Do children improve your life? Do parents regret having children?
It's complicated
Do children make you happier?1
Maybe not. In a famous study, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues got about 900 employed women to report every one of their activities at the end of each day and how happy they were when they did them. The women recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other research finds that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, along with a drop in marital satisfaction that recovers only once the children leave the house. As psychologist Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”
This shouldn’t be too surprising. Having children involves financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is also the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And children can turn a cheerful and loving relationship into a zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and rest and work and who doesn’t. As the writer Jennifer Senior notes, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—
more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, and sex.
Someone who doesn’t understand this is welcome to spend a full day with an angry two-year-old (or a sullen fifteen-year-old) and find out.
So, don’t have children, right?
It’s not as simple as that.
As often happens in psychology, there are the initial studies that provide clear findings—such as “Having children makes you unhappy”—and then there are the later studies that find that it’s more complicated.
For one thing, the happiness hit is worse for some people than others. One study finds that older fathers get a happiness boost; it’s young parents and single parents, male and female, who suffer the most significant happiness loss.
Also, most of the original data, including the famous Kahneman study, was from the United States. One team of researchers looked at the happiness levels of people with and without children in twenty-two countries. They found that the extent to which children make you happy is influenced by whether there are childcare policies such as paid parental leave. Parents from Norway and Hungary, for instance, are happier than childless couples—while parents from Australia and Great Britain are less happy. The country with the greatest happiness hit when you have children? The United States.
Finally—and this was a big theme of my book The Sweet Spot—there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, something having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning.
It’s not just me. When you ask people, “In the bigger picture of your life, how personally significant and meaningful to you is what you are doing at the moment?” parents—both mothers and fathers—tend to say that their lives have more meaning than those of non-parents.2
When I wrote about this in The Sweet Spot, I made the following remark.
I don’t know of any scientific research on this, but from my own experience and my own interactions with parents, there are few people who claim to regret having children.
A little while ago, I got a thoughtful email from Kevin Martin that pushed back on this claim—and prompted me to write this essay. (Everything that follows by Kevin is published with his permission.)
First, he gently pointed out that there is research on this, which I could have discovered if I had been responsible enough to Google it. Here are some numbers.
In a Gallup poll, Americans over 45 who had children were asked how many children they would want to have if they could do it all over again. One option was “no children”—this was selected by 7% of the respondents.
A couple of survey studies in Poland asked younger parents (in one survey, 18-30 years old; in the other, 18-40 years old) if they would have children if they could do it all over again—14% and 11% said no.
A survey study of Germans with children asked them to react to the claim If I could choose today once again, I would not want to have children. 8% of the parents said that they fully agree with this, and another 11% claimed that they rather agree with this.
These are low numbers—my intuition that “few people claim to regret having children” seems right. Actually, they are weirdly low numbers. Take the 7% finding for Americans. All the research suggests that having children is a tough call. Certainly, many people would have had happier lives (and happier marriages) if they chose not to have kids, and most parents know non-parents who are living rich and fulfilled lives. (I know quite a few myself.) It is surprising to me that so few people with children don’t look at their childfree friends and regret their own choices to become parents.
To put it another way, people often regret other aspects of their lives, such as their marriages, their jobs, and where they choose to live. What makes children an exception to this?
In his email to me, Kevin challenges my premise. He says that regret is more common than I think. A lot of people do regret having children. He writes.
[My wife and I] had countless encounters with parents who, finding out we’re childfree, drop the veil so to speak and talk honestly about their struggles. They report they cannot talk to other parents for fear of judgement, particularly since our society glamorizes the wonders of parenthood. We suspect many more parents than you might expect feel yet cannot express regret. I hypothesize that, especially in elite American circles, there are even stronger pressures for parents to appear perfect and not to disclose parenthood struggles. …
You may be interested in reddit.com/r/regretfulparents or reddit.com/r/childfree. They are some of the only “safe spaces” where people can congregate and vent. The general tenor there is we live in a “breeder” society somewhat analogous to heteronormativity with many, deep, implicit assumptions and norms that guide behavior or thought. They claim that parents (like you) can’t or won’t “see” what us childfree/regretful parents can.
(I went on r/regretfulparents, and, God, it’s heartbreaking. Story after story of unrelenting misery, of people trapped in lives they hate. If you’ve decided not to have kids and want to feel good about your decision, this is the subreddit for you.)
Anyway, Kevin is right about the stories we tell other people. If I regretted having kids, I might keep it to myself. I might worry that it reflects badly on me. Maybe other people would think that only a bad parent—or a bad person—would regret having kids.
Still, I don’t think this is a full explanation. The polling results are anonymous. People admit all sorts of things in anonymous surveys. If they regret having children, why don’t they say so?
