“Having kids was a mistake”

0:00Today Explained is the program. I'm Sean Rameswaram and I recently became the father of a daughter, but I didn't always know if I wanted kids. In fact, I distinctly remember being at a bar with some of my oldest friends one night in my 20s and my buddy Jeff said he wanted to have kids and I was shocked. We were 25. We never talked about kids, but he knew he wanted them. How did he know? It sounds like something I would say. I asked him this week, 15 or so years later. I wanted to pursue something bigger than myself, and that was something I could relate to at the time. It all worked out for Jeff, who now has two daughters and is super into them, but it doesn't go so well for everyone.

0:42More and more people in the United States are deciding not to have kids. Birth rates just hit yet another record low, and some people out there are having kids and regretting the decision. We're going to hear from a few of them on Today Explained from Vox. Support for Today Explained comes from Atio, the A-I-C-R-M for modern teams. Atio connects to your email, calendar calls, product data, billing data, and more. So your CRM is always complete, always enriched, and always in sync. Bye, bye, bye. If you want a CRM built for how you want to work, you can check out Atio. You can go to atio.com slash todayexplained and you get 15 % off your first year.

1:26That's attio.com slash today explained.

1:56Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. Today explained. Now you say, now Fran says. Today is the same. Good job. My name is Bindu Bansinap. I'm a senior writer at The Cut at New York Magazine. And a few months ago, we decided to do a theme package around the question of should I have kids? evergreen question that like every day new people ask themselves. And for that, I decided to do a story about exploring the parent regret, which is an under-discussed but widely felt sentiment among new parents, older parents, all kinds of parents. And I got the idea because a few months ago, just perusing Reddit, I kept seeing posts from this subreddit, regretful parents where people would share stories of their struggles in parenthood or, you know, vent about feelings that are too taboo to share, you know, with their spouses or with their friends or family members who don't seem to understand, you know, the feelings of overwhelm that they're dealing with.

3:11Missing the life I dreamed of. I am so tired. I gave up my son to my ex-husband and I am free. So I started looking through posts and looking for ones where people had kind of detailed their struggles and I was just kind of throwing everything at the wall, messaging people blindly. I wanted to have like a large sample of different kinds of parents. I was hoping to get, you know, parents of older children, parents of adult children. But by and large, I do think while those parents do exist in the subreddit, it is mostly dominated by parents of very young children. And it just so happened that the three people who agreed to chat with me anonymously happened to be young mothers of young children.

4:03The first mom I spoke to has a six-year-old and a three-year-old. She lives in the Northeast, and she was formerly the executive at a non-profit, and she was never really considered herself a kid person, but in dating her husband, it was kind of a deal-breaker for him. I remember telling my husband, I'm worried. I love our life now, and I'm not sure what it's going to look like with a child. He told me it's going to be better. Everyone in their lives assured them that, you know, their lives are going well. They assure them that this is the natural next step, that it would be well worth it. And so they decided to take the plunge.

4:43I was worried about my career, but I thought there are working moms everywhere. People do this. Then I had my first baby. She really struggled after the birth of her first child. I think there are many ways that, you know, she was let down. You know, I think her doctor was very dismissive about her postpartum depression and things of that nature. She just kind of dismissed me and said, well, you don't feel like throwing your baby out the window, right? And she just kind of felt like her life had gotten smaller. You know, she missed answering and solving like big problems at work. And, you know, now she was solving questions.

5:23There's one point that she made like, oh, do you want the crackers and the Red Bull or the Blue Bull? So I think it was just really overwhelming to see, like, on the day-to-day, how her time was dominated, how her life really just was upended. We'll watch movies or play video games, and every now and then I'll try and work on an art project. But by the time I've set everything up, I'm exhausted and it's time for bed. Having a kid turns you into a morning person the way being chased by a bear turns you into a runner. These were feelings that she didn't really share with her husband because she always felt that, you know, he was a very natural caretaker.

