If you aren’t mentally deranged or have a genetic disease you may pass on, it really is a mistake to skip having kids. Everyone I know with kids in their 40s and 50s is content. Everyone without are getting ever more extreme hobbies, like creating huge professional-esque home breweries or starting to BASE jump.
If you are in your 20's or 30's in doubt of having kids or not, and always finding a reason to not have them, you will probably regret skipoing. But if you, like me, know for a fact that you don't want kids and you never felt any kind of desire to have them, you will probably not regret it.
I'm the only one in my job over 40 that doesn't have kids. And both the quote from the article "By the same token, why does nobody ever say that having kids was a mistake?" or yours "Everyone I know with kids in their 40s and 50s is content." are false. If you poke hard enough, moms fall apart and recognize that sometimes they find themselves wishing to get rid of their kids and fantasizing about a childless life. But they don't like to talk about it because that would make them bad mothers. I reassure them that it's a normal feeling if you are going through hard times with them.
But they are not specially happy with having kids (and I'm sure there are precious times with them), nor I'm sad or regretful for not having them.
I promise you many parents regret it.
I think "regret having kids" is too strong here. But having doubts about it, or sometimes whishing/missing their pre-child life is very common.
For men is even worse, because they usually get the "luxury" of being almost childless having children. They put the childcare on the mother, and focus on the job, so having kids for them is like having an expensive hobby.
Spend enough years struggling to find a decent partner and then IFF you eventually do even more years struggling through the inhumane process that is IVF and you’ll also have your aunt’s regret, but not have made any mistakes along the way.
Even worse, what do people do who aren't decent partners themselves? I always wondered how people can think that children are for everyone, but also think that it is hard to find a partner that can help you with the kids. If there are so many people out there who would be horrible parents then maybe those people are better off not being parents, why try to convince them to be one?
> while most of those who actually chose not to had good, well-reasoned motivations and made the correct choice for them.
Why does it seem strange to act so as to minimize future regret? That's just common sense. This principle guided Jeff Bezos, for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ
for example i wish i had gotten married and have children earlier.
however, looking back, i see no way i could have achieved this. there is no choice i made that i could have changed, given what i knew then, and even given what i know now.
sure there were opportunities that i missed. like this one girl that showed interest in me, that i didn't pursue.
would my life have been different if i had chosen her? absolutely. would it have been better? i have no idea. so how can i regret a decision, where i can't even assess the outcome if i had made a different choice?
the only thing to really regret are dumb decisions. the ones where you already know ahead of time that they would be dumb. like drunk driving, or stuff like that.
but most regrets, if you think them through, should turn out to be things that you probably could not have made better anyways.
And this sentence says more about your (probably religious) background than about people who choose to not have kids.
OK, I admit I'm being deliberately offensive here in a tit-for-tat manner, you may have a point. I'll note though that feeling content, or happy, has never made much sense to me as a goal, since it's vacuous: the argument "you should do this because it will make you feel good" doesn't really address the "should" part, the moral dimension.
Many bad things will make you feel good, potentially for the rest of your life (this works out quicker if the thing kills you), and moral purpose seems to be sometimes clouded and twisted into disingenuous statements by for instance drug addiction, where the person is just trying to justify the compelling call of dopamine, or by parenthood.
Jog on mate. There's a difference between "you won't regret them" and "it really is a mistake to skip having kids."
I know loads of older people without kids. Would their lives have had more meaning and fulfillment if they had them? Maybe, probably. But they are happy and content, living lives of meaning. As for your hobbies comment...seriously?