Artistic professions may be characterised as risky activities with large investments in relation to the rewards that most of the practitioners can expect. Despite investing in long education, artists have a weak position on the work market and risk long periods without income or work, which makes extra jobs largely essential for sustenance. Since the art profession requires a continuous investment of time, it can also be difficult to distinguish clearly from other spheres of life, and thus it influences both one’s economic standard and family life. The field is also pervaded with a romanticism, where one has to challenge the world individually, an idea of artistic self-development as something in opposition to daily life, family life and security. Feministic researchers have claimed that artistic development and family life often have been regarded as mutually opposed phenomena. In this article I discuss what meanings this can have for young women with artistic ambitions. The article is based upon sequential, follow-up interviews with seven women with artistic interests. I discuss what these women think about their future, the distribution of time between artistic activity, work at home and family life. The interviewees in some way accept the romantic idea that free wings of self-development are fettered by care for other people. But at the same time as they reproduce this dualistic notion, they try to challenge it. They emphasise the potential freedoms which they see that family formation can offer. Having children is regarded as a journey of cultivation. In this way artistic activity becomes a practice where the limits between public and private are erased and self-development seems able to deal with social relations.