6:02She kind of felt like he always knew what to do in stressful moments with the children. And she felt it didn't really come as naturally to her. But, you know, they have a lot of childless friends and who they still hang out with. And kind of taking a step back and looking at where the chips have fallen for everyone, They kind of landed on, yeah, like we love our children, but certainly life would be easier and perhaps happier without them. I spoke to a young mom in Southern Europe, had a fairly sheltered life, and she also never considered herself to be much of a kid person. She got married pretty young and wanted to wait a few years before having kids, which was something that was important to her husband.

6:51and she found that while deciding whether or not to have children, a lot of people in her life were assuring her that, you know, you wouldn't do it alone. They would be there for her. They would help her along the way. And once she got pregnant and had her baby, it was very much not the case. There was a sense that the village who had promised to show up for her was in, you know, nowhere to be found. She was a teacher and had to put her career on hold, and her mom came to help and things like that, but it just kind of all fell on her. It felt like I'd been tricked into this. Everyone who wanted me to have a child, my husband, my family, knew they weren't going to lose much, while my freedom and identity went down the toilet.

7:39And something that I thought was interesting about her story was, You know, she talks a little bit about the feeling of that newborn bubble that she experienced with her daughter. And she said that she was afraid that she wouldn't feel a connection with her, that she would struggle with depression. But when I gave birth to my daughter, I was actually so happy. It's like I was in this bubble where I had no worries about work. Meals were brought to me. Nurses took care of us. Then it's, yeah, going home and kind of going back to reality where really an undue amount of stress and work falls on her shoulders that things become really difficult.

8:17If I could go back, I would redo everything. My fantasy is an alternate universe where I graduated, went straight to a doctorate program and lived alone. I would go for walks whenever I wanted and go swimming at the end of the week. It would be an isolated life, but a peaceful one. She's tried to communicate these feelings with her husband and her mom, but I don't think that it lands very well. Her mom is like, how can you not enjoy your child? And, you know, she feels like no one's really understanding. It's not that she doesn't enjoy her child. It's not that she doesn't love her. It's just that she feels very strongly that she's been tricked into motherhood.

8:56It's like my future is over now, with nowhere else to go, while my daughter's is about to begin. It's an ugly feeling.

9:07And then the third woman, she's a dog trainer in North Carolina who got unexpectedly pregnant with her boyfriend at 25. She didn't want to proceed, but she faced a lot of pressure. I spoke to my mom about it, but she's very religious and anti-abortion. The same thing with one of my closest friends, which surprised me. Her husband wasn't in that camp, but she knew that he very much wanted to have this child. And everyone kind of assured her that her doubts were just doubts that they would fall away once she had the baby, that this was a good thing. And she was just scared and anxious and everything would be different once she had her baby.

9:52But that wasn't the case for her. I felt like I disappeared as a human being. Clance called me mama. Friends and family asked me how my son was. They told me how excited and overjoyed I must be. I tried telling them I wasn't coping well with motherhood and was still processing the birth. And they'd tell me that's what motherhood is. She, you know, struggled to connect with her baby and also just she felt really sidelined as a person, as an individual with friends and family and all these relationships. She felt like a mother to them first and foremost. And as if her old self was just kind of shelved, not important anymore.

10:37I didn't feel like my life was worthless. It was just that I was stuck inside a role not meant for me. In the end, she really feels like she wishes that she had listened to her own instincts in the beginning and followed them instead of kind of letting people tell her that those are all normal feelings. And now she and her husband are separating and he's going to now raise the baby as a single dad. And that's the right decision for her. and she, in our conversation, expressed that she just wishes that she had listened to her instincts early on because they always stayed the same. I can't live this life with him anymore.

11:23I'm not the parent my son needs. I don't feel anything for him. I don't want to wait it out for years and walk out when he has actual memories. Right now, he's very young and you can fake things, but I can only fake it so much.

