New study confirms: Many adults opt for child-free life without regret
psypost.org
psypost.org
I think the pet comparison is apt here, because there's a lot of discussion in the "new puppy owner" community about feeling like we made a mistake, and a lot of corollary discussion about how having children is largely the same, but it's not socially acceptable to talk about those feelings when it's a human child. (The upside to a puppy, of course, is that you have a fully-formed dog in 2-3 years, instead of 18-25 years. The upside to a child is they probably won't die and leave you, and they might help care for you when you get older, though you shouldn't really plan on that.)
But once their kids are grown up and accomplishing things that make them proud, I doubt most parents regret that.
It's like studying to be a doctor: years of tough work, but usually followed by even more years of reaping the rewards for that work.
Great analogy. Ask any group of people who has done any challenging thing - law, medicine, marathon, etc etc - and probably half would discourage you from doing them while simultaneously feeling like they wouldn’t be the people they are without having done that thing.
So much of HN is certain having children is ruining one's life :-)
People say that to communicate or exaggerate how much work they’re doing as a parent. They might also be fishing for sympathy or trying to signal that they want you to cut them some slack.
Personally, I’ve lost patience for parents who think they’re martyrs or who think that complaining about their kids is a great casual conversation topic. As a parent of young children myself I find I’m much happier spending time with other parents who acknowledge that parent is work, but aren’t fishing for sympathy or pretending to be martyrs at every turn.
Yeah, parenting is more work than not being a parent, but people who pretend like it’s the end of their lives or the worst thing in the world are just unnecessarily cynical or have a martyrdom complex.
I bet the single most important factor in determining how difficult people find parent to be is money.
Probably. But also seems to me very likely to be a lack of proper orientation in what considers good, ascribes value to, etc.
I personally don't know any parents who regret having their children, but that doesn't mean they haven't known hardship or bad luck, including when it comes to their kids. However, I also have child-free friends who are deeply troubled or unhappy.
On the whole, I've concluded it isn't a big factor.
I tend to find my friends who are parents are more productive in their 30s and 40s than those who don't have kids, because it forced them to learn planning and time management, and their non-kid activities benefited as well. I think this may be compelling to many on HN.
If you have kids, you're committing to an experience that is more full of meaning and joy than anything else you can do.
But a huge fraction of the time is just work or suck-- far more than you get to revel in that meaning and joy. And you give up a lot of other options. And there's no escape from the struggle.
(I'm a father of 3 boys; they're awesome; I don't regret my choice. Though, it would be 10x better if I could have the best of both worlds and take a true break for a week or two every now and then ;)
That being said, I wouldn't feel anywhere this fulfilled if I didn't have children, I haven't regretted having them. I would have probably gone up to 4 if society did not make it this hard (economically speaking but many things become annoying too).
There is so much free time without children, no doubt. Doing nothing on the weekend is a pleasure I can only enjoy in small chunks, since I usually must do something for them.
That might be about you, specifically?
This is an unnecessarily antagonistic assumption.
Abstract: Childfree individuals, who are also described as ‘childless by choice’ or ‘voluntarily childless’, have decided they do not want biological or adopted children. This is an important population to understand because its members have unique reproductive health and end-of-life needs, and they encounter challenges managing work-life balance and with stereotypes. Prior estimates of childfree adults’ prevalence in the United States, their age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements have varied widely over time and by study design. To clarify these characteristics of the contemporary childfree population, we conduct a pre-registered direct replication of a recent population-representative study. All estimates concerning childfree adults replicate, boosting confidence in earlier conclusions that childfree people are numerous and decide early in life, and that parents exhibit strong in-group favoritism while childfree adults do not.
When people make an impactful decision, they are highly motivated to find reasons why their decision was the right one - especially when the alternative is admitting being wrong, or having made a life-limiting error. Psychologically, it’s a lot easier to bury regret in denial than to face up to it.
Noting that those with and without children are both eligible to hold this bias.
Anectode: I've never once wanted kids, any time I've ever thought about it I'd just think of the time and money involved and not want anything to do with it. I felt this way before I was even physically capable of reproducing. Now as a middle-ish aged adult, I still agree with past me's rationale regarding kids. I imagine if I was just coping with a poor decision, I would have made up new justifications that weren't there originally
Then we invented contraceptives and the sex-children connection broke.
