The Guardian published an article on Saturday entitled “‘It’s the breaking of a taboo’: the parents who regret having children”.
The women featured in the article appear to cherish their children but hate the seismic upheaval, daily drudgery and subjugation of self that motherhood can bring. They certainly don’t wish their kids hadn’t been born, which is what the clickbaity headline implies.
Semantics apart, it’s refreshing for the childfree to see an article like this. The standard discourse on “raising a child is bloody hard” tends to be rounded off with “but the cosmic moments of unconditional love and life-changing joy make it worth it”.
In this article, German author Sarah Fischer is quoted thus:
“The reality of motherhood is incontinence, boredom, weight gain, saggy breasts, depression, the end of romance, lack of sleep, dumbing down, career downturn, loss of sex drive, poverty, exhaustion and lack of fulfilment.”
(For once nobody interjects with “I am a proud mummy with beautiful battle scars and it’s all worth it…”)
Author and therapist Andrew G Marshall talks about the “sheer terror” of parenting, and how “the internet has created this child-worship, where anything beyond obsessive motherhood is bad motherhood”.
He mentions the contemporary “cult of motherhood“. I hardly need say that women without children are as sensitive to this as mothers are. I was also struck by what Marshall says next:
“Originally it was God that was going to save us from ourselves, then it was love, and now it’s children. It’s the product of the divorce era. Up until then, we could believe that falling in love means happily ever after. Now we’ve tested the love-is-for-ever myth and found a replacement: that a child is going to love us for ever, make us feel happy, secure and successful.”
As well as causing great disillusionment in parents, this definitely feeds the despondency felt by those that can’t have kids.
It’s usually inadvisable to peruse the often rabid comments under these articles – the defensive back-and-forth between parents and non-parents can be wearying and inconclusive. I found some of the comments under this one helpful to read, however, so here is a selection:
“This article (…) has given me much to think on and has helped me come to terms with the fact that I might not be able to have any of my own. Thank you”.
“I’m in the cohort of women aged 40-50 who are childless, and actually there is a big relief in coming to the end of the hope. It’s the hope that absolutely drags you down. Once there is no chance of conceiving, so many of my peers are dusting their hands, saying they mourned and grieved long enough, time to get on with enjoying life. Taking up sports, and new hobbies, meeting like-minded people. It feels quite rejuvenating. It’s far from being the suicidal issue that you suggest” (in response to a comment too stupid to publish here) .
“I’m 46, never wanted children, and have no regrets at all about being too old now to breed. I have been suicidal in my life, but none of it had anything to do with childlessness”.
“The real culprit here, of course, is the Cult of Motherhood, which makes involuntarily childless women feel worthless and without purpose, makes childfree-by-choice women feel they must constantly justify their choice and makes a lot of mothers feel like complete failures because they can’t get their kids to stop crying and the house is a tip. What is it about motherhood / non-motherhood that makes us all so preachy and judgemental of other people’s experiences and choices? Stop it, please”.
“My wife and I had intended to have kids but time went by. We are primary teachers but very happy not to have our own despite loving being with kids at work. Being just us two has enabled brilliant travel and a life in many countries. We are really happy. Occasionally I think it must be nice to have kids who are young adults and share their life experiences. However I never regret not having kids. I always say….. occasionally I wish I had kids, but I never wish I had had them…if that makes sense”.
“Society does tend to lead people to believe that children are a must-have accessory without which your life cannot be complete”.
“I don’t ever want children. What I do want is a relaxed, relatively stress-free, low impact existence. I’ve done well in my career but actively avoid promotion, I have never applied for a job that I can’t walk or cycle to and I don’t own a car, I live in a small house that allows for small mortgage payments, my favourite thing in the world is gardening, my husband and I enjoy camping holidays having found that nice holidays abroad don’t do a lot for us. I enjoy a centred and peaceful existence, with lots of exposure to nature, and it never feels empty”.
“(…) I never wanted children. I’m happy for those that do, but I knew all that stress and responsibility just wasn’t for me. I’m 63 now and have never regretted it, my partner is the same age and she also knew when she was 16 (unfortunately women get far more pressure than men in this regard …). We have a lovely, happy, care-free life and wouldn’t change a thing”.
