Answer

Why Does God Want Me to Become a Parent?

Becoming a parent is the largest thing most people ever agree to, and the culture around you is more likely to describe it as a cost than a calling. Wondering whether it is worth it is not a lack of faith.

God asks it because it is how His children arrive, and because of what it does to the people who do it. The first commandment given to Adam and Eve concerned their potential for parenthood, before anything about worship or obedience (Moses 2:28). That ordering is doing work. Bringing children into the world is not a consequence of the plan; it is close to the centre of it.

Eternal Truths

A child is received rather than manufactured. The doctrine that gives parenthood its weight is that a child is not created out of nothing. They existed as a spirit son or daughter of Heavenly Parents before you met them. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each person is a beloved spirit child with a divine nature and destiny — which was true of your children before they arrived.

Parenthood is where becoming like God actually happens. The Proclamation charges parents to rear their children in love and righteousness and to provide for their physical and spiritual needs. That is not a list of chores. It is the closest most people come in this life to doing what God does.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The costs are real, and pretending otherwise makes the case worse rather than better: time, money, sleep, freedom, some career trajectory. What the accounting misses sits on the other side of the ledger and is not the kind of thing that shows up in advance. There is also a communal failure worth naming. A community that says children matter and then leaves parents unsupported has not actually said children matter. Cherishing life means caring for the mothers and fathers doing the raising too.

Questions to Think About

• Am I weighing parenthood against a life I have actually seen, or against a picture of one?
• What have I absorbed about children being mainly a cost?
• Who around me is parenting without much help, and what could I do about it?

What You Can Do

Spend real time this week with a family that has small children, rather than reasoning about it from a distance. Then talk with someone who is a few years ahead of you and ask what they did not expect. If you cannot have children, know that the commandment has never been “produce offspring or fail” — faithful people in that position have been promised, repeatedly and explicitly, that nothing will be withheld. The essay behind this answer goes further.

Jesus Christ makes parents out of ordinary people, and He does not require you to feel ready before He begins.