11:42Did you look into how much these anecdotes might reflect, I don't know, data on what we know about how many people regret having children? Do we have that data? Well, I know that there was like a study done that found that I think somewhere like five to 14 percent of parents having this feeling. But that being said, even the researchers of that study kind of acknowledged that this is a really hard thing to quantify. Even, you know, as we spoke earlier about this just being such a taboo subject, it's hard to kind of really get telling data about it.

12:22I'm not a parent, but, you know, I'm someone who's been on the fence about it. This has kind of made me think more deeply about it. And now if I'm up against, you know, the kinds of things that the women I spoke to were up against, like people telling them, like, this is the natural next step. This is going to be a good thing. Like, you're going to find this worth it. I think that doing the story, having their hindsight, I might be, I'm really going to just consider it more carefully when I consider it.

13:03Bindu's piece is titled, I Regret Having Children, and you can read it at thecut.com. We're going to hear from someone who doesn't regret kids but still acknowledges some of the incumbent challenges when Today Explained returns.

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17:21Today Explained. Jennifer Sr. read Bindu's feature with The Three Regretful Moms, and it evokes some feelings. I mean, here's the thing about all three. all three had really small kids. And from zero to three, those are the toughest years. I mean, consistently, this is like replicated data over and over again. It's the hardest and sleep deprivation is a confound. And the fact that there is no real available childcare options other than, you know, everything is resting on this tiny nuclear family. It's so hard. It's boring. There's just so much going or so little and so much that's going on at the same time.

18:05Flow is unattainable. This is consistently the hardest time to parent. Parenthood lasts until you die. I mean, adult children are like an astonishing pleasure. Grandkids, I'm now a step-grandparent, are like calorie-free chocolate. They're just amazing. It's all upside and no down. and you get that from having kids or stepkids. But also, like, there are really pleasurable years and there are joyous times. It's very hard to find the joy when they're that young. I mean, it's just tough. And also, when you're in it, isn't the only way to look at it. I mean, it's also looking back on your life and to look at what you've done.

18:45So I think catching people in that window, I'm not surprised that people are just in agony. Okay, so you read this piece in New York Magazine at the Cut about parents who regret their choices, and you have a particular reaction to it. You yourself, a decade and a half ago or so, wrote a piece for New York Magazine about parenting and later turned it into a book called All Joy and No Fun. But I get the feeling it's a slightly different perspective that you were extrapolating there. It was a wholly different perspective. I wouldn't call it slight because I never talk about regret. Also, the subtitle was The Paradox of Modern Parenting.

19:31Parents are psychotically in love with their children, but that the way parenting is now conspires against fun. It just does. I mean, the sociologist Viviana Zelizer wrote this book called Pricing the Priceless Child. And the point is that there was a time when we lived on farms when the United States first began, you know, in its manufacturing years and post-industrialization, but before a robust middle class. when kids contributed to the family till, right? They worked on our farms. Sonny boy, no ABCs when there's corn to harvest. They were sent out. And by the way, I'm not pining for the Dickensian days of yore when kids went out and worked in factories and coal mines and textile mills.

20:26This was not a great arrangement, but they were contributing to the family's income. Wow. The crops brought in$10 this season. All right, Sonny Boy, I guess you earned some goodnight moon. When going to school became standard and everyone finished high school, and then when the progressive era happened, and suddenly there were, correctly, child labor laws forbidding this, and kids started going to school and completing school. And then what was their value? It was that they were emotionally giving you something. They were not economically giving you anything. Oh, honey, look at Sonny Boy. He's bobbing his head to the music.

21:07Just$5 ,000 for the premium baby Mozart package worth every penny. So they became economically worthless and emotionally priceless, in the words of Viviana Zelizer.

21:22And do you think it's evolved to the point that there's a chance we're overdoing it? I mean, I have friends in which, you know, both parents put the kids to bed every night without fail. And I admire them from a distance, but then I sometimes wonder if like that's putting just too much pressure on the parents. I mean like my parents definitely did not come anywhere close to doing that. And I think I turned out relatively well adjusted. I know. Me too. I pay my taxes. I'm pretty nice. I'm like I think I'm a pretty good parent. I mean like yeah, I'm not sure I like show up to work on time. It's really nuts.

