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The study found that one in every 14 parents in the United States, or about 7 percent, say they wouldn’t have children if they could do it over again, according to the study.
Rates of parental regret are even higher in parts of Europe, such as Germany (8 percent) and Poland (13.6 percent), Rutgers University said in a release. One of the main reasons that regretful parents have children in the first place may be fear of missing out, more colloquially known as “FOMO.”
“Why do you really want to have a child? What are your motivations?” said Kristina M. Scharp, an associate professor in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and coauthor of the study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
“In the context of what it means to be a parent, FOMO could be a valuable consideration.”
Parental regret is antithetical to how parents are expected to feel about their children, the Rutgers release says. Social norms suggest that parents, and especially mothers, are “supposed to love their children unconditionally from conception to eternity,” the researchers wrote.
To understand what moved regretful parents to start a family, the researchers collected narratives from Reddit’s /r/childfree subreddit, an online community of 1.5 million child-free users. Moderators allow parents who express regret about having children to post to the subreddit, which has cataloged 85 such testimonies between 2011 and 2021.
Scharp and her colleagues coded the Reddit posts with items such as “investment of time” and “relationship sacrifices.” Codes were then grouped into themes – such as “resource-intensive work” – which helped illuminate so-called discourses. Three discourses from regretful parents emerged: parenting as heaven; parenting as hell; and parenting as (the only) choice, the Rutgers release says.
Finally, the researchers examined how these discourses interacted to guide decision making about having children. What they found was a new, previously unconsidered, driver: FOMO.
Click here for the full release from Rutgers University, which was also published by Rutgers Today. The study itself was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
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