Crosscut · 24 min
Deciding to Have Kids in a Warming World
If end-of-the-world headlines make having a baby feel like a mistake, look at why the worst climate predictions are becoming less likely and how to make the best choice for your family.
I Don’t Want Children. I Do Want Children. What Should I Do? × Climate Change’s Worst-case Scenario is Officially Canceled
Published 2026-07-14
0:00 / 23:54 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The connection
A listener asked whether it’s fair to have children when the world feels like it’s falling apart. It’s a heavy choice, caught between personal longing and global dread. Writing this past June, Sigal Samuel looks at the internal tug-of-war for those who feel pulled in both directions, offering a way to honor competing values without being paralyzed. There's a different perspective in a May article by Bryan Walsh, who notes that the absolute worst-case climate scenarios are actually becoming less likely. Something interesting emerges when these two views are placed side-by-side: the future might not be a closed door, and the decision to become a parent doesn't have to be a calculation of despair.
Samuel leaves the reader with a person staring at a wall, trying to figure out if the desire for a child is selfish or moral. It is a quiet, internal struggle, but the pressure often comes from a very loud fear about the world outside. Many people stuck on the fence aren't just weighing their own capacity for caregiving; they are weighing the ethics of bringing a new life into what has been described for years as a doomed environment. That is where Walsh’s report changes the math. By pointing out that the most apocalyptic climate projections have been "canceled," he shifts the backdrop of the entire conversation. If the five-degree warming nightmare is no longer a realistic forecast, the "ethical implications" Samuel’s reader worries about start to look less like a death sentence and more like a difficult challenge. Seen together, these pieces suggest that the hesitation to become a parent might be built on data that scientists themselves have moved past. It doesn't make the decision easy, but it replaces a vision of certain catastrophe with one of a "merely bad" reality. This discovery moves the focus from whether a child should exist at all to what kind of world they will actually be stepping into.
A nursery door or a graph of rising temperatures can feel like two different realities. Holding onto both—the desire for a child and the fear for the planet—doesn't have to be a breaking point. If the worst-case climate predictions are starting to fade, the room for a personal life gets a little wider. What lingers is the tension between a person's private dreams and the weight of the headlines. How much of a life should be built on hope for a world that hasn't arrived yet?