Different Shores 
Wow. A product of the divorce era is putting everything on having a child and expecting that child to fill the hole. Mind. Blown. Because it really is the root of this push towards having children at all costs. It’s also the root of people being so disappointed when they don’t get the birth experience/breastfeeding experience/bonding experience/home-schooling experience they push for. It’s healthy to embrace these milestones, but we really have taken it above and beyond.
I love my kids (yes, I’m going to preface that) and am grateful I have the opportunity to parent. But one gift infertility gave me was opening my eyes to the fact that there were some deep-seeded hurts that were mine and mine alone to work out. It is unfair to expect that the Beats would fill those holes; hell it may even create holes for them. So I have to do the work to heal myself and embrace that I am lovable.
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I read that article too and I found it quite scary that there were some women who had even gone through infertility treatments who then felt that way after having the baby! The fact that you can’t know beforehand how you will find being a parent worries me a bit. I can understand a lot of the points though, having young children can be extremely stressful or even boring and mundane a lot of the time. And I hate when people talk about their kids literally non stop and I could imagine still finding that topic dull even if I had a kid! It also makes sense that women who are very independent and into their careers /hobbies etc could find having children a huge adjustment. I’ve had times where I’ve spent the day with friends and their kids and it’s been overwhelming (toddler tantrums /screaming babies etc) and it has been nice to be able to hand the kids back to their parents and go home and have a bit of quiet! So I can certainly imagine finding aspects of it hard but I hope I would never regret it if I ever manage to have any kids. I am happy that the topic is being discussed though as people shouldn’t think that having children always means happy ever after!
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Holy crap the notion that the love used to be the Happily Ever After, but now children are is mind blowing. I never considered that, but now that I hear it…it is so very true. We are always looking for a fairy tale – a perfect, one size fits all scenario for everyone – and when one of those items falls through, we just move on to the next. It even links with my Microblog Monday post – LOL. I posted about how hard Valentines was when I was single, and now how good Valentine’s is because I have my love, but how hard other holidays are because I’m childless. When I was waiting on Valentine’s Day – I thought a love would fill my heart. Now I have that love, but I’m still not full, so I am hoping children will. MIND BLOWN. Thank you…thank you!
I also love this comment:
“The real culprit here, of course, is the Cult of Motherhood, which makes involuntarily childless women feel worthless and without purpose, makes childfree-by-choice women feel they must constantly justify their choice and makes a lot of mothers feel like complete failures because they can’t get their kids to stop crying and the house is a tip. What is it about motherhood / non-motherhood that makes us all so preachy and judgemental of other people’s experiences and choices? Stop it, please”.
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I’m glad more and more people realize that not having children is an option because it’s sad that see/read about people that didn’t truly thought that it was an option and I know too many people that their relationship with their parents wasn’t very good due to it, too.
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“(For once nobody interjects with “I am a proud mummy with beautiful battle scars and it’s all worth it…”)”
While reading that part of the article I thought something similar. Finally a blurb about the, as the author called it, reality of motherhood, without the addition of a “but”.
When I was still on the fence about having kids, I thought about regret a lot. Will I regret not having children? Would I regret it if I did have them? Ultimately I decided that I would much rather regret not having children than having them.
While it was validating in some ways to read The Guardian article, I also felt (and still feel) so sad for these women. It’s hard to imagine living a life so full of regret.
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The comments you reposted here are amazing. I’m sure there are plenty of others that were not so well thought out or beautifully articulated (at least one that you alluded to), but wow. I’m all for painting a true picture of an experience, including how difficult parenting is (not the air-brushed, sugar-coated fantasy social media would have you believe all your friends are experiencing), or how happy and fulfilled people without children can be, even if that isn’t the life they thought they’d have.
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I think it’s interesting how often the “regret” question is directed towards the child-free, but seemingly never towards parents. I’ve had a lot of people ask “but won’t you regret NOT having children?” and every time there’s this part of me that wants to see what they’d say if I said “Do you regret HAVING children?” It seems like, in my experience at least, people who choose to be child free put way more thought into that decision than those who choose to have children. I know one couple for instance who had a child soon after being married and it turned out that the father hated being a father so he left. I wonder what would have happened if they’d sat down and really hashed out why they wanted a child to begin with and what it would mean for their futures.