I expect this has created strong selection pressure going forward for people with a drive to have kids, instead of just a drive to have sex.
It also shows why “if it’s intelligent it will figure out what we wanted” doesn’t work; like us it has no reason to care what was “intended” even if it knows
For penguins it's less clear. It is at least seasonal homosexuality (penguins pairs, like ducks). I would have to ask an expert.
This strong selection pressure also applies at the society level. See kid count differentials across various religions.
Had my parents conceived me before they were 30, I'd have grown up destitute on the outskirts of Detroit. Giving people an alternative to adoption or abortion is important, even if you feel it's petty or antiproductive.
There's an entire swath of people in society today who are voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool, for a number of different reasons. Some of those reasons are marketed influences trying to convince people to do it too, which is more nefarious in my opinion.
No matter how you slice it though, from an evolutionary perspective deciding not to reproduce only has one outcome.
If someone is gay, they are most likely still capable of conceiving with the opposite sex. They are making a series of conscious decisions that preclude that conception, but they haven't been "removed" from the gene pool any more than a straight couple using a condom has been. Unless you don't believe in free will, most people are not at a "dead-end" at all.
Most women I know who are child less (not on board with calling it "child free", as if it's a sort of disease), ended up that way because they didn't get into a stable relationship quickly enough before their biology caught up with them. It wasn't so much an explicit choice as much as a consequence of an inability to be satisfied with a partner, or inability to settle.
Given the context of the thread, I'm referring to people who remain child-free for all of their lives. And "evolutionary dead-end" isn't calling anyone names. It's just what it is.
I tend to agree with you on having children a little later.
Couples do indeed shy away from raising a child, but shaming them for temporarily turning down the question is the wrong response.
Though I'm pretty sure that people who refer to child-free people as "evolutionary dead ends" are lashing out because they have some sense of jealousy.
I actually think it's more interesting why child-free people would consider it harsh or react sensitively to it, at least when it's a conscious choice.
Pregnant women are smug.[0] Pregnancy often ruins women's bodies. People with five children have too many children.
I consider these things to be very factual. You won't find me saying them to people though.
As to why people 'react sensitively' to these kinds of comments is quite simple.
People, especially women, very strongly dislike being reduced down to their reproductive ability. I guarantee you that someone like Rosalind Franklin has contributed so very much more to 'evolution' and the wellbeing of our species, however you want to measure it than your stereostypical redneck pumping out a dozen kids in the trailer park.
It won't change that your hypothetical redneck passes on more genetic material than they do.
Being a parent must be a lot harder in the US, otherwise I can't explain it to myself.
Not sharing the work with relatives or neighbors makes everything harder. You're the single point of failure. No redundancy.
There are plenty of reasons to eschew judgement of the childless.
But not at least participating in some community involving children, to pass on one's life lessons seems...suboptimal.
At 70 years old, your kids will be fully formed adults with their own families and lives taking priority and they don’t have time for some senior citizen’s problems or diaper changes. womp womp
It’s hardly a gamble when your actions and life choices tip the scales.
People who complain about their kids not being a part of their life in their old age should spend their idle time considering how they raised said kids. If you do it right, they want to see you.
> At 70 years old, your kids will be fully formed adults with their own families and lives taking priority and they don’t have time for some senior citizen’s problems or diaper changes.
Having someone who cares about you is more than just listening to rambling stories and wiping your ass. It’s everything from a second pair of eyes watching out for your well being to a sense of connection to the future.
Parents and grandparents perceive their descendants' life as if it was a third person view game. Much of it happens of-screen and the controls are terrible, often worse than absent, but it still keeps them interested in the next day/month/year. If you only have your own remaining years to look forward to you have much less.
They do not express desire to have children. They do not have children. They do not regret that, even as their peers deal with theirs. What reason could possibly there be to believe that they would suddenly start regretting their decision after 70?
If it comes down to the fact they "won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age", I posit that their situation is not going to be very different from that of many bechilded people (modulo any money the childfree people might have saved by not having to provide for another human being), which will - and should, if having a "free" caretaker in their old age played a part in it - regret their decision.
