[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

I think the title should be: "I regret having children with person X" as opposed to having children in general. Kids are amazing to add to your life, when you and your spouse are truly committed to doing so. With the wrong spouse, or someone who only pretends to give a crap, I could see it being a massive burden at times.

Well that's pretty far from what the article is about.

Anyways, I thought this passage was interesting.

Parental regret also highlights gendered asymmetry around parenting; while fathers are increasingly active in child-raising, most child care and housework is still performed by women, as 2017 StatsCan census data indicates. Donath has also interviewed men who regret fatherhood, and has found one difference is that most men who became fathers even though they didn’t want to did so because their partner wanted to be a mother, and they didn’t want to live without her. “They made their decisions without being threatened by divorce, as opposed to several women in my study.” Stephen Marche, author of The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century, often writes about fatherhood. He says he has never met a father willing to admit to regret: “I can think of only a few who might even have felt it,” he says. Fathers’ regret tends to be expressed with their feet, says York University’s O’Reilly. “They walk away.” While men are judged for doing so, they don’t face the same censure as women, she says: “Men’s identity is never collapsed into their parental one; if you’re a bad mother, you’re a bad woman. If a father is late at daycare, it’s ‘Poor thing, he’s busy.’ A mother who’s late is viewed as selfish and irresponsible.” That’s changing, O’Reilly believes, though she questions the extent: “Some men may feel their children are central to their identity but I’ve never seen it.”


Exacerbating gendered parenting imbalances is the fact that, as mothers entered the workforce in record numbers in the 1970s, parenting philosophies increasingly embraced hovering attachment. “Helicopter parent” was coined in the 1960s; “attachment parenting” was introduced in 1992 by evangelical physician William Sears based on three tenets—breastfeeding (sometimes into toddlerhood), co-sleeping and carrying babies close in slings. Once regarded as fringe, it’s now the dominant parenting mode among white, middle-class, educated women, says O’Reilly. “It’s like a cult.”


Time spent by parents with their kids has doubled in four decades, The Economist revealed in November; in an analysis of 11 wealthy countries, mothers spent an average of 104 minutes a day caring for children in 2012, up from 54 in 1965. Men do less, but far more than they did in the past: 59 minutes a day, up from 16.