Do people actually regret not having children? Possibly not
You’ll be lonely. Nobody will look after you when you get old. You’ll miss out on life’s greatest joy. You won’t ever be truly fulfilled. Your life will be meaningless and shallow. Everyone will pity you. If you choose not to have children then you’ll end up regretting it forever.
Pretty much every woman who has ever been on the fence about having kids has heard variations of the above. Either from other people or from a little voice inside their own head. There is, to state the bleeding obvious, an intense societal pressure for women to become mothers.
But do people actually regret not having children? New research suggests they don’t. Last summer researchers from Michigan State University found that one in five adults in the state, or about 1.7 million people, didn’t want to have children. This was followed up with another study, published earlier this month, which looked more deeply at people who are childfree by choice. Turns out they’re all pretty happy with their decisions. “[W]e found no evidence that older child-free adults experience any more life regret than older parents,” Jennifer Watling Neal, the coauthor of the study, said in a statement. “In fact, older parents were slightly more likely to want to change something about their life.”
This isn’t the first study to suggest that it’s the people who have kids who might be the ones who end up regretting their life choices. YouGov data from 2021 found that one in 12 British parents (8%) say they currently regret having kids. Younger parents aged 25 to 34 (one imagines the most sleepdeprived group) were the most likely to feel regretful, while those aged 55 + were the least regretful. Similarly, a 2013 Gallup survey found that around 7% of American parents older than 45 wouldn’t have any kids if they “had to do it over again”. And parents seem remarkably unhappy in Germany: a 2016 YouGov study found 19% of German mothers and 20% of fathers say that if they could decide again, they would not want to have any more children.
Saying that you regret having kids is still massively taboo but, in recent years, it has become a more prominent topic of conversation and the subject of regular newspaper features. There’s a Facebook group called “I Regret Having Children” which has 59,000 followers and an increasing amount of scholarship on the subject. In 2015 Israeli sociologist Orna Donath caused a number of headlines with a book called Regretting Motherhood: A Study, based on interviews with 23 women. You’ll notice that a lot of the coverage on parental regret is really about maternal regret. That’s largely because men are not deemed quite as freakish if they don’t want kids. And it’s also, of course, because much of parenting still falls to women in heterosexual relationships – parenting is a hell of a lot easier when you’re not doing the bulk of it. Which goes to the heart of the issue: parental regret, for the most part, isn’t caused by people spawning little monsters and hating their kids, it’s caused by social structures which make raising children difficult and eye-wateringly expensive. It’s a cliche but it’s true: it takes a village to raise a kid. But instead of villages most of us have nuclear families and childcare which costs as much as a mortgage.
Ultimately the takeaway from all this isn’t that having kids is good or bad–it’s that there is no one way to live a happy and fulfilled life. Parenthood isn’t for everyone and it should always be a choice. And yet Republicans across the US are doing everything they can to take that choice away.
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In 2014, more than 90% of US cases were diagnosed in men; by 2021, women accounted for about a quarter of new syphilis cases. “The reasons for syphilis’s rising rates in women are complex,” Keren Landman writes in Vox. However, a drop in funding for safety-net sexual health services and sexual health education play a role. As does declining access to maternal health care, an important tool in catching and treating infections. By some accounts, nearly 7 million women of childbearing age in the US have low or no access to maternity care.
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South Korea is testing out an AIbased gender detector
Last year a man murdered a female colleague he’d been stalking for years. The day before he was due to be sentenced for stalking and threatening the 28-year-old he snuck into the women’s bathroom at Seoul’s Sindang metro station and stabbed her. The horrifying murder triggered accusations that South Korean authorities were failing to take violence against women seriously. In response the Seoul Metro has now decided to pilot an AI-based gender detector to spot men entering or leaving women’s bathrooms. The system is reportedly able to “distinguish gender based on body shape, clothing, belongings and behavioral patterns”. There are so many problems with this idea I don’t even know where to start. Suffice it to say AI isn’t going to solve gender-based violence, it’s going to take social change.
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The week in pawtriarchy
A cat-killing competition for kids has been cancelled in New Zealand, following a large backlash. Yep, you read that right. New Zealand, which I once thought of as a sane and gentle place, was trying to get kids to compete to kill cats. Only feral cats, mind you: the North Canterbury Hunting Competition, which raises money for a local school and pond, said that anyone who killed a pet cat would be expelled. Feral cats pose a problem to biodiversity and native wildlife in New Zealand but turning kids into killers seems like a very strange way to deal with the problem. Though there is precedent: last year 40 New Zealand schoolchildren took part in a rat-catching competition and one five-year-old managed to catch and kill 60 rats over the course of the three months. Do not mess with a child from New Zealand!