gentleman sitting next to her, that didn’t seem to matter.
After all, it wouldn’t be him at home raising all the children.
Children need more than their basic needs met to survive and thrive—lest they one day sit in the same chair their mother sits in now.
A king in the 13th century wanted to study whether children had innate propensities to speak certain languages. So he forbade the babies’ caregivers from speaking to scores of newborns. Do not coo. Do not smile. Do not resonate. Just feed. Just change soiled linens (I doubt Huggies were around in the Middle Ages). Just do the very basics to help them survive—or at least what the king thought were the basics.
He didn’t intend to keep the children from feeling loved. He merely wanted to see whether, once they were able, their first words sounded more like “matri” or “mere.”
Well, he didn’t get that opportunity.
Because the babies died.
While the children were fed and kept clean, they were missing a key component of survival and development in our species: limbic resonance and attunement.
All fancy words for saying someone who cares for them and shares a special, calming, two-way emotional bond.
Before adding to your family intentionally, you need to have room inside yourself for patience, reflection, and personal growth. That’s you feeling safe so they can feel safe.
This isn’t about barring traumatized people from having children. Most of us carry some version of trauma.
It’s about capacity.
Money and inclination are not the same thing as readiness.
I should know. I was 17, knocked up with an oopsie baby. I definitely didn’t have the best resume for motherhood at the time.
I got lucky, though. I did have the capacity in my head and heart to provide more than the basics.
Intergenerational trauma is very real. It’s likely the reason my client was sitting in front of me at that very moment—and why her three children are statistically at higher risk for their own trauma, whether through abuse, poverty, and/or incarceration.
The good news is attunement matters.
But attunement requires presence.
And presence isn’t just being physically in the room. It’s about paying attention to what your child needs beyond “three hots and a cot.”
It’s not snapping or yelling when your child makes a mistake or your patience wears thin. It’s being able to pause. To reflect. To own it when you mess up (because no parent is perfect). It’s about meeting your child’s emotional needs as much as their physical ones.
It’s also letting your little human be themselves without judgment or expectation. But that’s another post for another day.
That kind of presence is hard to access when you’re still living in survival mode.
Parents need the capacity to give it.
The old “you can’t pour from an empty cup” line applies.
Now back to my client and to the very-much-still-around cultural norm of having children as the “next step,” the right thing to do, the way to pass on your lineage (back to the 13th century again, I see).
All fine and good reasons. Just make sure you can provide more than milk and a clean bottom.
-PZ