Is Baby Fever Real?

PHOTO: JGI/Jamie Grill/ Getty Images

Growing up as an only child, Jaime Lee McHale always knew she wanted kids. “I was the child telling everyone [I] would have 12 children,” says McHale, a 33-year-old sales representative in New Berlin, New Jersey. Since then, her ideal number of kids has shrunk – from six in college to four after graduation to two or three now – but her longing for more babies has not. Even as a mom of two, she still gets the feeling when she holds her 6-month-old and misses his “itty-bitty stage” of infancy.

McHale calls it baby fever, or a “yearning in the pit of your stomach” for a child. “You start envisioning your life with another one,” she says. McHale is in good company. In an online message board for moms she participates in, McHale says “even the women who have determined their families are complete … still feel it from time to time.” For Katie Townsend, an 18-year-old college student in Morrisville, New York, with no children, the feeling started creeping up when she saw her older friends and older sister have children. “Baby fever feels like an irresistible urge to have a baby,” she says. “You see babies and wish you had one of your own.”

Even men experience baby fever. McHale’s husband, John McHale, says he’s felt it since around age 20. “I wanted to have the feeling of joy seeing my kid do something, or later in life, achieve something,” he says. “I wanted to feel proud of someone, and I wanted a child.”

While few researchers have studied baby fever, a 2012 study in the journal Emotion confirmed it’s a real phenomenon that both men and women report experiencing. Rather than simply wanting a baby due to society’s expectations or winding up with a baby as a result of the desire for sex, “there’s something distinct that’s going on where people want to have children specifically,” says study author Gary Brase, a psychology professor at Kansas State University.

The Science of Baby Fever

What causes baby fever? Brase’s recent research has found it’s often influenced by both being around youngsters and life circumstances that support raising a child . By evaluating nearly 500 tweets with the hashtag #babyfever, he and his students found that people often tweeted about baby fever after being around babies – “When the cook brings her baby grandson to the house … Everyone has #babyfever” – and people who shared positive feelings were usually in a romantic relationship. The less frequent tweets expressing jealousy or regret – “I just want a baby to cuddle with, is that too much to ask? #babyfever #singleproblems” – more often came from single women.

“People can want to have children, but they’re not in a situation where they think that’s something they should do,” Brase says. “But also sometimes once people are in the situation, they find they want to have children more than they did before.”

While many women experience baby fever when their bodies are in their reproductive prime – or before age 32, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists – there’s no one biological or physiological process that’s responsible for baby fever, says Dr. Shannon Clark, an associate professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

“If you’re in the right mindset, and in you’re in the right space, and you’re ready financially [and] emotionally, [and] your maturity level is there and you’re around your friends’ kids, you may have baby fever,” she says. “It’s a very subjective thing.”

Baby fever was situationally-dependent for John McHale, who had put aside the desire to have children at age 35 after he and his first wife divorced. But once he met his current wife, the feeling reemerged. “Meeting Jaime and finding a woman younger made the thought process come back again,” he says.

Some women might not get baby fever until they’re in their 40s, and others might not have it at all, Clark says. “If you don’t ever have it, that’s perfectly fine,” she says. “Not every woman needs to have a child. Not every woman feels that’s her goal in life or that it’s some innate desire she has.” Plus, she adds, you don’t need to have baby fever to have a child or to be a good parent.

Still, Clark urges women who think they might eventually want kids to start thinking about it early – even if baby fever hasn’t struck – since the quality and quantity of eggs decreases over time. “No matter how healthy [women] are, no matter if they don’t smoke, don’t drink, that has no influence over whether or not their eggs are going to decline at a less fast rate,” she says.

‘Coping’ With Baby Fever

For the McHales, the solution to baby fever is considering having another one. For the women in her online forum who don’t want any more children, holding other people’s babies helps satisfies the urge.

Townsend, on the other hand, “copes” by keeping in mind that the time isn’t right – and maintaining a Pinterest board of her favorite baby-related items until it is. “I want to finish college and be married before I have a child,” she says. “I also don’t want to bring a child into the world until I am financially stable and will be able to spoil him or her.”

How any one woman or man handles baby fever varies as widely as when, how and if it strikes. “It’s a normal part of human psychology and doesn’t mean that you definitely should act on it or should not act on it,” Brase says. “You should look at your circumstances, and you should consider what would be the best thing considering your other goals in life.”