In the ancient and post-Imperial worlds, parenthood is not presented as a choice for married people but as a necessity. Only consecration allowed individuals to reject parenthood as a life choice. Becoming a parent is presented in the majority of normative and narrative sources, and likely in common discourse too, as an essential facet of a person's life for both men and women. However, the questions that have been previously asked by historians of the family have all been broadly similar: considering constructions of Medieval childhood, examining age ranges for different stages of childhood, looking at women as mothers and attempting to establish affective relationships between parents and children. The questions that have not been asked by historians, but which are worth asking, are those which currently absorb sociological consideration of the modern family: how does the arrival of a child into a marriage change the lives and relationships of the parents? How do parents view themselves within the role of mother or father? As children grow up, marry, leave home and procreate themselves, what is the role of the parents? Thus, the focus of this chapter is not on how the life of the child changes as it grows, but on how the arrival and growth of a child impacts the adults and the marriage. This section therefore will maintain the focus on the adult couple at the centre of the family unit and examine the transition into parenthood.

In the literary evidence, there are no documented cases of married couples remaining voluntarily childless, except in the rare cases of those who chose to remain forever virginal for religious reasons such as Injuriosus and his wife in Gregory's ‘Two Lovers’, but there are suggestions that involuntary infertility could be a problem. Infertile couples cured by divine miracle are a staple of hagiographical texts. Caesarius of Arles includes in his sermon against abortion and contraception an exhortation to women to stop using potions to improve their fertility and encourage pregnancy. These suggest that there may well have been a thriving market for infertile couples looking for medical or magical solutions.