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I was with someone today who was bad-mouthing her (grown) child, and another woman at the table said that even if she thought these things about her child, she would never say them aloud. The point is that I wonder how common these thoughts are amongst women (and men) — that idea of regret mixed with the idea of still liking the choices you made.
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It’s about damn time that somebody wrote something like this. Albeit a tiny one, maybe this is the first step in the right direction for embracing the spectrum of the human experience when it comes to procreation.
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How wonderful to read an article that actually addresses the cult of motherhood. Fascinating too to see the linking of the divorce era issues with its rise. I love this – “The sanctity of motherhood … is certainly a subject that could use a dose of reality.”
I will certainly say that this is evident in a lot of infertility blogging, where the desire is perhaps heightened because of the scarcity of the result. Yet “reality” is not something any infertile woman trying desperately to conceive is very good at facing. (I speak from experience).
I also appreciated her saying, “Say I never got pregnant.” So many parents say, “I can’t imagine my life without my children, I love them so much,” and I want to respond, “well, of course you can’t, not now.” But asking them to imagine never getting pregnant/adopting … well, that’s another matter. I’m going to remember that.
Thanks so much for alerting me to this!
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Excellent article and post!
I will let this “simmer on low” in my head for a while 🙂 and will very likely write my own post about it at some point. My psychologist actually also said a few things about the “cult of motherhood” that go in a slightly different direction, but that helped me a lot at the time. In any case, I think it is worth dismantling the concept.
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I look forward to a future post!
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Okay – this is pretty interesting. I need to read that article.
We have been childfree and it’s by choice. Instead of saying it’s too hard to handle the pressure, I think I am not cut out to be a Mum. I love children and I would love to foster someone someday.
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Wow. I really appreciated the comments to that article that you shared. Thank you!! Yes, when people complain about their kids or even when they complain about them growing up too fast, I always think, “Well, what did you think it would be like? What did you think would happen??” It’s not all cute onesies and trips to the park. I guess those people that get pregnant and have a child easily haven’t had as much time as I did to really think about everything that goes along with parenting.
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Hi Phoenix yeah I think infertility really makes you think forensically about what parenting involves; it did me, anyway
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Whoa, great post. I so agree that there is a “cult of motherhood” out there, and that there is so much pressure to do everything possible for your child or maybe it looks like you don’t love them enough, or you’re not a good enough mom, and that just sounds horrible. I feel like I see it on facebook all the time, and when someone actually says something about motherhood being hard they are met with comments like, “Cherish this time! You’ll be sorry when they’re gone!” and crap like that. Um, it’s okay to admit it’s freaking hard and that you’re not always your best in the face of all-day whining or food throwing. I also appreciate the lack of “my battle scars are worth it” type comments in the article. Those articles about miracle/war-torn-from-birth bodies hit me hard, because I have marks from my injections and a scar from my ectopic surgery and I don’t actually have a lining anymore, but I don’t have children as my reward. I don’t get to join in the stretch mark conversation, although I certainly have them. 🙂 Interesting stuff. I wish more people talked about the downsides of parenting, for everyone’s sakes — a friend of mine had a really hard time breastfeeding and she told me how all her mom friends talked it up while she was pregnant and she felt no one told her the truth, and so she felt so guilty when she stopped because it was just too painful and too minimal to feed her baby. She was like, “No one ever tells you the truth, they make it all glitter and rainbows. I’m going to tell you the truth about the first few months, and beg you to take off enough time that you get to the fun parts.” Now if she’d said that on facebook she’d be denigrated as not loving motherhood, or not being a great mom, because she didn’t enjoy the first couple months of having an infant as much as “she should.” This is so messed up. And it makes you feel even worse as a person who is unable to have children and is having difficulty adopting, because you can’t even get to this point. So these articles with reality in them are so important. A voice of honesty in a sea of mother worship, child worship, and this smokescreen that it’s all awesome and the best thing you can do to bring happiness into the world. (I hope for some of that happiness, but I know it will be miserable some of the time and I intend to talk about that, heh heh heh.) Great post! Love it!
