Unconditional love and believing their children to be the best thing that has ever happened to them: that’s how parents should feel and think about their children, we’re led to believe. And, typically, many parents do, even if there are times the children drive them to distraction. But these are easy things to say. This is the socially acceptable position to take about parenthood, in all its chaotic splendour.
Admitting parenthood isn’t all that, and maybe even something you think you shouldn’t have signed up to, on the other hand – well that’s a whole other conversation. And one you’re not likely to hear discussed openly.
Regretting parenthood, or wishing you hadn’t had some of your children, is a deeply guarded secret for some parents. And it’s one of the biggest parenting taboos. But just because something isn’t openly discussed, doesn’t mean it isn’t felt by plenty.
Maria was married for almost a decade before she decided to have children. “I just wasn’t a kiddie type of a person,” she says. “It didn’t appeal to me.” However, as her friends began to have children, she started to feel a bit “left out”. The couple were “will we, won’t we?” she says, before deciding they would have children. But, she adds, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but the husband often says, ‘if we hadn’t had those kids ... we could be on a beach in Spain or a beach in Portugal and retired by now’.”
“My husband would definitely say, if it were all to be done again, he wouldn’t do it. Me, I would say, the fear of missing out would keep me at it again.”
The couple had a second child, as Maria is an only child and she didn’t want her child to be an only child too.
One of Maria’s children is autistic. She also has a teenager. “It’s not for the faint-hearted and nobody tells you. And even when you’re pregnant, all you think about is a cute little baby at the end of it. You don’t think about the practicalities of having to feed this [child] morning, noon and night, every day, several times a day and it’ll be thrown back at you.”
Having a child with additional needs makes things “a lot more complex”, she says.
Maria believes people go into parenthood “completely with the eyes closed and with an idealised view of what it’s going to be like”. Parenthood is not what she expected, and she says she would caution other people before deciding to have children.
There are times I think: f**k, why did I ever have them? Life would be so much simpler if I didn’t have kids
— Samantha
She would tell anyone considering parenthood to “think it through. Don’t think about having a lovely little adorable bundle that is going to be cutesy and lovely. Think about the bleeding nipples, and the night-time feeds, and the screaming and roaring, and then what’ll come after that. When they’re portable, they’re one thing. When they speak back, they’re another.”
Samantha has four children. They’re all adults now, but three of them still live at home, she says. “Not only is [parenting] the hardest job, it’s the most thankless job,” she says. “I look at new babies and their mothers cooing over them and I’m like, ‘Enjoy it. Enjoy it while it lasts.’ Samantha enjoyed being pregnant, and giving birth and says the most amazing gift you’ll ever have “is having that baby put into your arms”, and she enjoyed having younger children. But she feels the current generation of young adults is “entitled and selfish”.
“There are some times I regret having the kids,” she says. “They’re adults now and it’s now that I’m regretting it, rather than when I was younger. Which seems strange, because you would think they’re older, they’re adults, they have their own lives and they’re not going to interfere with yours.”
She says she gets “zero respect” from her children most of the time. She tries “to set boundaries and they’re just walked all over”.
She was a strict parent, she says, when her children were growing up. She and her partner are no longer together, and she says that although her children were not the cause of her relationship breaking down, they did play a role in the break-up. She had anticipated having some freedom as they got older, but the fact that they’re still living at home prevented her and her partner pursuing their long-term plans, placing an unsustainable pressure of her relationship.
Samantha doesn’t feel this is something her children care about. She expected this stage of her life, with adult children, to “be easier”. But life hasn’t turned out that way.
“Parenting is hard,” she says. She wonders whether, if her first two children hadn’t been the same gender, she’d have “continued” having children. She says the worry never ends, irrespective of your children’s age. “But there are times I think: f**k, why did I ever have them? Life would be so much simpler if I didn’t have kids. And I shouldn’t be saying that with adult children.”
Ciarán has had “so many moments of regret” when it comes to parenthood. “They always seem to happen when I’ve been taxi driver, ferrying people about. School runs, shopping, soccer training, parents’ evenings and hospital appointments. There was a month when I seemed to be on the road from 8am until 11pm every single day.”
He doesn’t feel he can admit publicly to regretting parenthood, or that he wouldn’t have children if he was to live his life over again. He fears doing so would mean he’d incur the wrath of those who “absolutely adore every minute of parenthood”, or “who can’t have children”.
He has even told two of his children that they shouldn’t have children themselves in the future.
It’s not parenthood so much that Ciarán has the problem with. “I quite enjoy that,” he says, apart from the “tantrums, meltdowns and misbehaviour”. His issue is with how parenthood and expectations of parenthood have changed. “I left school thinking: if I got a job, find a girl, settle down and have kids, raise them, they’d move out and do the same. The housing crisis and having children with special needs has put a dent in that bit.”
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Ciarán, who was adopted, misses the life he could have had. Being adopted, himself, made him want to have biological children of his own, he says. “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so desperate to have a family of my own.”
Parental regret is something you would typically see “in the moment”, says Dr Colman Noctor, child and adolescent psychotherapist. A regret where you might “temporarily think, ‘I should never have had a child – this burden is too big’.”
It can occur, he says “during an argument, or tension, when a child is ill, or sick, or in hospital”.
With these sort of things “people can express regret in that moment. It would be more unusual for someone to say conclusively, ‘I should never have had kids – I constantly regret it and my mind never shifts from that’.”
Noctor says there can be occasions where a child may be proving particularly testing for a parent and a parent may say, in that moment, “I wish I never had him. Or I wish he wasn’t my son. Or my daughter.” But this, says Noctor, is typically a “transitory” thing. “A heat of the moment experience, rather than it being something that is sustained and conclusive.”
And transient feelings of regret are not something parents should feel guilty about, Noctor believes. “This is normal and fleeting.”
“Permanent feelings [of regret] are a different story”, though he would advise a parent to talk to someone if they found themselves falling into this category. “Parents don’t always love their children. Many do love them, but at times of stress aren’t ‘in love’ with them.”