The better question to ask wouldn't be continuing to ask "Really???" with increasing intensity, it would be to ask exactly why more people feel content with a child-free life. Is it something about changes to perception of meaning in life, religion and faith, society as a whole? Seems like a more interesting path to go down.
Why not just live the life you want and then check out on your own terms instead of rotting away in a filthy home?
(have elderly family who will die alone amongst strangers because they are not good people; lineage did them no good)
This shows no sign of slowing or correcting that I can see.
If that doesn't work out, we are properly spoiling our nephews and nieces as a backup plan. :)
The fact no one admits regret means someone is fibbing or you have not been looking very hard.
“In this study, we compared how much adults age 70 and older said they’d want to change something about their life — in other words, whether they had any regrets about how their life had gone. We didn’t see any difference between childfree people and parents. This suggests that childfree people are similar to others in terms of life satisfaction and often don’t regret their decision later.”
Or that none of the people sampled has any meaningful regrets.
I guess knowing a couple of people like that, it makes it difficult to believe that everyone really is all that satisfied with their life.
What should it tell me? That I want children but know I can't afford to have children? I already know that, and it's why I'm asking in the first place.
>The fact no one admits regret means someone is fibbing or you have not been looking very hard.
Two have admitted failure, which is to say they simply never found a person they wanted to have kids with. I don't consider this a decision subject to regret and neither did they.
So many damn people need to take a look at themselves, make their own decisions, mind their own business and stop projecting. Some of these comments are just rude and gross, do better people.
I read a blog a while ago that sums this up so well (sorry I can’t find it so I will paraphrase)…
What you think parenting is and what it’s actually are not the same at all. There’s this whole extra level that you only get when someone relies on you totally and when you have to do all the inbetween bits.
I personally love it.
But even saying that I totally believe that you can have an excellent life without kids. Just the sleep alone! And modern life is really set up to fuck with parents.
If you're the nerdy-intellectual type, if you love to learn things, if you love to do projects, raising children offers so many rewards.
It's fascinating to watch them grow and achieve things, it gives you first-hand knowledge of the human condition you will surely appreciate, and you are absolutely involved every step of the way. It'll make you research many things, it will make you pick up lots of new skills. It will motivate you to be healthier and have better planning and time management chops. It'll give you an experience that is uniquely and individually yours, akin to posessing a secret knowledge.
Do you love that feeling of being productive and time well-spent, when you don't second-guess whether you made your hours count? The obvious purposefulness of every hour with your children will give you that feeling every time, even (and especially) during the hard bits.
Lots of things conceive of having children as some form of sacrifice, but there's so much to gain.
> The initial revelation last summer that nearly 1.7 million Michigan adults were child-free had surprised many. Now, this data has been validated in a follow-up study published in PLOS ONE
The author is trying really hard to make this as dramatic as possible. Claiming that it has “surprised many” to learn that some people don’t have kids and don’t plan on having kids feels like a big stretch.
I think the real surprise for many people, at least in younger generations, might be that the childfree group was only 1 in 5 people. If you talk to young people or take a look at Reddit you’d get the impression that virtually nobody is having kids and nobody ever plans on having kids. Then you look at these survey results and the significant majority (80%) of people are either parents or plan to be parents some day.
Anecdotally, many of the happy parents in my peer group were convinced they were never having kids when they were younger. In our late teens I barely knew anyone who could fathom the idea. In our early 20s a lot of people were staunchly against kids. Now I still have many friends who don’t have nor want kids, but a significant number of people grew up and had a change of goals. I’ve also seen several marriages dissolve as one partner realized that they did actually want kids, but another didn’t. And somewhat surprisingly, I’m starting to see situations where the partner who didn’t is getting older and coming around to the idea of having kids.
It’s everyone’s right to choose not to have kids if they want, of course. I just think it’s strange that a vocal minority of the internet population have become so convinced that having kids or wanting kids is a minority position when the data suggests the opposite over a lifetime. Even articles like this fuel the internet controversy by burying the lede and picking the headline most likely to get picked up by the vocal childfree minority.
