外刊精讀｜第四篇｜原文

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 co-author 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 sleep-deprived 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.