Why should Jen Hawkins have to give a reason for not having a baby? (Source: Instagram.)
A headline caught my eye recently. It read: “Jennifer Hawkins, 31, says she has ‘no plans’ to start a family with husband Jake Wall and remains focused on work”.
“There’s no plans yet, I’m just having fun with life at the moment,” Hawkins told The Daily Telegraph in regards to future babies.
Interestingly, Hawkins was then referred to as a “career-focused” woman and a list of her business engagements was then rattled off. It was as though her childless state required a reason, and despite Jen not explicitly saying it, it was decided upon that “work commitments” must be the culprit.
The constant “when are you having children?” question needs to stop. Chrissy Teigen and Tyra Banks agree. Last week they both revealed their struggles with fertility on TV show FABLife.
“I will say honestly John and I were having trouble. We would have had kids five, six years ago if it happened,” explained Teigen who went on to reveal that she and husband John Legend have visited fertility doctors.
“It’s kind of crazy because I can’t imagine being that nosy to be like, ‘So, when are the kids coming?’ because who knows what somebody’s going through.”
“So anytime somebody asks if I'm going to have kids I'm just like, 'One day you're going to ask that to the wrong girl who is really struggling and it's going to be really hurtful to them and I hate that. Stop asking me.’”
Consider yourself warned. Banks, 41, revealed that she too abhors questions about her fertility.
“I'm so tired of seeing on my social media, ‘why don't you have kids, why don't you have kids?’ You don't know, you don't know what I'm going through. You have no idea,” Tyra said.
What Banks is going through is multiple rounds of IVF, which would no doubt be physically and emotionally draining.
Banks uploaded the above image to Instagram, in which she implored others to #StopAsking.
"I can’t believe so many of you out there can totally relate. Truth is, there are so many of us that keep getting asked that baby question and people just don't realise it hurts to constantly be asked," she wrote in the caption.
"Many of us really want kids and when you find out you can’t have children or that maybe you can, but the journey is just so damn hard, the one thing that seems like the most natural thing in the world becomes so very unnatural and so very taxing."
There's a time, place and person for those baby questions. If you’re a close friend or family member, then go ahead and ask – sensitively, of course. But if you don’t know the person?
Just let them do their thing and support them in whatever they’re doing. And if they have baby news, they’ll be happy to tell us.
Do you hate being asked "the question"? Or are you guilty of asking it?
