I've often wondered how many people do regret having children. I imagine it would be hard to come up with reliable statistics - nobody would want to admit that out loud.
Having kids doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can really judge without having had kids.
Especially since you're basically manipulated by biology once the process starts.
I will say that I’ve never heard it from my wealthy friends. I imagine it’s a lot easier to not regret the decision when you can outsource childrearing from infancy onward, and spoil your children rather than deal with the drama that results from saying “no, we can’t afford that.”
I bet some, very few, people do truly regret it. I best the vast majority of those who say they do will have a different answer if you ask again later.
Some kids are so much easier to raise, it's not always a fair comparison.
Because if you agree there'd variance, then you must agree that some kids would have more bad behaviour then others.
Also, do you think mental illnesses are binary?
Kids can be raised in exactly the same way and turn out vastly different. My wife is pretty similar to her siblings. I only share a couple of personality traits with my sister, and as such we’re very different people.
Most of the research points to nature being way more heavily weighted than nurture. Most people don’t want to admit this. For parents it’s hard because you feel powerless. For everyone else they want to attribute their good/bad traits to how they were raised instead of attributing it to biology.
I am increasingly uneasy about it, though, because I feel I brought them into a world that is worse than the one I was in, and without an encouraging trendline in the medium term.
You might be surprised. I've certainly heard it.