On Still Waiting to Have Kids in Your 40s
- Hopeful Dads
- Mar 25
- 3 min read
There’s something about still waiting to have kids in your 40s that forces reflection on your whole life.
Not the performative kind of reflection—the “look how far I’ve come” highlight reel—but the quieter, more honest inventory. Where did I think I’d be? What actually happened? And what am I still waiting for?
For us and many like us when we turn forty, that question has a very specific answer: We thought we’d be parents by now. Instead, we’re still waiting to have children and build our family.
The Family We Planned to Have By Now
At 20 years old, 40 felt impossibly far away.
At 30 years old, the milestone felt like a checkpoint.
By 40 years old, age becomes something else entirely—a moment where the expectations and reality of your life sit side by side, and you have to reconcile the gap between them.
Matt and I didn’t plan to still be waiting here to be parents, to have kids, to build our family.
But here we are.
The Reality of Reproductive Grief and Having Kids after 40
Struggling to have children and build a family is a strange experience because life doesn’t pause for it:
Careers move forward.
Trips happen.
Friends build their families.
And you’re happy—genuinely happy—for all of it.
But there’s always this quiet undercurrent of reproductive grief:
“When will it be our turn?”
Still waiting to have kids in your 40s comes with a unique kind of irony. You spend your younger years planning and building the life that should support a family with children—only to find that when everything is finally ready, the timeline doesn’t cooperate.
The Benefits of Having Kids in Your 40s
There are also benefits to having kids in your 40s:
We’re more stable.
More established.
More intentional with how we spend our time and money.
At 30, we might have had more energy—but less clarity.
At 40, we know exactly the kind of parents we want to be.
That doesn’t remove the frustration of waiting so long to start having kids. But it does change the foundation we’re building our family on.
The Thoughts about Having Kids in Your 40s (You Don’t Always Say Out Loud)
There are moments where the excitement of planning to build a family gives way to something quieter.
You think about:
energy
time
how old you’ll be at different milestones
Not in a dramatic way—but in a very real, grounded way.
What will it feel like to have a newborn at 40? To be in your 50s at your child’s high school graduation?
These thoughts aren’t fear—they’re awareness.
And strangely, they don’t take away from the desire to be a parent at 40 or older.
They sharpen it.
What Having Kids in Your 40s Gives You (That Being 30 Can’t)
If waiting to have kids in our 40s has taken anything from us, it’s also given something back.
Patience we didn’t have before
Perspective we couldn’t have had earlier
A deeper understanding of what actually matters
At 40 and older, parenting isn’t about checking a box.
It’s about presence.
It’s about being there—fully, intentionally, without the constant pull of “what’s next.”
The Kind of 40-Year-Old Dads We Want to Be
Waiting to have kids after 40 has made us realize:
We don’t want to rush through it.
We don’t want to outsource it.
We don’t want to miss it.
After everything it has taken to get here, we want to actually feel what being (two) dads is like.
The small moments. The routines. The chaos.
All of it.
A Different Kind of Hope, a Different Kind of Family
There’s comfort in knowing we’re not alone in waiting to have kids at this age.
So many people—some you’d never expect—have found their way to parenthood later in life. Not because they planned it that way, but because life unfolded differently than expected.
And maybe that’s the point.
There isn’t one timeline.
There isn’t one right way or right time in which to build a family.
There are so many different types of beautiful and nontraditional families:
Building a family through adoption
Having a child through surrogacy
LGBTQ+ families with two moms
LGBTQ+ families with two dads
Having kids after 40 and beyond
And many other possibilities and combinations.
Where We Are Now, and A Message for Anyone Else Waiting
Matt and I are 40.
We’re still waiting to have kids and build our family.
But we’re also more ready for parenthood than we’ve ever been.
And that has to count for something. If you’re here too—somewhere between hope and uncertainty—you’re not behind.
You’re just on a different timeline from the average.
And sometimes, the life that takes longer to arrive… is the one you’re actually ready for.
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