“We both want children” is where this conversation usually starts and stops. It is nowhere near enough, because almost every difficulty that follows is about a detail that sentence does not contain.
Timing
Straight away, or in five years? For couples marrying later this is not an abstract question — fertility declines with age for both partners, and a five-year difference in intention can be the whole thing.
Ask plainly, and ask what would change the answer. Someone who says “in a few years” because of their career is in a different position from someone who says it because they are not sure they are ready.
Numbers, and what they are based on
Two and four are different lives — financially, professionally, and in terms of how much of your thirties is spent with very young children.
Worth asking where the number comes from. People often name the size of the family they grew up in, without having examined whether they want to reproduce it.
What happens if it is hard
The conversation almost nobody has before marriage, and one that a significant minority of couples end up needing.
- How far would we go with fertility treatment — financially, and in terms of what it costs a body and a marriage?
- How do we each feel about adoption?
- If we could not have biological children, what happens to us?
Nobody can answer these fully in advance. Having asked them at all puts a couple in a much better position than discovering, in the middle of it, that they hold opposite views.
It is also worth knowing that fertility treatment raises halachic questions in observant households — different authorities take different positions on aspects of it — and that this is a rabbinic conversation, best had with someone who knows the area, and better had before it is urgent.
Upbringing, specifically
Covered at length in the article on raising children Jewish, but the headline questions are:
- What does their Jewish week look like, not their Jewish year?
- Day school, Hebrew school, or neither — and who pays?
- What is the rule when they push back, and do we have the same rule?
- What would we do if one of us wanted to move in a different direction later?
That last one catches couples out, because people change. A parent who becomes more observant, or less, ten years in changes the deal for the children as well as for the marriage.
Division of labour, honestly
Ask what each of you expects the first year to look like. Who gets up at night. Whose career pauses. What “helping” means, and whether either of you used that word without noticing what it implies.
Research on the transition to parenthood consistently finds a drop in relationship satisfaction, sharper where the division of labour turns out to be more unequal than one partner expected. The expectation gap does more damage than the workload.
Genetic screening
A practical point specific to Jewish couples. Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi populations each carry elevated carrier frequencies for particular genetic conditions, and pre-conception or prenatal carrier screening is widely available and recommended by medical bodies including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Several Jewish community organisations offer screening programmes. This is a medical matter for your doctor, and in some communities also a rabbinic one; either way it belongs before conception rather than during a pregnancy.
If one of you is unsure
“Unsure” is a real answer and deserves to be treated as one rather than as a soft yes.
What it needs is specificity: unsure about children, or unsure about children now, or unsure whether you would be a good parent? Those are three different problems with three different resolutions, and only the first is a compatibility question.
What does not work is proceeding on the assumption that they will come round. That is the most expensive assumption available in a marriage, and it is made constantly.