Parental regret: If you could go back in time, would you choose to become a parent?

Yet parental regret is real for a significant minority. In a US poll, 7% of parents said they wouldn’t have children if they had their chance over again; a 2016 German study found 8% wouldn’t, while 11% weren’t sure.

And a Polish study showed at least 10% of parents expressing being regretful.

“Quite a sizeable chunk of the population feel parental regret,” says Dr Ann-Marie Creaven at University of Limerick’s (UL) Department of Psychology. Being emotionally literate about such a potentially tricky topic is important, she says.

“By regret, we mean a clear, well-considered belief that if you could go back in time, you would not choose parenthood.”

Regret is different to disappointment. “The type of activities we regret are those we had some control over. We experience disappointment when something doesn’t work out as we hoped; we experience regret when that something was clearly under our control.”

Creaven says that regretting parenthood doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent or that you don’t love your child. “For many who feel regret, they love the child, but regret the role.”

Dr Anne-Marie Casey, senior clinical psychologist in Children’s Health Ireland at Crumlin and member of Psychological Society of Ireland, agrees with this distinction. “Parental regret is not ‘I regret my son/daughter’ or that I don’t love them, it’s the changes that have happened as a result of parenthood that are regretted.”

Casey says that becoming a parent involves change. “It’s these changing roles and relationships, the fantasy of how you imagined life would be and the reality. Nothing can prepare you for these, nor for the relentless ideals that are out there for parenthood.”

Parenthood is forever

So what can predispose parents to regret? “If you didn’t want to be a parent in the first instance, having a child isn’t likely to make those feelings disappear,” says Creaven. Unlike decisions about career/housing, both of which are reversible, becoming a parent isn’t temporary. “All going well, your children will outlive you. So, it isn’t possible to box it away and unpack it when you feel in the mood for a spot of parenting.”

So becoming a parent to satisfy a partner’s desire for parenthood, for example, isn’t a good idea; your life will not be ‘the same, just plus a baby’, says Creaven, who points to a societal assumption that heterosexual couples will have children. “If you’re on the fence and someone’s pressuring you to go one way, you might decide to go that way. It’s really difficult to imagine what parenthood is like beforehand. Someone could easily be swayed; you don’t really know what you’re getting into, and everybody says it’s wonderful. And it’s expected.”

Stretched resources can tip parents into regret. “Research in Germany and Poland found regret more likely among lower-income households. Similarly, single parents in Poland were more likely to experience regret. Supposedly ‘it takes a village to rear a child’,but if you don’t feel you have a village, you might well experience burnout and regret,” says Creaven.

The timing can also feed regret. “People can regret when they had children, rather than that they had them,” says Dr Carmel Hannan at the Department of Sociology, UL.

She points to findings from Growing Up in Ireland (2008), which showed that 72% of mothers said their pregnancy was planned. But 10% reported they’d intended to become pregnant ‘somewhat later’ and 5% had wanted a baby ‘much later’ and 6% hadn’t intended having children at all.

Casey says parental burnout is another predictor of regret. “A study in the Netherlands found parental burnout increased in lockdown when parents spent more time attending to children and had less time for self-care.”

Pointing to a study from the University of Utah, which analysed online comments about parental regret, Casey says a child who’s different than you expected can lead to feelings of ‘should I ever have done this?’ “Maybe there’s a personality clash, or there’s a medical diagnosis with constant hospital appointments, and you really miss your old life then.”

What parents are mourning is their previous freedom and the alternative route their lives would have taken. “This isn’t necessarily related to careers, but to more fulfilled, well-rounded lives,” says Creaven, who sees a temporal element to such regret, which might be intense during the busy years of parenthood, but dissipates when the parent becomes a grandparent. “The time at which you might most intensely feel regret could be when you’re at your busiest and most distanced from the life you had.”

Creaven cautions against taking parental regret seriously during the early years, a labour-intensive time of big life change. “Once that has all cleared and you’re feeling regret at a stage where generally people would be well settled in the parenting role, then it’s probably a genuine regret,” Creaven says.

Impact on children

While lacking data on the impact of parental regret on children, Craven says we can speculate about this. “It can mean parents feel guilty and invest considerable effort in making sure the child doesn’t feel the parent is regretful. It might also mean parents put a lot of structures in place to allow them fulfil other aspects of their lives.

“I don’t think regret needs to impact children; it doesn’t necessarily mean the parent doesn’t love the child. They regret their role, not the existence of the child.”

Casey says there’s stigma to expressing parental regret but not to say you regret having a pet. Yet there’s a certain overlap of experience in both scenarios. “You love them, but they’re expensive and time-consuming. You miss the time before when you didn’t have them. You maybe resent the time input, the sacrifice, the difficulty. Exactly the same themes come up. I find the contrast interesting: Here’s something that’s socially acceptable to say and here’s something that isn’t.”

The taboo about expressing parental regret is because parenthood has become “a holy grail, so glorified and sacrosanct”.

Creaven says parents doubt themselves for regretting such a monumental choice. “You feel silly. You don’t want to undermine your child. And you don’t want to be hurtful to others who wouldn’t want to hear, because maybe it might bring up difficult questions for them.”

Hannan says studies show most Irish men and women want to have children. “In Ireland, having children is almost a universal norm,” she says, citing a 2011 Eurobarometer survey of 27 European countries, which asked about actual versus ideal family size. “Family-size preference was larger in Ireland than in the other countries.”

This can make it harder to express parental regret, which Creaven would like to see countered by society becoming more tolerant of different life paths. An accepting attitude might see “more people opting out of parenthood and parents less likely to experience regret”.

But how to deal with parental regret? Casey says it’s about holding two emotions together: Regret for the path you took and love for your child. “It’s healthy to acknowledge regret, to acknowledge both the love and the shadow. The more truthful we are with ourselves, the better.”

Creaven’s advice for those feeling this tricky emotion: “A person can experience regret for their parenting role [but] still feel a lot of love for the person their child is/has become. Understanding this might make people feel less guilty about their regret.

“Also, regret more generally is very normal. Think of the major life decisions we take, around jobs/homes/relationships/parenthood; chances are some of us will experience regret relating to those.

“You don’t need to feel guilty about the regret - it’s inevitable some will have this experience. Even the best-laid plans don’t always make us feel how we expected to feel.”