The best time for family portraits is during early childhood – when children are changing fastest, and your family looks most like itself right now. Most families know this. Most families still wait.
If you’re in the early years of motherhood, you’ve probably thought about it and taken plenty of your photos yourself. Nursery runs, toddler meltdowns, a kitchen that’s never quite clean. Life doesn’t feel calm – and the idea of adding anything else to the list can feel like too much.
So you tell yourself: we’ll do it when things settle down.
But here’s what I hear from families again and again, after they’ve finally come in: “I almost waited another year.”
When is the best time to get family portraits taken?
There isn’t one. Not in the way most of us imagine – some future version of life where everyone’s cooperative, the house is tidy, and the diary is clear.
Childhood doesn’t pause while we wait for life to feel organised.
Right now, your child reaches for your hand in a particular way. They climb into your lap when they need reassurance. The way your family fits together at this exact moment – the noise and the chaos and the love – is specific to right now. And it won’t look like this for long.
Portraits made during this season aren’t about capturing perfection. They’re about holding onto what’s real.
Why family portraits matter for children’s development
There’s something quietly powerful about a child growing up with portraits of their family on the walls. Not school photos — real portraits, showing them belonging, being held, being loved.
Those portraits tell them something every single day: this is my family. I am part of this.
That sense of belonging shapes how children see themselves as they grow. And you don’t need a perfect chapter to create it. You just need this one.
Do children need to cooperate for family portraits to work?
Why imperfect moments make the most powerful portraits.
Many parents worry their children won’t cooperate – that the portrait experience will be stressful, or that the results will reflect the chaos rather than the love.
But some of the portraits I’m most proud of were made in exactly those moments.
A toddler mid-wriggle, a mum laughing because she’s given up on stillness, siblings doing what siblings always do. The portraits that stop people in their tracks during the reveal aren’t the ones where everyone held still. They’re the ones where something real happened.
Connection always photographs better than compliance.
What happens when families wait too long for portraits
The families who come to me, having waited – sometimes by a year, sometimes longer – often say the same thing during the reveal.
“I didn’t realise how special this stage was until I saw us together like that.”
Not because the portraits are beautiful (though they are). But because seeing it on a big screen, all at once, makes them feel something they hadn’t quite let themselves feel in the middle of it: pride. In their family. In this imperfect, exhausting, incredibly full chapter of life.
That’s what these portraits are really for.
The toddler who wants carrying everywhere won’t want that forever. The hand that always reaches for yours will eventually stop. These years are loud and relentless and so, so fast.
You don’t need to wait for calm. You just need to decide this chapter is worth celebrating.
When is the right time to book family portraits?
When your family is growing, changing, and loving each other – right now.
If you’ve been thinking about it and keep putting it off, I’d love to talk about what the experience would look like for your family. I work with a small number of families from across Essex and Hertfordshire each month at my studio at Parndon Mill in Harlow – so if you’re ready to stop waiting, let’s have a chat.
→ Let’s chat about your family’s story
Frequently Asked Questions
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