{"text":[[{"start":6.36,"text":"Ten years ago, Gianina Logan did not know if she wanted children. Mind racing over myriad worries about her future, she turned to Google for information. Finally, she came across a community of people on social media who seemed to have answers to the question that was troubling her. Was it true — as her mother had reassured her — that you would love a child if they were yours?"}],[{"start":28.12,"text":"Perhaps, came the answer from the group. But that might not be enough. Its members wrote of resentment, exhaustion, financial strains, loss of identity and countless other concerns. Some lamented becoming parents due to accidental pregnancies or religious pressure. This resonated with Logan, who felt the weight of social conformity and of her mother’s and partner’s Christian beliefs. The honesty of the posts, typically anonymous, was shocking. But Logan found it somehow reassuring. “It’s knowledge, it’s wisdom, it’s being able to learn from somebody else’s mistake,” she says on the phone from America on a spring Saturday, years later."}],[{"start":66.82,"text":"The “I Regret Having Children” group had confirmed Logan’s fears were real: having a child could ruin her life. She had made her choice. “I love kids. And I’m so glad that I don’t have them,” she says."}],[{"start":78.68,"text":"Today, Logan, who works as a laboratory analyst, runs that same Facebook group, which has more than 115,000 members. The role involves moderating discussions that are supportive, but sometimes also acrimonious, as parents post and parse their deeply personal stories. Logan refers to herself as “an anonymous employee” of the page which, she says, is “a thing all of its own and has a life of its own”. She describes the group as “wild and mostly unmanaged”. When she does occasionally proffer her own opinions, members downvote or make fun of her. “I am just an editor and a manager and the holder of this great responsibility and opportunity,” she says."}],[{"start":119.2,"text":"Some post on the forum in rushes of emotion; others are more considered. “I catch myself wishing I didn’t have a kid every day and I hate this life,” writes one woman. “At least now they removed my womb because NOW they believe me that I don’t want kids. If they did it when I asked them, I wouldn’t be in this shitty life.” One describes the pride she feels for her three adult children. “My regret has nothing to do with who they are. My regret is that raising them came at the expense of my own life. I spent my entire adulthood taking care of other people. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a person with dreams of my own and became someone’s mother first, second and third . . . Even after they became adults, they still needed help.”"}],[{"start":163.4,"text":"Another writes: “Seven years into parenthood, I feel like a shell of the person I used to be. I never really wanted children, and I definitely didn’t want them with my spouse. But my mother desperately wanted a grandchild, and eventually I gave in. Now she’s gone, and I’m left living a life I never wanted for myself.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":182.66,"text":"As messages like these illustrate, the community is grappling with a pressure that is existential — and taboo. “This is something that people will only tell you anonymously,” says Logan. “It’s a secret. You can’t tell people at your job the whole story or even your family.” She sees the group as a space that allows members to be honest with each other about regret or resentment. It is, she says, a “sacred grief that a lot of people are carrying, [which] makes me realise that people are deeper than we really allow them to be, and have much more going on”."}],[{"start":211.16,"text":"Logan, 44, grew up one of four children. Two of her siblings are dead. Her surviving brother has an unstable life, she says. “I’m pretty much their only good kid [and] they had a hell of a time with me,” she says of her parents. Her mother, who she says shows no signs of regret, “is a saint, my mama is so sweet; [she] seems like a happy person and she smiles a lot”."}],[{"start":233.02,"text":"One source of displeasure, however, is her daughter’s sideline. If Logan ever brings up her online community, her mother gives a tight smile and changes the subject. “I don’t think she wants to think about that at all. I think that she thinks it’s awful . . . so sad for everyone involved. She blocks it out.” Many friends and colleagues react similarly. How does that impact her? “It affects me in that I don’t talk about it to anyone,” she says."}],[{"start":256.62,"text":"Pushing a pram along a sunlit South Bank 14 years ago, I met another new mother. We swapped stories about day-to-day strains, feeding struggles and bouts of isolation. It felt cathartic to unload and, perhaps emboldened by our shared vulnerabilities, she asked me a question: if you knew your son would be guaranteed better opportunities with new but brilliant parents, would you give him up? No, I said, aghast. Would you? The silence was unsettling."}],[{"start":283.92,"text":"I shouldn’t have been shocked. Before I became a mother, I had wrestled with the abstract notion of remorse over such a huge, life-long commitment. This was a form of self-soothing when, in my late thirties, I feared I might not have a child. Later, there were moments when, as a mother, I felt unmoored and overwhelmed. Not just with the responsibility or juggling home with work deadlines, but with love. Experiencing so much feeling was discombobulating, even if, in my wilder fantasies, I wish I’d had five kids."}],[{"start":313.04,"text":"I’d never felt regret. But, whether or not it applied to the other new mum I met, it is a normal human emotion. Kierkegaard said: “I see it all perfectly. There are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”"}],[{"start":334.08,"text":"It is one thing to regret not asking someone out on a date or choosing the wrong career. You can retrain, become the lawyer or artist you always wanted, or even get back in touch with the one that got away. But having a child is irreversible, and that marks parenthood apart from other choices."