How is childless Clare getting on, I wonder? Is she happier? Hungover?

“You’ll never regret having children, but you might regret not having them” – or so people contemplating parenthood are often advised. But is that really true? Expressions of parental regret, where parents admit to regretting having some or all of their children, are regarded as one of the more resilient taboos in parental discourse. Recent candid discussion of the gory physical toll of many childbirths falls into a similar category – daring revelations concerning the psychological and physical costs of parenthood.
We associate taboos with unusual or minority positions, but is reflecting on the merits of having decided to have children not perfectly natural? This morning, 12 minutes deep into fraught discourse about whether the dinosaur cup was the right vessel for my daughter’s juice, it’s easy to drift into comparative reflection about a Clare that didn’t procreate.
Possible worlds help philosophers analyse the meaning of talk about possibility and necessity – ways things might or must be. Every way things could be represents a possible world, and any difference can distinguish a new possible world – for example, one where Denis Irwin decided to pursue chess competitively, instead of football.
On the philosopher David Lewis’s theory, all possible worlds are equally real. The difference between this actual world and others is that this is the world I’m in. The word “actual” is indexical, referring to the world where the relevant pronouncement is happening just as “me” refers to different people depending on the speaker. On this model, talk of what might’ve been possible for me is interpreted via sufficiently similar beings at other possible worlds called counterparts.
People admitting regrets around having children are often interpreted as wishing their children didn’t exist. Contemplating the virtues of possible worlds where one didn’t reproduce provides a gentler way of thinking about those feelings.
So, there’s a possible world where someone very like me didn’t have kids. How’s my childless counterpart getting on, I wonder? Is she happier? Surely, she must be better rested. With no 3am toddler bathroom visits or midnight baby-bottles, she’s presumably broaching breakfast with more pep in her step. No beverage negotiations for her. Actually though, I wonder is she hungover? No night-time care work might be freeing, but I have rarely paired freedom and rest, so why should it be different for a similarly chaotic counterpart?
Formal decision-making is about maximising expected utility – facing uncertainty, we go for the option with the greatest value or desirability. In reality, where we aren’t delivered the probabilities of outcomes on a platter, we must reason using imperfect projections about how life will be if we have children, or if we don’t. The number of relevant variables here is dizzying. Worse, even if we could know what life would be like (if we decide one way or another) we also need to know how we’ll feel about it, and that’s a level of hypothetical self-knowledge few could claim. Becoming a parent is transformative, at least with respect to knowledge – you truly can’t know how it’ll be until you do it.
Thus, you typically don’t opt in to having a child on a rational basis. Even just considering a few elements – the children, your health, the birth – thinking about the myriad ways any one might shake out can make deciding the case on the merits seem ridiculous. You commit to having a child, let’s say, but you can control almost nothing about them. You can’t even control how many will show up on the day. With so much uncertainty and vulnerability, one should expect waves and pockets of regret.
Perhaps wondering about whether my childless counterpart is happier is fruitless. However, it’s valuable to take seriously the idea that, amid all parenthood’s joy and meaning, there are costs and probably numerous valuable things that are made nonactual when we decide to do it. Our choices shape what regret and happiness mean to us at any time. When asking would I be happier if I didn’t have children, what do I mean by happy? If happiness reduces to comfort and autonomy, then sure, having children probably decreases my happiness fairly often. I can’t just abandon the breakfast table, and sometimes, I don’t love it there. However, there’s a version of happiness that is positively responsive to challenge and is enhanced by it.
We imagine the joy felt by those who commit to feats of great intensity – running marathons, mastering difficult skills – that’s not about comfort, but about doing something hard that we value. I could never run a marathon, but I’ve done some cold swims and some long ones, and there are absolutely points in the water where I’ve thought “it’s terrible here” and “I enormously regret taking this on”, in the course of a project which usually takes me to a proud, elated state in the end. They’re not perfectly analogous scenarios, but I think having children is similar: committing to an arduous pursuit of joy, which is no less difficult for being so common.
Discussions of parental costs show us how to make things better for families. If, as is common, parental regret disclosures are explained in terms of things such as the career collapse, relationship strain, damage to the body, the recent phenomenon of having your children remain in your home until their mid-30s, then, perhaps what seems like regretting parenthood is really regretting it in the current sociopolitical environment. Such admissions then provide a roadmap for how society could be improved to make parenthood and individual flourishing more mutually consistent.
Public reflection on these topics is vital. It’s important to furnish the next generation of possible parents with information that will help them think these issues through (even if, as I believe, it’s unlikely to be a truly rational decision either way), but it’s also important for establishing the legitimacy of the choice not to have children.
[ Should you have children? These five philosophical questions can help you decideOpens in new window ]
Many women who don’t want children report an experience of public distrust in their ability to know their own minds on this front. Wait until you meet the right person. Presumably, if more people were honest about regretting aspects of parenthood, or pining for elements of a life they don’t have because they have children, it would help bolster the credibility of the women who are routinely told they couldn’t possibly not want them.