Nina, 34, a successful business consultant, is wrestling with what feels like an insoluble dilemma. Whether or not to have children. “By the time my mother was my age she had four children. It was a nonissue for her. She met my dad, got married and then had babies,” she says. “But it feels very different for me.”

Nina lives in London with her partner of five years, enjoying an enviable lifestyle of interesting work, plenty of money and a busy social life. But last year she suddenly felt broody for the first time in her life. “I had never wanted children, but suddenly I had this almost overwhelming physical urge,” she says.

So why not just open a bottle of wine, pop some folic acid and let nature take its course? “My boyfriend is five years younger than me and he is launching a new business,” says Nina. “He told me that he’d like kids one day, but I’m 34 already and am scared of trying to have children too late. I didn’t want to issue an ultimatum as I wanted it to be a joint decision, but my clock was ticking. I felt confused.”

Nina’s next decision was, perhaps, a surprising one. She went to see a life coach; one who specialises in coaching women who cannot decide whether or not to have children. Beth Follini, who was a manager and mentor in the voluntary sector before training with the UK Coaches Training Institute, set up her business, www.ticktockcoaching.co.uk, a year ago. She soon realised that she’d hit a nerve with many modern women, for whom starting a family is anything but straightforward. The result of this agonising is that unprecedented numbers of women are not having children. According to the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, one woman in five now remains childless, with nearly one in three degree-educated woman never becoming a mother.

“In many ways, what I do is a sign of the times, says Follini, 37, a mother of a two-year-old son, who lives in London with her partner. “My clients are both in relationships and single, mostly over 30, often in demanding jobs. Some feel a strong urge to have children but are frightened of the implications, socially, financially and in terms of their career. Others want children, but their partner doesn’t. Some are in their mid-thirties and don’t feel ready, but realise that they may face problems conceiving if they delay. Others have discovered that they have a fertility problem and don’t know if they should have treatment or learn to live with it.

“Some don’t feel broody at all but feel a social pressure to have children and may be scared that they will regret not having them in the future. That there will be nobody to visit them in their nursing home. A lot of them feel stuck. They come to me to find a way through their feelings.”

One of the key problems Follini identifies is that women are often frightened of having children. She says: “They are used to having choices and control of those choices. With a job you can always resign. You can move from one country to another. Today women even marry knowing that it doesn’t have to be for ever. But there is no way to sample motherhood; you can’t try it out to see if you like it. People no longer just assume that things will be OK.”

In fact, with raising a child seeming more daunting than ever, it’s unsurprising that women tie themselves in knots about it. These days parenting is a science, a competitive sport and a vocation rolled into one. It is laced with paranoia about food, education and emotional nurturing. And while some of us feel the fear but do it anyway, others, says Follini, feel worried that they won’t be up to the job. “The pressure to be perfect is huge. You are expected to be beautiful, to lead an exciting life, be young and have an amazing career. They want to be in the perfect house, with the perfect partner, creating the perfect life for their child. But how many people with children can really do that? Something has to give. One subject I often raise is the concept of the good enough parent, the good enough person,” she says.

Perhaps the key problem for Nina, though, is her boyfriend’s unwillingness to take this most fundamental plunge into the unknown with her. It is perhaps ironic that the very liberation that was supposed to set women free to think and act independently has left many feeling at the mercy of men in one of the most fundamental and important parts of their lives. “I feel jealous that my partner can have children later than I can,” Nina admits.

The man-factor is something that Follini acknowledges is at the heart of many women’s baby-making dilemmas. “We live in a kidult culture,” she says. “Some of my clients are in relationships with 35-year-old men who think that they are too young to become fathers. In all the debates about why women aren’t having children, this is the great unspoken problem. Where are the men? Having children challenges their view of themselves as eternal adolescents. Women are not the irresponsible ones refusing to have children, but in many cases men are making it difficult and challenging for them.”

Is Follini, who is patently madly in love with her own son, ever tempted just to tell her clients to get on with it? And do these women not have friends to confide in who will say the same? She laughs. “I don’t bring my feelings about parenthood to the session. What I am trying to do is to discover how my clients feel, to find out what they want. They probably do have confidants, but that’s not what coaching is about. I feel that people should be able to find someone to talk to who isn’t pushing their own agenda.”

For those who wish to pay £38 a session for telephone coaching or £48 for face-to-face coaching, Follini offers a mixture of exercises to root out her clients’ fears and desires. “One of the most powerful is to ask women to visualise their future selves in, say, 15 years’ time,” she says. “This often helps to clarify women’s priorities. If you have an averagely busy life you can get bogged down with your small daily agendas and ignore the larger vision until it is too late. For example, is the most important thing to be in a relationship with children, or is just having children more of a priority? What do you want from motherhood? Connections with other people? Social acceptability? Can you meet those needs in other ways? Do you want to do that?”

She also discusses practical issues. “If a single woman comes to me who wants to have a child but is scared of the implications, we might look at her financial security and ways to develop supportive social networks. I can signpost her to appropriate fertility treatment if necessary.”

In the case of a client who enjoys being child-free but would like to have children in her life, Follini might explore options such as mentoring children. “I have sometimes discovered that a woman who says she is undecided actually doesn’t want children, but is worried about how she will be perceived. A man of 47 with no children is often admired, but a woman may well be pitied or thought of as hard and unfulfilled.”

One problem that many of her clients share is a fear of the cost implications. In a world where having children has gone from being seen as a social duty to being regarded as a luxury lifestyle choice, the perceived financial burden of parenthood can be terrifying. “House prices are a big issue for some of my clients,” says Follini. “They feel they will need a house if they have a family and cannot imagine how they will afford it. They also worry about the impact on their career and earning capacity.”

She admits that previous generations probably worried much less about this, and Nina agrees. “I’m sure my parents didn’t sit down with a spreadsheet when they decided to have me and my siblings. But it seems more important now. Perhaps because we have children later. I know that if I wait until my partner’s business is more established we will be in a better financial position to have a child. I will have paid off my mortgage in five years’ time. But the downside is that we will be older and my parents will be older, too, and might be too frail to be the kind of grandparents that I had.”

Nina says that she is finding the counselling insightful and useful. “Sometimes it throws up more questions than answers, but I have clarified my choices, which are to have a baby regardless, think about adoption if that doesn’t work out, to decide to remain childless or to see what happens in two to three years’ time. V Is deciding to have a baby difficult or should women just get on with it? Tell us what you think: body&soul@the times.co.uk

Time for baby? The questions to ask when making the decision on whether or not to have children

What is important to me about having children? What is important to me about being childfree? What are the values/ feelings that you associate with having children? How can you have those values/ feelings without having your own biological children? Close your eyes and visualise your self in 20 years’ time; what is her life like? What does she look like? Who is around her? How does she seem? Ask her a question; how do you get from where you are now to where she is? If the issue is that your partner doesn’t want children, list the values that are important to you in a relationship. Ask your partner to do the same and discuss what comes up. If you are single and want children but are worried about doing it on your own, write down all your fears or worries about having children on your own. Then list the actions that you can take to address your fears/worries. Beth Follini, a “baby coach”, will be holding workshops on having children in London in June. For further details and information, visit www.ticktockcoaching.co.uk or phone 07793 554228. You can also e-mail Follini on beth@ticktockcoaching.co.uk

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