On the other hand, I wonder if there is space to discuss the possibility that raising children (whether biological or adopted) is actually a service to society and to the community that you’re a part of? If we take the above stance, from the perspective of the individual (regarding your own personal interests, your ability to save money and spend it on progressively more expensive hobbies, the freedom of movement and expression of self, adventure, etc.) it wouldn’t be so outlandish to conclude that having kids is an almost absolute net negative. It’s not surprising that people don’t want to do this; the world offers more and requires more and more from us day after day, and the perspective of suddenly losing maybe 80% or more of your free time can be quite scary. Plus of course all the inherent responsibilities involved that will take not only your actual time but also most of your mind space.
As such, one might ask, why then should you have kids anyway? Sure, there’s the “love” aspect but, are we then to assume that childless adults have no need for love, or have access to less love than us parents? Is “not needing so much love” then an actual advantage in the social competition, because you can then have all the time in the world to improve yourself while parents are basically stuck in an endless loop of exhaustion and routine? I know what you’re thinking: “it was your choice” and it sure was, and that is exactly the point. I feel like there is a philosophical question/gap here about making the sacrifice of raising children (not only for the greater good, but certainly a bit for it) and being rewarded by it, somehow. If only because the opposite-being rewarded by not having kids-sounds a bit weird to me.
I’ve suggested this once or twice but the response from childless adults is (obviously?) quite negative. I wonder if I am just being crazy here.
Most people I know barely see their parents. So it really can’t be about being lonely when you get old.
Anecdotal, but I see my wife’s parents several times a year (500 miles away) and video call with them daily, sometimes multiple times a day.
I still talk to my parents, but not as much. I think the reason for this is that I feel like her parents have more in common with me and are friendlier and open to different things. Not to mention showing an interest in minutiae of life.
I still love my parents of course, but they also don’t put the same amount of effort that the wife’s do. My Dad was pretty mean when I was growing up, and isn’t anymore but I know he regrets being the way he was.
Coincidentally, my wife and I are expecting our first child spring next year. For us, it’s hard to answer “why”. I guess it’s a feeling of wanting that deep unique love, for having a deeper purpose.
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449999/
https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-...
People might not care, but purely biologically it’s actually more healthy to be 400 pounds, smoke cigarettes, and die from a heart attack after having a few kids than be in good shape and eventually die with no kids.
It makes total sense. Not all members of a species reproduces... it's actually common that only a few do. Bees are the extreme case where basically only one female in a whole hive reproduces... with chimps we know that it's mostly the alpha male who does and most males do not get a chance. Most animals actually die very young, before even being mature enough for reproduction.
Your hypothesized "everyone should have kids" world doesn't exist. In fact, biologically, you could say it's "better" if only the strongest multiply while all the others just "care" for their young. Don't confuse your morals and wishes with what biology actually entails.
"The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion persons in the next 30 years"
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
Doesn't seem to be a problem for this generation.
Nothing is eternal.
It causes the population to be unfit. Evolution does not apply to individuals, but to populations.
> People might not care, but purely biologically it’s actually more healthy to be 400 pounds, smoke cigarettes, and die from a heart attack after having a few kids than be in good shape and eventually die with no kids.
... Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about.
Very disappointed reading some on the forum to be honest.
I just hope that the average person that made their choice is happy with it and fries not look back. Seize the day.
I said there are 3 kinds of actions:
Good actions increase the public good.
Neutral actions do not change the public good.
Negative actions decrease the public good.
I will raising a child (not for profit) is a positive action.
Did you consider your sampling bias?
The longer I live, the more I recognize that everybody has a role despite any apparent flaws. Take gays-- in a hunter-gatherer society, a clique not burdened by children to protect are free to become scouts or trailblazers; they have mobility. This childless-by-choice stuff is a modern invention and not an option for sexually-active adults otherwise.
We don't all have the same purpose. We're more like ants than we want to admit.
Natural selection optimizes for the human species over tens/hundreds of thousands of years. You won’t see a benefit in your lifetime.
Not having kids, well, you see the result in your lifetime (tends to be a slightly positive result).
A study would usually fall on the less than publicly end of the axis, since one's answers are anonymized, only read by the researchers themselves - no-one else gives a fuck about them, usually - and even the anonymized datasets hardly ever get published.
It's not difficult to admit "actually, I feel like I should have had kids" to a medical professional. It's even less difficult to admit it on an online form, especially one by an entity you trust - which will perforce be the case - claiming your answers will be anonymous. It's not like the general population cares that much about privacy, after all, and here they would have nothing to lose by admitting regrets about being childfree.