Do You Regret Having Kids? What I Learned When I Asked That Question Out Loud
It was 7:14 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday, and I was standing in my kitchen ankle-deep in spilled Cheerios when I said it out loud. My 8-year-old had knocked his whole cereal bowl into my open laptop – the one I’d saved three months to buy for the freelance work that pays our grocery bill – and my 4-year-old was curled on the floor screaming because I’d cut her toast into squares instead of the triangles she’d demanded. My husband was already three hours into a work trip three states away, and the sink was full of dishes from the night before. The kitchen window was propped open to let out the smell of burnt toast, and I yelled it over the rain to the gray sky: “Do you ever regret having kids?”
Mrs. Henderson, the retired first grade teacher who lives next door, was watering her roses along the fence line. She didn’t gasp or yell back that I should be ashamed. She just laughed a quiet, rough laugh and said, “I’ll bring iced tea over after drop off.”
When she showed up an hour later, we sat on the back step on old lawn chairs, and she told me about when her boys were little. She was going through a messy divorce back then, working full time, her older son had undiagnosed dyslexia and got sent to the principal’s office every other week for acting out, her younger son had asthma so bad she slept on the floor by his bed half the nights just to make sure he could breathe. She said she thought that exact question every single day for almost two years. Back then, anyone she even hinted it to would jump in: “You don’t mean that,” “How could you say that about your babies,” “It goes by so fast, don’t waste it.” So she stopped saying it out loud, shoved the feeling down so deep she barely breathed around it, and for a while she was so tense and angry she could barely hug her boys without feeling like she was faking it.
I’d always thought the same thing as everyone else: if you even let that question cross your mind, you’re a bad parent. All the parenting posts I see online talk about how these are the best days of your life, all the relatives remind me to soak up every moment, so I’d had that little flicker of regret a hundred times before that Tuesday, but I’d never said it out loud. I’d just feel guilty for hours after, walk around on edge, and snap at the kids over something stupid like leaving their socks on the floor. It never occurred to me that the shame was worse than the feeling itself.
Mrs. Henderson’s first big point was that regret isn’t just one thing. There’s the big, permanent regret of “I wish I never had these kids,” and there’s the tiny, daily regret of “I regret this terrible, messy, exhausting moment right now.” Most of the time, what we feel is the second one, but we call it the first, and we scare ourselves into hiding it. I started doing one small thing the next week that has stuck with me: when I feel that flicker of frustration and regret building, I say the full sentence out loud, quiet enough just for me to hear: “I regret this right now. I don’t regret having you.” Separating the moment from the whole life takes the sting out of it faster than any pep talk I’ve ever given myself.
I also made a vent agreement with my best friend, who also has two little kids. We don’t have to fix each other’s problems when one of us texts “I’m having a regret day.” We just text back “Same, that sucks” and that’s it. No unsolicited advice, no reminders that it gets better, just validation. It takes 10 seconds, and it keeps me from dumping my bad mood on my kids or my husband when they’re already stretched thin.
As a teacher, Mrs. Henderson also pointed out something I never thought about: kids pick up on your shame way more than they pick up on you being frustrated. If you’re walking around shoving down hard feelings, you’re distant, you snap over small things, and kids think it’s their fault you’re upset. If you name your feelings honestly, in age-appropriate terms, you teach them that bad feelings don’t last, that you can still love someone even when you’re angry with them, and that it’s okay to not be happy all the time. That’s a bigger lesson for emotional development than any worksheet they’ll get in preschool. Two weeks after that Tuesday, we had a flat tire on the way to school, I’d forgotten the field trip permission slip that was due that day, and the kids were fighting over the last fruit snack. Instead of snapping, I pulled over, turned off the car, and said “Give mama 30 seconds, I need a minute.” I rolled down the window and whispered my sentence, then turned back to call roadside assistance. When we got to school late, my 8-year-old grabbed my hand before he ran in and said “I’m glad you’re my mama.” He didn’t need me to be perfect, he just needed me to not be scary angry.
Last weekend, I hosted my 4-year-old’s birthday party. There were eight kids under five, cake frosting ground into the living room couch, one kid peed on the rug, we lost one of my daughter’s new birthday shoes somewhere in the backyard, and I was picking confetti out of the silver drawer at 9 p.m. That flicker was there again: why did I do this, why do I do any of this, this is so much work. I didn’t shame myself for it this time. I just leaned against the counter, sipped cold leftover wine, and acknowledged it. Through the window I could see my two kids asleep on the couch, they’d fallen asleep watching a movie after everyone left, their cheeks still pink from running around.
The question “do you regret having kids” doesn’t have a simple yes or no answer for me anymore. Some days, a lot of small messy moments, the answer is yes, right now I do. Most days, the big answer is no. And I don’t need to feel guilty for the yes moments anymore. That’s the part no one tells you before you have kids: it’s okay for it to be both.
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