Julie Jay: Is there ever a good time to have kids?

Irish Examiner

06-05-2025

Recently, a friend was venting about the spiralling costs of rebuilding her dream home, west of Dingle town.
As she talked me through their plans and how the amount of bureaucracy required to draw down the derelict-home grant was nothing short of scandalous, I nodded along, like a woman who could somehow empathise with her plight, despite my only experience of renovating a home starting and ending with my love of the show Property Ladder back in the noughties.
It starred the inimitable Sarah Beeny - a property development icon and inventor of the beanie hat.
Given that I am currently paying back the cost of a €50 coffee machine in instalments, it's safe to say this friend and I are in different seasons of our lives.
But as her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed like Puss in Boots's, I tried to allay her fears as best I could that this was, as she feared, a terrible time to be taking on such a big project.
'Building a house is like having a child, there's never a right or a wrong time to do it,' I announced with a surprising level of confidence, and my friend positively purred in delight.
No doubt the many, many property developers who read this article (I've heard I'm very big down the docks) would disagree with this statement and insist that there is indeed a good time to build a house (1954) and most certainly a bad time to seek planning permission (2025). Still, I believe my statement stands when it comes to the next generation of planning-permission seekers.
I was born in 1983 (my worryingly receding hairline might suggest I am, in fact, a '70s child), and a few years back, I took great interest in watching the episode of Reeling In The Years that examined the year of my birth, up until the point that the final vox pop contributor asserted that anyone with sense would get out of this country as soon as physically possible.
What on earth were my parents thinking, choosing to have not one, but two children in the middle of a dire economic depression? Surely, they could have waited until we were out of the recession, before deciding to procreate?
As anyone alive in the 20th century will attest, the answer is no, because things didn't really pick up until 1995, which would have had my mother up there with Janet Jackson in terms of maternal miracles.
I often fret about the world I have brought my children into. Between what is currently happening in Gaza, global instability, and a housing crisis that doesn't seem like it will be solved anytime soon, it is easy to feel despondent that the timing for adding two more people to the mix was wrong.
Seeing the increasing number of weather-related disasters, I have, more than once, asked myself what kind of future lies ahead for my two boys. In a week where we have been enjoying higher temperatures than Barcelona, it occasionally does niggle at me that somehow this isn't right.
As much as we love rubbing salt into the wound of anyone who went to Spain only to be without power for 18 hours and counting, global warming can no longer be denied.
When I think of social media, I sometimes despair at how it will be nearly impossible to protect children from what is sure to be a space that will cause them some form of anxiety, be that social, emotional, or purely related to finding a TikTok sketch their father threw up circa 2020, where he is trying to teach their heavily pregnant mother the cha cha. In other words, a tape no child should have to see.
When Bebo first landed on these shores at the turn of the millennium, I was so insecure about the social totem pole that I spent the majority of the time working in a West Kerry call centre, calling my best friend on loop and asking him to visit my page to get the hits up.
I can only imagine the competition that my own two will have to deal with when some children are hitting transition year and have already amassed more followers than the population of their medium-sized town.
Sometimes, I ask myself whether my timing for having children is selfish or ill-considered. But then I remember that I didn't meet their dad until 2018, so my hands were pretty much tied.
Having children beforehand would have meant having different children completely, and given that some of my previous partners liked Joe Rogan, that just doesn't bear thinking about.
There is never a good time or a bad time to have children. Just ask Madonna, whose pregnancy on the set of Evita had initially been seen as massively problematic by studio executives, only to have no impact on the film.
Yes, terrible things are happening in the world right now, but there are also lots of good developments, such as cartoons on demand.
In other words, there has never been a better time to bring forth children, but maybe hold off on the house-building if you can (apparently, bricks are expensive).