A new genre of cultural confession has emerged: mothers publicly expressing regret for having children. A recent article in The Cut featured several women who describe wishing they could return to their former lives, before the demands and permanence of parenthood. ‘Parent regret is more common than you might think,’ the piece notes, pointing to online communities where thousands gather anonymously to express what remains shameful (for now) to say aloud. Similar articles have appeared in outlets such as The Guardian, while a piece in Forbes presents these stories as guidance for those weighing whether to have children.
What emerges from these accounts is not only the familiar struggles of raising young children, but a particular interpretation of them. The struggles of motherhood are framed not as the cost of something meaningful, but as evidence that the entire enterprise was a mistake.
Stories of parental regret are often presented as necessary correctives to overly sentimental portrayals of family life. But they also function as something more: a cautionary tale that lands most forcefully on those already hesitant about having children. The growing visibility of such confessional think pieces resembles a kind of cultural campaign, unfolding in a familiar three-stage pattern.
The first stage is destigmatisation. For most of human history, marriage and children were understood as part of the ordinary arc of most people’s lives. There have always been crosses of infertility, but such cases were recognised as a sorrow precisely because of the shared conviction that parenthood, though costly, is unquestionably worth it. In recent decades, however, this expectation has been steadily loosened. At this first stage, the claim is modest: those who opt out ask only that their choice to deviate from the norm be destigmatised. Most people, sharing a common live-and-let-live disposition, readily assent to this.
The second stage is normalisation. What began as a request for acceptance becomes a positive vision of the good life. Social media and popular culture begin to showcase the perceived benefits of a life without children. The language shifts from ‘childless’ to ‘child-free’. It is framed as an expression of autonomy, a response to economic pressures, and an act of environmental responsibility. Parenting is just one option among many, each with its pros and cons and each option equally valid. Eventually, the norm begins to disappear, and love and marriage carry no expectation of a baby carriage.
The final stage is inversion. What was once expected is now recast as oppressive. Motherhood is not a natural good, but an external imposition – one that even those with a child in their arms can admit was a mistake. This inversion is not entirely new; it is the same logic as abortion, but a new way of feeding that logic.
To be sure, parenting is difficult. In some ways, it has been made easier by technological advances, but in other ways, it has become harder. Many parents now raise children far from extended family, without the networks of support that once sustained ordinary family life.
But the deeper modern challenge to parenting is less logistical than it is spiritual and psychological. We have devalued it. Stripped of a larger framework of meaning, the daily tasks of caring for children can feel merely repetitive and hidden. One regretful mother in The Cut piece laments the loss of the ‘big problems’ she once solved in her career: ‘As a parent, you’re solving tiny problems… Do you want the crackers in the red or blue bowl?’ And so the sacrifices of family life come to feel not only heavy, but meaningless.
The problem is not that parenting is hard – lots of things are hard, such as career advancement or staying in shape. The question is whether we believe it is worth it. Another regretful woman in The Guardian piece describes rediscovering herself after returning to a yoga class: ‘Oh yeah, there she is. She’s in there somewhere.’ At the same time, she acknowledges that motherhood has made her a better person; it has decentred her, made her more compassionate, she says. And yet, she still regrets it.
Motherhood helps us achieve what moral formation is meant to achieve: a decentring of self. But if the goal remains to be centred on oneself, then even becoming a better person will feel like a loss. What is gained is experienced as diminishment, and what is, in fact, a reordering towards love is mistaken for the loss of the self.
The reason these cautionary tales are powerful is because they seize upon something instantly recognisable: before you have children, you have no real sense of how meaningful they will be. Afterward, you do. That gap, that unavoidable ignorance, can be exploited. If the meaning of parenthood can only be fully known from within it, then a culture that teaches us to fear it may succeed in persuading many to turn away from it.
At a time when the social narrative against children grows more insistent, all the more must we help bridge that gap. We do not want to push parenthood on those who are afraid or disinclined towards it, but we need to help reorient one another if that fear is the result of a campaign of inversion.
Regret over children is now a public conversation; regret over their absence remains largely private or a conversation relegated to conservative and religious circles. However, the regret of the childless transcends such categories, and those who carry it should not be stigmatised but platformed. They are real victims of – and powerful correctives for – the propaganda campaigns that surrounded them.
Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of the books Awake, Not Woke, Theology of Home, and a forthcoming book, No Contact, on the politics of estrangement. She is a wife and mother of six in California.
