Do Parents Regret Having Kids? What the Hard Mornings Taught Me
The three-year-old was lying flat on the kitchen floor, shoes on the wrong feet, screaming because I’d peeled her banana the wrong way. The baby was crying in the bouncer. The school run was in eleven minutes, and I was standing at the counter in yesterday’s shirt, thinking it very clearly: I should not have done this.
I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t even let the thought finish forming. I just stood there, holding a banana that had been peeled “incorrectly,” and felt a wave of shame so heavy it almost made me sit down on the floor next to her.
This is the question nobody asks in the parenting groups, the one that feels too dangerous to bring up at playdates: Do you ever regret having kids?
I think most of us don’t. But I also think most of us have had a moment — usually around 7:15 on a Tuesday morning — where we felt something that looked an awful lot like regret, and we shoved it down so fast we told ourselves it never happened.
It happened to me last Tuesday. And the Tuesday before that. And probably next Tuesday, too.
Here’s what I’ve been trying to untangle since.
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The day after the banana incident, I was still feeling raw. I walked my daughter to school and watched her run through the gate without looking back. Her hair was lopsided, her backpack was too big for her, and she was already yelling hello to a friend before her foot hit the playground tarmac. She didn’t need me for another six hours, and that somehow made the morning feel worse.
I told a friend about the banana thing. She’s a teacher, so she’s seen hundreds of kids go through these phases. She laughed in a way that told me she’d been there.
“Here’s the thing about regret,” she said. “You’re not regretting her. You’re regretting the overwhelm. Those are different things, but they live in the same neighbourhood, so it’s easy to get them confused.”
That distinction has stuck with me ever since.
When I say “I regret having kids,” what I actually mean most days is: I regret being late. I regret not having a shower. I regret the fact that I haven’t finished a single conversation with another adult in four days. I regret that the house is permanently crunchy. I regret that I snapped at the dog.
None of those things are the same as regretting the existence of the small human standing in front of me in a dinosaur costume demanding toast with the crusts cut off. But in the moment, the brain doesn’t make that distinction. It just registers fatigue and frustration and files it under “bad decision.”
The friend, being a teacher, also reminded me of something I already knew but had forgotten: kids this age are not giving us a hard time on purpose. They’re having a hard time. The lying-on-the-floor screaming isn’t revenge. It’s a three-year-old whose nervous system is still figuring out how to handle frustration.
That doesn’t make it less irritating. But it reframes it.
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So what actually helps? Not the Pinterest version of parenting where everyone does yoga at sunrise and eats food they grew themselves. The real, low-friction version that keeps me from getting to 7:15 a.m. with murder in my eyes.
First, I stopped trying to “win” the morning. That sounds small, but it was huge. I used to treat getting out the door as a battle — me versus a toddler with her own agenda. I would respond to every delay with “we need to go,” which is basically abstract noise to a child who’s deciding between two colours of socks. Now I say less. I hand over the wrong-peeled banana and say “you can eat this one or you can pick a new one yourself.” It gives her back a scrap of control and takes me out of the role of banana dictator.
Second, I started getting myself ready first. Fully ready. As in, dressed, teeth brushed, bag packed — before I wake the kids. That meant waking up twenty minutes earlier, and for the first week it was awful. But now it means that when the screaming starts, I’m not trying to brush my teeth with one hand while negotiating shoe placement with the other. I have room to be calm because I’ve already done what I need to do for myself.
Third, I made a rule about my own body in those moments. If I feel the heat rising — the frustration, the “I can’t do this anymore” feeling — I sit down on the floor. That’s it. Sitting down lowers my physical tension and puts me at eye level with the kid, which changes the whole dynamic. I’m not towering over a screaming toddler like an authority figure. I’m just on the floor having a bad time with another person. It’s astonishing how often that defuses things.
None of these are magical. They don’t stop the meltdowns. They stop the feeling that I’m drowning.
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There’s something else, too. I’ve started watching my daughter at school pick-up. Not in a weird way — just arriving early and standing by the fence, watching her play before she notices I’m there. And what I see is a completely different child than the one from this morning.
She shares the mud kitchen without being asked. She helps a smaller kid with their shoelaces. She’s fine. She’s functionally fine.
The morning version of her — the one who screams about bananas and shoes and the wrong cup — that’s the version who trusts me enough to fall apart. She saves all her jagged edges for home because she knows, on some level, that I’m safe. And as exhausting as that is, I don’t want her to feel like she has to hold it together in her own house.
That’s the part that keeps me going on the hard days. Not gratitude journaling or “cherish every moment” posters. Just the quiet realisation that she’s melting down at me because she feels like home is a place she can melt down. I’d rather hear her screamin about a banana than have her not tell me things.
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I’m not going to pretend this is resolved. There are still mornings when I close the door to my own car and sit in the driveway for thirty seconds before I put the key in the ignition. There are still nights when I lie awake listing all the ways I messed up that day and wonder if I’m doing permanent damage.
But the question has shifted. I don’t ask myself anymore whether I regret having kids. I ask myself whether the life I’m building around them is working. And when it isn’t, I change something practical — waking up earlier, lowering my standards for the morning, sitting on the floor, handing over the banana.
The regret, when it shows up, isn’t a verdict. It’s a signal that something in the routine is out of alignment. And that’s fixable.
Last week, my daughter came home from school, sat on my lap unprompted, and said, “Mummy, I like you the most.” It was the kind of moment the greeting card companies want — pure, unrehearsed sweetness.
The next morning, she projectile-vomited onto my work laptop while screaming that she wanted the red cup, not the blue cup.
So I celebrated the moment, cleaned up the laptop, and peeled her banana the wrong way on purpose.
We got out the door at 8:47. Nobody was on time. But we got there.
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