DP and I were together for 15 years before we finally made the decision to have a child, when I was 37 and he was 43. We‘re now very happily ‘one and done’ with DD. I never really had that strong biological urge to procreate that others often describe, so deciding to have any child at all became a very long drawn-out, deeply considered, ‘pros and cons’ type decision, arrived at over many years.
Aside from the financial and practical factors that always come up in these discussions, the main reason we finally took the plunge was that both of us loved the idea of nurturing a new human and introducing them to everything that’s amazing about our world: the different landscapes, nations and cultures; awe-inspiring nature; wonderful art, music, theatre and literature and meaningful relationships with others. We’re both very much into education (for its own sake, not just to increase earning potential) and love sharing our knowledge and learning alongside DD. I also knew a fair bit about child psychology and development due to my own education and work, so we felt like we had a lot we could offer a child.
As other pps have mentioned, it’s also about self-knowledge; having just the one child was, for us, the best way of ensuring that we had the resources - both financially and in terms of time, mental bandwidth and energy - to provide all of these experiences and opportunities for DD. Any more than that and we’d both have been frazzled and spread too thinly - we both like calm and focus, and dislike excessive noise and chaos.
DD is now 7 and we’re currently on a two-week self-drive holiday in the Black Forest and Alsace. We’ve swum in lakes, climbed waterfalls, whizzed down summer toboggan runs, tried all manner of different foods and practised our French and German skills. We would never have been able to manage this kind of holiday with more than one child due to affordability (we’d have needed to pay for an extra hotel room for a start) and the sheer logistics of travelling with multiple DC.