You may have heard that there’s a generation of older adults in grief because their kids decided against having children of their own. More Americans are opting out of a traditional family path, and in doing so, crushing their parents' desperate wishes for grandchildren.
This topic became a front-page article in the New York Times a few months ago, a trend story that launched a thousand Reddit threads. Most commenters were unsympathetic to these Boomers and Gen Xers because, as one critic lamented, no one should ever force their kids to have kids. (Duh.)
For her entire adult life, Minnesota native Courtney Kocak, 41, was one of the decidedly child-free, focused on her busy writing, acting and stand-up comedy career in Los Angeles. But when her mom confided in her through tears that she always hoped to be a grandparent, Kocak did something radical. She listened.
“I don’t feel like I owe my parents this,” she told me about the prospect of having kids. “But on this particular issue, because they’ve been so lovely to me and gave me this great life, I feel compelled to keep the chain going.”
Shortly after that exchange with her mom, Kocak and her husband decided that they would try to have a baby, a choice she wrote about in an essay published by Business Insider. Her change of heart resonated with me because, well, we’re not supposed to admit that external pressures could influence whether we decide to have a child — one of humankind’s most personal, consequential and irreversible life decisions.

The truth is, you could be blissfully sitting on the fence for years until a now-or-never urgency starts to kick in. For Kocak, she noticed many of her peers in Los Angeles started to become new parents. Scrolling through their posts, she couldn’t help but envision what it would be like to have a daughter of her own. She also thought of her own precious relationship with her grandparents, and how that intergenerational bond between elder and child could stop with her.
“My grandmas have passed now, and it brings it into sharp relief: The people you cherish and love so much, they can go at any time,” she said. “I want my parents to have that time, and I want my kids to have that time, too. Grandparents are such a gift.”
Her parents, Mark and Kerri Kocak, are in their 60s, retired from their teaching jobs and living in the small southern Minnesota community of Jackson. They have four kids of their own and envisioned they would have been grandparents by now.