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Jess thanks for the fab comment! Here’s hoping for more honest articles like that one in the future.
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Hey very nice blog!
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Amen to the “cult of motherhood.” And (as others have noted), reading about how people are looking to children to “save” them, all I could think was that’s a pretty big burden to lay on an innocent child. I have always thought that far too many people leap into parenthood (or have it thrust upon them) without really thinking through what it entails and whether they’re truly cut out for the job, and a lot of children suffer as a result. People who make a deliberate choice to be childfree (including my own sister) have obviously given these matters a great deal of thought, and I admire & respect them for that.
Thanks for wading through all those comments (so that we wouldn’t have to!!)! lol
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I do think parents are living through their kids more than ever and it does sometimes put a psychological strain on the kids
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Very good post, and lots of great points. It does feel like there is a shift with society putting too much responsibility on children or parenthood to achieve happiness. A child cannot be a person’s everything. It is not healthy on the child or the parent. The cult of motherhood is very scary. The expectations on parents seems almost insane sometimes. And it can feel very isolating to those of us without children, whether by choice or not.
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Thanks for your comment Jamie; I definitely think there has been a shift, too
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Interesting topic whenever it comes up. My thoughts are mostly the same as they have ever been: feelings are feelings and actions are actions. Two different things. Women do not stop having the full range of emotions when they become mothers. I see nothing very surprising or horrible in the fact that some regret becoming parents, especially if they are not properly supported in that new role. And lots aren’t. However, feelings do not change the fact that everybody owes their child the best and there is no ethical way of avoiding that. I fully support a family centred society where all parents and children are supported regardless of their feelings. And people without children have valuable contributions to make in all aspects of life, including the lives of the next generation. They can do things that parents can’t. I’m not sure what “the cult of motherhood is,” but all cults are creepy, and tying ones self image to externals is never a good idea. The one new thought I had after reading this: what about the relationship of these parents with their own parents? Did they not talk about what it was like to be a parent, try to pass on their knowledge? My parents made their children the centre of their lives and but they never pretended their choices came without sacrifices, and I have never assumed mine would either, although I did not always know just what I would be giving up to get something else.
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Interesting thought there, thanks. My parents didn’t talk to me or my sister about being parents; I got the message from them that it was very hard and that children were annoying and gave you strife but everyone just had them anyway, it was what you did… but I’m a child of the 1970s from working-class northern England so wouldn’t expect everyone to have that experience…
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Reading this makes me understand why there are so many more ladies suffering post natal depression… to me it stands to reason that having a family would be hard work, but as so many other people have commented prior it’s all sugar coated by others (I’ve had friends verify this same thing when they have been mentally and emotionally wrung out with the trials and tribulations of their kids) and women are constantly put under such enourmous pressure in our society already – to have the children / be grateful for the children / be superwoman when in reality life is just darn hard going sometimes. I think it’s even harder when someone has struggled with infertility or babyloss prior to having children too.
It’s also really, really refreshing to see the sort of comments about not having children and how varied all of these comments were – it’s a crying shame we can’t all explore all of our feelings more openly with everyone about having/not having children – I’m lucky that I have friends who, although they are mothers, definitely do not want to speak about their kids if we’re on a night out as it’s their down time, they get to be themselves for the evening and do ‘adulting proper’ (to coin a phrase from one of my friends!) I don’t mind hearing about their kids, or being in the company of their kids, but I do understand their need for a night off occasionally too – it’s good to recharge your batteries and let your hair down, no matter what your circumstances are.
I just wish society as a whole were more tolerable toward each other, regardless of anyones personal choices / circumstances around having / not having children and that we could all support each other instead of this horrid one-upmanship thing that seems to permeate parenthood. I think life is challenging enough, the hippy in me is saying ‘less hate, more peace and love everyone!’
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Thanks for your brilliant comment Bamber. I too wish everyone could tolerate one another better: I think it comes from insecurity, maybe – people want to know that they made the right choices and are constantly comparing and seeking validation. Life is definitely too hard already without this sort of pressure and tension
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