‘Good Guys’ Say Don’t Let the Internet Scare You Out of Having Kids

If you’re in your 30s, chances are you’ve felt it—the low-grade panic about whether you should have kids, mixed with a chorus of unsolicited opinions from people who already did. One friend swears it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them. Another warns you your life will be “over.” Everyone sounds confident. Somehow, you feel less sure.

On Good Guys, hosts Josh Peck and Ben Soffer cut through that noise with a refreshingly grounded take on parenthood and decision paralysis. Their message is simple but reassuring: don’t let other people’s experiences bully you into a decision that isn’t yours. Whether you’re on the fence, leaning one way, or just exhausted by the discourse, this conversation offers a much-needed reality check.

‘Good Guys’ Say Don’t Let the Internet Scare You Out of Having Kids

Your life isn’t over…it just changes

The idea that having kids ends your life gets thrown around a lot, especially online. It’s dramatic, it’s scary, and it’s also wildly overblown. “Your life is not over when you have kids,” Soffer says. What does end? The stuff that wasn’t really doing much for you anyway. Sleeping until noon. Rotting in bed all day. Killing time for the sake of killing time.

What replaces it, he explains, is something harder to describe but easier to feel: the sense that your time has weight, that what you’re doing matters in a deeper way. “I’ve only felt that it’s a value add,” he says. “It’s a life-changer, but it’s only changed my life for the better.”

Research backs this up. Studies on parenthood and well-being show that while parents often report more day-to-day stress, they also tend to report more meaning and long-term fulfillment. In other words, fewer lazy mornings, sure. But more moments that actually stick.

That distinction matters, because stress and misery aren’t the same thing. Being busy isn’t the same as being unhappy. A lot of the fear around having kids comes from confusing “this is harder” with “this is worse.” And once you separate those two, the decision tends to feel a lot less terrifying.

90 percent of the pain is in the deciding

“90 percent of the pain is in the decision whether or not to do something hard,” Peck says. “It’s the anticipation, the projection. Is this going to be rough, how is it going to change, blah blah blah.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it shows up before almost every major life choice. Quitting a job. Ending a relationship. Moving to a new city. You run every possible outcome in your head, fixate on the worst ones, and let the fear grow bigger than the thing itself.

What Peck is describing isn’t that the hard part disappears once you decide. It’s that the mental spiral finally stops running the show. “When I finally just grin and bear and go, enough already, let’s just go, let’s do it,” he says, “I’m rewarded with relief and realizing that it’s not as hard as I expected.”

He comes back to a phrase from recovery that fits this moment perfectly: “More will be revealed.” You can’t fully understand how something will feel until you’re actually living it. And for Peck, now a dad of three, the reality has consistently been far less intense than the version he imagined beforehand.

Psychologists have a name for this pattern: anticipatory anxiety. It’s the tendency to overestimate how bad something will be before it happens, and research shows we’re famously bad at predicting our own emotional reactions to future events. The decision feels overwhelming not because the outcome is doomed, but because the waiting gives fear too much room to grow.

Don’t let other parents project their misery onto you

So should you have kids, or should you not have kids? That’s the question everyone wants a definitive answer to. And according to Soffer, that’s also the wrong place to look for clarity. “Don’t let other people scare you into not doing it,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than parents that project their feelings onto other people. ‘Your life’s over.’ Like, it’ll never be the same. That’s just creating fear.”

What gets lost in those warnings is context. When someone says parenthood ruined their life, they’re usually talking about their life. Their relationship. Their support system. Their timing. Their mental health. Parenthood doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and treating one person’s experience like a universal outcome does more harm than help.

Soffer is blunt about that too.

“People are happy when they don’t have kids and people are happy when they do have kids,” he says.

“People’s lives are miserable when they don’t have kids and they’re miserable when they do have kids. It’s not necessarily related to the kids. Sometimes it’s just related to the person.”

That perspective is freeing, especially if you’ve been absorbing other people’s stories as cautionary tales. Kids don’t magically fix anything, and they don’t automatically destroy anything either. They tend to magnify what’s already there. If someone is burned out, resentful, or overwhelmed, parenthood often becomes the easiest thing to blame.

Which is why Soffer draws a clear boundary around fear-based advice. “Any person who tries to scare you out of not having kids with their own personal experiences,” he says, “is just bad for your decision-making process.”

The takeaway isn’t to tune everyone out, but to listen without letting someone else’s regrets, joy, or exhaustion make the choice for you. Other people can offer perspective. They don’t get to write your future. That part is still yours.

For more insights, tune into Good Guys wherever you get your podcasts.

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