Starting a family before establishing your career often ends with moving back home.
Nobody moves to Los Angeles to start a family. They move here to work, so it is hard for “family” not to take a back seat to an acting career, from the outset. There is a kind of selfish ambition that a city like Los Angeles selects for, resulting in a force that is centrifugal– it pulls relationships apart. As your career star rises, it isn’t easy holding your personal life together.
Starting a family in a big city away from the support of extended family can also be quite difficult. Starting up an acting career isn’t any easier. Starting both at the same time in Los Angeles could well lead to you feeling you need to choose one and bail on the other.
Acting and parenting may seem fundamentally at odds in many ways– an acting career is ever volatile, requires lots of time away from home, focuses on the self and brings irregular income. By contrast, starting a family demands stability, requires lots of stay-at-home time, focuses on your family instead of yourself and calls for steady income.
You might say the projects of parenting and acting are diametrically opposed in fundamental ways. Is it possible to do both well? Yes. Can you find the support, the community, to make it all go? Yes, but it sure ain’t easy.
I’ve known a number of initially child-free couples who moved to L.A. to advance their acting careers. They started having kids before things took off professionally and finally had to move back to their home town or at least to a more family-supportive environment. They did this move for the right reasons, as family is the most important thing. The worse version of this leads to a split in the marriage for the sake of professional ambition. No child deserves this.
Some can handle these pressures and emerge with a successful career and family intact. But many eventually find it just impossible. If starting a family is on your agenda, you might want to consider this.