A second possibility explored in The Sweet Spot involves memory distortion. When we gauge our own previous experiences, we tend to remember the peaks and forget the 99 percent of mundane awfulness in between. Our memory is selective. Making a distinction between day-to-day experience (the experiencing self) and our reflective sense of how our lives are (our remembering self), the writer Jennifer Senior puts it like this:
Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids . . . But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life tales.
In a house I lived in a while ago, I had photographs of my children on the wall up the stairs, and whenever I passed them, I would look at these happy pictures—the family playing together on a beach, the boys cuddling together while watching a movie, and so on—and think: “What a good life!” There were negative events—the tantrums, the exhausted nights with a colicky baby, angry fights about schoolwork—but, of course, there were no pictures of those. Maybe this is how our memories work, and maybe this is why, when we think about our children, we tend to think we made the right choices.
There’s something to this. But it’s incomplete as an explanation. For one thing, we do remember the bad times (I just did when writing the paragraph above.) For another, even if it’s true, it pushes the question back: Why are our memories of our children so much more distorted than other memories? Not everyone looks back so fondly on their relationship with their partner, for instance. We still need some other explanation of what makes the choice to have children special.
I think the right account for the relative lack of regret has to do with love.
Most parents love their children, and it seems terrible to admit to yourself and others that the world would be better if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, it’s not just that you feel compelled to say that you are happy they exist—you are happy they exist. After all, you love them.
This potentially puts you in an odd state.
You don’t regret having children.
You might admit that your life would be better without them.
In his book Midlife, Kieran Setiya expands on this point. Modifying an example from the philosopher Derek Parfit, he asks you to imagine being in a situation where, if you and your partner were to conceive a child during a time frame, the child would have a serious, though not fatal, medical problem, such as chronic joint pain. If you wait, the child will grow up without such a problem. For whatever reason, you choose not to wait. The child grows up, and you love him, and, though he suffers, he is happy to be alive. Do you regret your decision?
That’s a hard question. Of course, having a child without this condition would have been better. But if you waited, you’d have a different child, and this baby (then boy, then man) you love wouldn’t exist. It was a mistake, yes, but perhaps a mistake that you don’t regret.
I think the answer to our puzzle, then, is attachment. The love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to have them has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness and meaning.
I think that many of the tragic stories you find on r/regretfulparents arise because, for whatever reason, the love isn’t there. And so regret creeps in.
I’ll step back now and let a real writer end this. In a moving essay called Joy, Zadie Smith describes having a child as
a strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.
And then she talks about the risk:
Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than total annihilation?
But if the loss of a child would be total annihilation, then having a child, healthy and happy and sound, must be annihilation’s opposite, which sounds pretty terrific.
This is an edited version of a paid-only post I sent out a few months ago, which was itself a modified and extended version of a discussion in my book, The Sweet Spot.
I’m describing the choice of whether or not to have children as a sort of cost-benefit calculation, where you decide based on comparing your assessment of how your life would be under either alternative—which would make you happier, which would give your life more meaning, and so on. I think this is the right way to decide, but my friend Laurie Paul strongly disagrees with this, arguing that becoming a parent is a transformative experience and, as such, normal decision-making procedures fail us. She makes this argument in her wonderful book Transformative Experience, and we debate her theory in this back-and-forth in Slate. I may return to this issue in a future Substack post.
I have considered this dilemma many times - do I regret having children? Would my life be simpler, free of regret? Would I be happier? I gave birth to four UNPLANNED children. I aborted a fifth “possible” child, for reasons I won’t go into here. But now, there is regret — who would that person/child have been? You see, three of my four live births only lived for varying periods. My first son died at 16 in a car accident. My only daughter died at 32 of medical issues coupled with a drug overdose. My third child died at 37 of an out & out drug overdose during the height of Covid. My fourth and last (LIVING) child is on the spectrum - very intelligent but lives with social difficulties. I have never, ever for one moment regretted the lives of my children, so, consequently, do not regret being a parent. My one regret, as stated, is NOT letting that fifth “being” BECOME. Every day, I outshine that annihilation of the spirit by loving my 16 years with Michael, my 32 years with Lisa, and my 37 years with David. I am 75 years old, now, and appreciate/love every minute spent with my living 39-year-old son. There is no accounting for the power of love.
I'd say the solution lies in granularity. Experiences that are miserable at each particular moment, like climbing Mt. Everest, could be deeply happy and meaningful overall. Indeed, that's typical of the most meaningful experiences, which is why people are often loath to repeat them. The key is abandoning the analytic assumption that a whole's goodness is just the sum total of the goodness of its parts.