}],[{"start":351.08,"text":"Mumsnet, as well as Reddit, TikTok and the group Logan oversees, have provided corners of the internet where parents can anonymously discuss their ambivalence, guilt and darker feelings about life with children. Helped by social media, a body of research devoted to parental regret has emerged. The emotion was defined in a recent paper as a “negative feeling grounded in the comparison between one’s actual life with children and the imagined, better life that would have followed from an alternative choice of remaining child-free”. There is, according to the researchers, a difference between short-term regret, triggered by immediate issues such as challenging child behaviour or a sudden feeling of lost identity, and long-term regret, which involves “idealising” how life without children might have been."}],[{"start":397.82,"text":"Unlike other regrets, which can be adaptive and provide opportunities to change course, the paper found parenthood regret to be “maladaptive” because there is little opportunity for change, which tends to impair wellbeing. Konrad Piotrowski, a psychologist at the SWPS University in Poland and one of the paper’s co-authors, says that parental regret piqued his interest eight years ago, when he was looking into the challenges of transitioning into adulthood. He identified parenthood as one of life’s most significant challenges and created a questionnaire to discover how mothers and fathers felt about it."}],[{"start":434.58,"text":"Colleagues warned Piotrowski that parents would not be willing to discuss such a delicate topic. It was the opposite, he says: many were willing to share their experiences. And this made him appreciate the importance of distinguishing regret from fleeting negative thoughts or exhaustion. “There are parents who are not burnt out or depressed, but realise that being a parent is not a role they identify with.” There were, he found, factors that made someone more susceptible to regret, such as experiencing divorce or a trauma in childhood. Perfectionists commonly felt regret too."}],[{"start":470.58,"text":"Piotrowski estimates that between 5 and 15 per cent of parents feel this way but he does not know whether regret is a permanent state or can fade over time. “Feelings can change, so I would not tell a parent that they will always feel this way,” he says. “The baby years can be especially demanding but we do not have good evidence that parenthood regret is most common then.”"}],[{"start":493.14,"text":"In her 2017 book Regretting Motherhood, Israeli sociologist Orna Donath interviewed 23 women who regretted becoming parents. For all the women, this feeling was distinct from wishing their child did not exist, though when asked whether they would do it again the answer was no. Donath wanted to highlight regret to push women to think harder about becoming mothers, not to sleepwalk into it. She describes one such case: Sunny, a mother of four, who told her, “I felt ready for it. At some point it was time for the next stage. And I wanted to be like everyone else.”"}],[{"start":528.9,"text":"In her book, Donath identified a wider culture that glorified motherhood, and argued that maternal regret should not be seen only as an individual problem, as doing so assumes that the answer is that “these specific mothers should try harder” and ignores the way women can feel pressured into motherhood. For Donath, overlooking regret as a normal consequence of decisions means ignoring women’s agency and ability to evaluate “whether all of this was worthwhile or not”."}],[{"start":556.74,"text":"Piotrowski argues that as contraception has allowed parenting to become a personal choice, it has become a “decision to analyse”. It’s natural, he says, that we should evaluate whether it’s a good or bad decision. He is, like Donath, keen to point out that a parent can love their children while regretting the decision to become a parent."}],[{"start":577.94,"text":"Women dominate the members on Logan’s group, but seeing more mothers on forums does not necessarily mean regret is more common in women, says Piotrowski. “In my studies in Poland, the proportion was similar for women and men.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":590.96,"text":"In her 2001 book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, the novelist Rachel Cusk wrote: “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like, and I wonder whether, as a gender, we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject.”"}],[{"start":610.46,"text":"Years later Cusk described the hostility she received for writing the book: “On and on it went, back and forth: I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual. One curious article questioned the length of my sentences: how had I, a mother, been able to write such long and complicated sentences? Why was I not busier, more tired? Another reviewer — a writer! — commanded her readers not to let the book fall into the hands of pregnant women.”"}],[{"start":647.06,"text":"As the reaction to Cusk’s book showed, anonymous posting about parental struggles on social networks and talking discreetly to academic researchers is not the same as speaking about it in public. Sarah Fischer later had a similar experience after publishing her book, Die Mutterglück-Lüge (The Mother-bliss Lie). “I knew what to expect, and I wanted to really provoke and get people to think about this very important topic,” she tells me over the phone. Still, she found the hostility she got in some quarters, including death threats, bruising."}],[{"start":678.02,"text":"Fischer says the overwhelming response from women was positive: many said she had made them feel less alone. “Mothers wrote to me and said, ‘Because of you, I could stop taking my antidepressants because I realised it’s not wrong what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling.’”"