Being a parent is the best thing that ever happened to me. My wife feels the same way. But that doesn't mean it's for everyone. My wife and I don't have careers, we have jobs. And we'd gladly quit them tomorrow if we could support ourselves otherwise. A lot of people who resent children have careers that they derive a tremendous amount of satisfaction and status from. My wife and I don't, which I suppose is why we don't feel our children have imposed any great sacrifices on us.
I think any marriage where one person isn't really interested in raising kids is likely to run into problems if they decide to start a family. These days you really do need two committed parents to make it work.
But I think the biggest reason families are under so much stress these days is the outrageous expectations around child-rearing as practiced by middle-class and upper-middle-class North Americans. The sports, the enrichment activities, the clubs, classes, and fundraisers. When I was a kid, my parents put a roof over our heads, clothes on our bodies, and fed us three meals a day. Besides that, we were mostly on our own. Our activities and leisure time - which was pretty much every hour we weren't in school or eating dinner at the table - was our own to do with as we pleased. It certainly didn't involve schedules and driving and parental supervision six days a week.
And I think we need to recognize that this dramatic ramping up of parental duties, this quasi-competitive approach to parenting, was put in place mainly by mothers. There's a reason mommy blogs are way more of a thing than daddy blogs. It's moms who turned child-rearing into a kind of aspirational vocation. And if we're going to ease off the pedal on hyper-parenting, it's moms who will have to take the lead.
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Originally Posted by kunkstyle
There's a huge social stigma about admitting you regret having kids that exists in absolutely nothing else, which I believe partly exists because the idea of having kids is romanticized like almost nothing else.
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Part of the stigma of coming right out and publicly stating you regret having kids is because it can't be good for kids to hear they're unwanted. It's not as though they have any choice. It would be like saying you regret getting married to someone who you plan to spend the next 20 years with. How can that be healthy?
Some decisions we just have to live with. Being a parent isn't what some people hoped it would be? That's ####ty. But once you take on the responsibility for a person's upbringing, that's for life. It's a duty you can resent, but that doesn't make it any less of a duty.