Do I want children, or do I just feel that I should?

You may need room to consider this without immediately defending either answer. Expectations can speak in the voices of parents, friends, a partner, or an imagined future self who has somehow already judged you.

Try separating the wish to raise a person from related wishes: to belong, to be loved without uncertainty, to avoid regret, to preserve a relationship. None makes you foolish. But a child cannot fairly be given responsibility for solving those problems.

Consider the everyday reality you would be choosing: repetition, care, disrupted plans, affection, uncertainty and a growing person's independence. Notice both desire and reluctance without asking either to produce perfect certainty. A freely chosen life without children is not a failure to mature. Wanting children does not require being free of fear. The task is to hear your own position clearly enough to make a considered decision.

Jing makes room for your own voice. I would add that a child would have one too, eventually quite different from the voice you might imagine. Wanting a family includes a willingness to meet someone whose life cannot be designed as the completion of yours.

Consider the care around the decision as well as the feeling inside it. Who would share responsibility? What support exists? What promises are reliable, and which depend on someone becoming a different person after the birth? These questions need not diminish love. They describe conditions in which love would have to act.

No answer removes every possible regret. Parenting and not parenting each close some doors while opening others. You can acknowledge that cost without letting the fear of a missed life make the decision. There is no single life from which all the alternatives disappear painlessly.

The invisible committee on whether you should have children has rather too many members. A distant cousin holds the microphone. Someone from a dinner party has submitted a demographic forecast. None has volunteered for the night shift.

I would ask the committee to leave the room. They may return only with a concrete offer of help and the ability to hear an answer they did not prescribe.

Jang wants to know which promises are reliable. Excellent. 'We will help all the time' should be translated into days, journeys and what happens when everybody has a cold. The committee becomes noticeably quieter during this section.

Then consider what you want, including the less photogenic parts. Your life is not an empty position the committee must fill. And a child is a person, not the minutes of a meeting finally approved by your relatives.