}],[{"start":694.94,"text":"She has always made it clear that she never regretted her daughter, who is much loved and wanted, rather, she was oppressed by the feeling of being consigned to the role of mother. Today she is divorced and lives close to her ex-husband, who Fischer describes as the “better mum”. In contrast, a large source of frustration in Logan’s group is from parents who feel unsupported by their partners."}],[{"start":718.5,"text":"To some extent, the work of these writers can be viewed as a reaction to what Donath describes as the “fetishisation” of parenthood, and motherhood in particular. When the French psychotherapist and mother Corinne Maier published her book No Kids in 2007, she hoped to make women seriously consider the question: is it worth having children? “[Then] it was fashionable to repeat things like, ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a child’s smile’ or ‘Motherhood fulfils women,’” Maier says now. She argues that one result of this was that parenthood could become the solution “for people with little imagination”. “Once we no longer really believe in an afterlife, a brighter future or the miracles of progress. So what is left to project oneself into the future? Children. That is too easy an answer.”"}],[{"start":765.22,"text":"In the 20 years since she wrote her book, Maier says the conversation has opened up. Some might say too much. A succession of crises and financial pressures has left young people worried about the future, while a growing community speaking about the positives of being child-free has discouraged many from becoming parents. The US conservative Institute for Family Studies said that conversations about the “nonstop slog” of parenting increased the perceived costs for many young women. Others have described a “social contagion”."}],[{"start":792.02,"text":"Could talking more openly about parental regret become a contributing factor to declining birth rates in industrialised countries? David Matley, a researcher into online communities on the subject, says the broader effects of sharing such stories are difficult to assess. “The main impact is that they give some legitimacy to the whole idea of women saying that they are not happy with the pressures to be a mother and that it is OK to say, ‘It is not for me.’”"}],[{"start":821.06,"text":"For Maier, openness is crucial. “If I had my life to do over, it is clear that I would not have children. At the same time, I am glad that they exist and that they are doing well. And to those who think my children must be very unhappy to be the children of Mrs No Kid, they are doing very well in life and pursuing things that interest them, which shows that having a mother who is honest with herself can have positive effects for everyone.”"}],[{"start":847.78,"text":"Parental regret is as old as parenthood itself, says Logan. “There have always been people who resented their parental responsibilities, abandoned their children, or struggled to feel the love and fulfilment society tells us should come naturally with having children.” What’s different now, she says, “is the ability to speak openly about those feelings” — at least on social media. “Anonymous platforms like ours give people an opportunity to express thoughts they might never admit to their families, friends or even themselves. After years of reading these submissions, I’ve come to believe these experiences are far more common than society has traditionally been willing to acknowledge.”"}],[{"start":887.42,"text":"Logan is proud of the community she has nurtured and of enabling people to confess dark thoughts they have bottled up. “Before the internet, you wouldn’t have heard this side of the story. It was too taboo to talk about. I don’t remember hearing [about this subject even] when talk shows were a big thing in the ’90s,” she says."}],[{"start":904.68,"text":"Moderating the forum on top of her day job takes its toll, but Logan says she is not tired of the topic. “I still find these stories compelling. I also appreciate being able to provide a space where people can share experiences they might otherwise have to keep to themselves. That’s what has kept me involved all these years.” Her immersion in it is one reason why, when people tell her they are pregnant, she doesn’t automatically congratulate them. “I understand what a huge task it is to raise children.” Logan thinks moderating the forum has made her more empathetic. At work, she recognises her colleagues with children “might have more going on underneath the surface”."}],[{"start":944,"text":"The internet’s role in breaking open discussion of topics that seem taboo in real life has been liberating for many people. But forums about parental regret are, to be brutal, also content. In flocking to these sites, participants are also feeding the machine. “People write in every day even though they get beat up in the comments,” says Logan."}],[{"start":963.58,"text":"Their bravery in sharing their vulnerabilities — even anonymously — is admirable. Some regretful parents are scolded for even thinking that way; others who are child-free by choice can sometimes veer into smugness, seeing regret as a validation for their choice."}],[{"start":978.5,"text":"Post-children, I’m drawn to the members’ stories because I find the parenting experience in all its shades of darkness and brightness fascinating and too easily dismissed as trivial or sentimental compared with, say, romantic love or filial relationships."}],[{"start":993.52,"text":"Logan wants to make sure I understand that her members are not callous or unfeeling, instead, they love their child but regret being a parent. “That’s the majority.” Her key message is that we should acknowledge and accept regret, not try to argue others out of their feelings. “There’s people who want you to just figure out a way to enjoy it,” she says."}],[{"start":1013.18,"text":"Emma Jacobs is an FT features writer"}],[{"start":1015.5,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":1024.9,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793497672_2935.mp3"}