为什么很多父母都后悔要孩子?| 时代周刊

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I’m so often advised that I’ll be a parent that, though I’m sure I won’t, I still prod at this ghost self, trying on its shape, asking what I’d do if I felt obliged to adopt this spectral, alternate life as mine. For here’s the next question people tend to broach if I indicate I don’t plan on having kids: what does my husband think? I find this odd, a little prying—do people think I didn’t discuss this topic with him, at length, long before we pledged to share a life?—but the question also rings the alarm bell of one of my own great fears. If I respond with the truth, that he feels exactly as I do, here’s the usual follow-up: but what if he changes his mind?

I have friends who long for kids, and I know the need to be potent, inarguable, as primal as my desire to go without. I’ve seen parent friends’ faces open with love as they watch their small children sing to living-room karaoke, the adults radiating joy as laughing tots carol and bop. Should my husband’s mind change, I can picture the rift that would open wide, dividing us. Either I’d deprive him of what he needs, or I’d give in, birthing a child I don’t want. Or, and this prospect is painful enough that it hurts to type the words, our lives would have to diverge. No bridge of compromise can quite traverse the rift: as King Solomon knew, there are no half-children.

This fear is so salient that I turned it into a pivotal tension in my upcoming novel, Exhibit: a celebrated photographer and her husband agreed they both don’t want children, but he wakes up one day realizing he does, and powerfully so. She’s certain she ought not be a parent; he’s pining for a child; they love each other very much. Short on joint paths forward, they have no idea what to do next.

Parental regret springs from a range of origins, not all having to do with privation of choice or means. In and before a post-Dobbs U.S., people have given birth against their will. The cost of raising a child runs high; for parents lacking funds and support, dire hardship can result. It’s a lack far too typical in the U.S., where there’s no federally mandated paid parental leave, and families are often priced out of childcare. But this regret isn’t a phenomenon limited to people in grave financial straits, nor to those forced into parenting. Other parents, all through the world, also wish they’d elected otherwise.

In recent months, as I waited for the publication of the novel I worked on for nine years, I kept returning to the plight I’d explored: I hadn’t yet finished wondering what I might do, how I’d live, if. And though I’d heard a range of chronicles of parental regret, as have other friends without kids, the stories were related one-on-one, in private. It’s a taboo subject, one made all the more difficult, punitive, by the ubiquitous belief that people who feel as they do either can’t or ought not exist.

I’ve also thought about the isolating effect of silence, and what it can cost to live in hiding. I wanted to talk with parents who, if they could go back in time, might make different choices—and who’d also agree to be quoted. It was, again unsurprisingly, hard to find people willing to speak with me on the record about parental regret. I promised to alter the names of each parent I interviewed for this piece. Even so, people were skittish.

“I don't think that everyone is made for children,” says Helen, a high school teacher in her 40s. And telling people that their purpose is to reproduce is destructive, she adds. It’s what she heard growing up: though Helen wanted to take Latin in high school, her mother forced her to enroll in home economics instead. “I don't think I ever decided to have kids. I was pretty much just told that that's what you do. That's what girls are for,” Helen says.

One problem is that our culture wants just one kind of story about parenting, and it’s a story of “pure joy,” says Yael Goldstein-Love, a writer and psychotherapist in California whose clinical practice focuses on people who are adapting to parenthood. But, Goldstein-Love says, people often experience grief in the transition to being a parent, grief for the life they might have inhabited otherwise. “Part of what makes the grief unspeakable is that there's always a strand of this regret,” she adds.

While Goldstein-Love hasn’t had patients bring it up, she also has friends who confide in her about parental regret. I mention the alacrity with which people can lunge to say that no parent feels regret, that it’s impossible. I ask if, perhaps, this type of remorse poses an existential threat, belying an ideal picture of what we might be to our own parents. Is this an aspect of why people can be so quick to refute the notion that regret can, and does, happen?

Absolutely, she replies: Most people want to believe that our parents felt nothing but delight about raising us. “They never regretted a moment. They never hated us. And that's bullsh-t.” I ask Goldstein-Love what she’d tell parents who wish they had made another choice. ■

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