22:01Yes. And I think that this is in part an outgrowth of that, right? That this is now our job, right? Like, because they're not doing it. It's to cultivate the kid. So it sounds like you do think that we're overdoing it. I mean, I think kids would be fine if we did less. And yes, I think we're overdoing it in the sense that it's coming at the cost of our mental health. And I don't think kids are benefiting from being hovered over. My kids are not allowed to go swimming with anyone that is not their biological parent. If I got to drop my kids off because parents aren't allowed, they won't be there.

22:40when they go to the doctor or to the dentist to get an x-ray, I request an x-ray jacket. I do snoop through my kids' stuff through their phones. I read their texts. Sorry, call me what you want, but I got to be in there like swimwear. You wrote this book that really struck a chord 12 years ago. We turn next to our weekly Brief But Spectacular feature. Tonight, author Jennifer Sr. shares her ideas about the tribulation. Our guest, Jennifer Sr., writes about how children change the lives of their parents for better and sometimes for worse. She's the author of All Joy and No Fun. Bindu wrote this piece in New York Magazine, The Cut, that really struck a chord a month ago.

23:17On Twitter, people just discovered the Regretful Parents subreddit, and so everyone's outraged that the parent would even, like, dare to admit that. I truly believe that the majority of women would not choose to be a wife and mother if they really knew how it was going to be. Okay, so parental regret is the topic, and I admit I didn't actually read the article because it's behind a paywall. If nothing else, what we can gather from that is people are always thinking about this question about whether to not have kids. And you seem to really want to remind people that there's a lot of joy to be had and that this isn't necessarily something you'd regret.

23:55But do you worry that this is increasingly a less appealing proposition to not just a generation, but to multiple generations? Totally. I get it. Yes. I mean, I'll say two things. First of all, I think there's a lot of meaning in having parented, you know, and in parenting. And you can't, the studies are very bad at measuring that. You have to actually ask how meaningful is your life, you know, and you have to ask people what the most meaningful things are in their lives. And what was your key for people who, you know, said like, Jennifer, I'm so glad you wrote this book. How do I make it more fun?

24:32I did use it to encourage people to be less fixated on cultivating their children, like with quite the intensity that they did. Like, it's okay for them to bike on their own. It's okay for them to do like two extracurriculars and not four. they didn't have to learn Mandarin if you need time for yourself if you find a child care provider who you trust and who has good references you're not screwing up your kid by handing your child to a babysitter it's okay but oh my god I can completely see why younger generations today would be really nervous about having kids I am terrified for my kid He's 18 And I'm scared for him I don't regret him because I love him And I think he's going to be nimble enough To figure out how to lead a good life And if he came to you and said, you know, mom I don't want kids Oh, I would get it and I wouldn't My heart would not break And also, I don't have any vanity associated with this Like, what are you talking about?

25:46But my genes must live on in perpetuity Like, I don't have any vain attachment to my DNA. You know what I mean? And also, kids are born strangers. Like, you don't know who they're going to be. I mean, it's such a joke. My kid is nothing like me at all. Like, he hates reading. Like, he despises it. I was like the New York Times book critic for two and a half years. My sister-in-law at one point said to me, maybe you should expose him to more books. And I was like, 150 galleys, like, per week arrive at my doorstep. My kid doesn't like reading. What am I going to do? He's like a different human being.

26:20That's that, you know? So the best reason to have kids is not to, like, see your, you know, genes replicated in another being. What is it? Well, I mean, from the selfish perspective, it's that there's meaning in your life. There's joy in your life that's kind of qualitatively different. There's an opportunity to love someone else and to not privilege your own self. and it's nice to not think about yourself and to learn how to not think about yourself. So I guess that would be my, you know, argument.