The Kind of Person Who Has Kids

It's okay if you don't "seem" like a mom

Reminder: My book, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, is now available for preorder! Nothing helps a book’s success quite like preorders, so grab your copy today!

---

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

For a long time, I worried about having kids because I didn’t have the personality of a prototypical parent.

Sure, there are folks beliefs about who becomes a parent—the chill, the fun-loving, possibly even the religious—and I’m not any of those. But there’s often a difference between our lay impression of personality and what the research shows about personality—this is the point of doing studies! Because of this book project, I also know who science says becomes a parent. And, spoiler, I’m not any of those things either.

Scientists generally agree that five traits make up personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Compared to other people, I rank low on extroversion, the perky, outgoing trait, and high on openness to experience, a trait that involves imaginativeness, creativity, and liberalism.

But several studies have found that people who become parents tend to be higher on extroversion and lower on openness.

People who are less open tend to be more traditional, and in this baby-bust era, having children is considered somewhat old-fashioned. (Or even borderline “trad,” as one researcher put it to me.)

And although extroversion connotes party-going and public speaking, it also makes you more likely to have one of the key ingredients of procreation: a romantic partner with whom you’re satisfied.

Extroversion is “related to being very social and having a big network,” Manon van Scheppingen, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, told me. “You also usually more happy in your relationship. So that might indirectly contribute to a higher likelihood to become a parent.”

These findings both made a lot of sense, but also gave me pause. Specifically, the one about extroversion concerned me. Throughout the many, many years during which I contemplated parenthood, I often wondered, Am I perky enough to be a mom?

My impression of mothers of young kids was that they were good at being upbeat, silly, and always “on.” In other words, extroverted. I felt like I could turn on a fun personality for a party with a few units of alcohol (not recommended for parents!), but that normally my tendency was to be subdued and serious. One of my friends from college once remarked to me, out of the blue, that I don’t seem to smile much.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the delivery ward: I became fun. Thanks to a witch’s brew of hormones and evolutionary biology and mirror neurons and exhausted delirium, as a parent, you’re biologically programmed to do whatever it takes to make your baby laugh. You will want to make the goofy faces. You will want to make the animal sounds. You will want to dance to the YMCA, titty a-dangle from the nursing bra, to stop the baby from crying. Yes, even you, an introvert who needs quiet time to themselves to recharge.

I knew I would change after I had a kid (mostly in bad ways, because I am a Millennial on the Internet.) But the thing I didn’t realize is that your kid will also change you. They will beam at you with their insane little baby-tooth smile and force you to do whatever it is they want or need. They will make you into an extrovert, at least for the limited purpose of entertaining them. Or, if that’s not what your kid wants, then they won’t. (If you’re a hardened introvert, you can pray that your baby will crave a quiet, book-filled room with lots of cats.)

You don’t have to worry about whether you “seem” like a mom before you become one because you will become “like a mom” after you literally become one. There is lots to be anxious about when contemplating or preparing for parenthood. The idea that you’re not “the kind” of person who has kids shouldn’t be one of them.