Time magazine has a piece on “the parents who regret having their children.” As you might have guessed from the title, it’s not the most uplifting read.
The piece’s author, R. O. Kwon, who has “no plans to be a parent,” reflects on unsolicited advice she’s received over the years from those who suggest she’ll regret her voluntary childlessness.
Kwon thinks it is curious that people do not acknowledge the regret in the other direction.
She references a 2013 Gallup poll showing that 7 percent of respondents with children said they wished they had none, as well as a 2023 study estimating that somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of parents in developed countries regret having had children.
Kwon also says that, after writing about the perks of childlessness, she’s lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances who have confided in her their parental regret.
Reading Kwon’s piece, I was reminded of this theme in Tim Carney’s book Family Unfriendly, which I recently reviewed for National Review magazine.
Carney names “civilizational sadness” as a major cause of our present Baby Bust. “The dread, guilt, sadness taking over our society are the evils that rush into the vacuum created by a culture that tried to discard God and all other traditional sources of meaning,” Carney writes.
Later, he adds: “Nothing you do in your life will carry the weight of forming a human soul, teaching her the meaning of love, convincing him he has infinite value, and at the same time imbuing a love of sacrifice and a sense of duty.”
Convincing him he has infinite value. This, fundamentally, is the problem. It’s little wonder that our culture, which rejects the objective worth of human life, is increasingly misanthropic.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
