“Two things can be true at once. You can love your children and still wish you weren’t a mother.” Photo / Getty Images
Earlier this year Kelley Daring started collecting anonymous stories on social media from people who questioned their decisions to have families.
A question for all the parents out there: do you ever regret having kids? It’s a controversial one, but if you’re brave enough to answer it — and answer it honestly — then Kelley Daring wants to hear from you.
For the past few months Daring, 45, an entrepreneur, women’s advocate and TikTok star (@kelleydaring) from Sacramento, California, has been collecting anonymous stories from women around the world who have something to confess: they wish they had never had children. The resulting series, in which she reads their words — frank, visceral, innermost thoughts — aloud in online videos, has racked up millions of views, with Daring building a fanbase of “regretful parents” who say they have finally found a voice.
“There are so many,” she tells me. “The women who are bone-tired from struggling day in and day out to make ends meet. The women whose children are adults and they still feel regret. Those that say they would welcome being hit by a bus. Their despair comes through in their messages and it brings me to tears.”
Daring doesn’t feel any such regret. She has no children, a decision she made as a teenager, and though she now has three grown-up stepdaughters, she insists she has never felt the urge to be a biological mother. “I have the utmost respect for motherhood and the relationships of mums with their children,” she says. “I am child-free by choice.”
What she resents is seeing other women, including her stepdaughters, confronted by sugar-coated images of parenting that bear little resemblance to the realities of raising a child — something she says needs to change. “I believe a forum like this is extremely important and long overdue,” she says. “We do women, especially young women, a disservice by not telling them the whole truth about the various life paths available to them, including marriage and motherhood. Regret is an acceptable emotion in every other area of life. Why must we pretend it doesn’t exist in parenthood?”
Why, indeed. There’s something of a stigma around admitting life as a parent isn’t all lullabies and laughter: the suggestion implying that you’re somehow incapable of the role, or failing at the juggle, or — gasp — occasionally don’t like your own offspring.
Ask me on a good day and I’ll refuse to admit that my two sons, aged two and five, are anything but angels, blessed with scabby knees and sticky fingers. It was not an easy road to have them, so I would never dream of wishing them away.
Yet ask me on a day when they’ve kept me up all night, or one’s having a tantrum in the supermarket, or is off school with the zillionth bug this term, and I might hesitate — just a little — before my wholesome reply.
A YouGov survey in 2021 found that 1 in 12 British parents regretted having kids, with the strongest negative feeling among the 25-34 age group. For those willing to share their confessions, there is a Facebook group, I Regret Having Children, with more than 75,000 followers, and you’ll find countless subreddits, newspaper columns and psychologist-authored books on the subject.
Meanwhile on social media there’s a growing band of outspoken “mumfluencers” who rail against traditional parenting norms: Sarah Turner, author of The Unmumsy Mum, and the Scummy Mummies (the comedy duo aka Ellie Gibson and Helen Thorn) have built successful careers on daring to say what others don’t.
“It has definitely become more acceptable to share the proper realities of parenting, rather than the Instagram-perfect narrative that once was,” says the parenting expert Kirsty Ketley. “Having a safe space where parents can feel less alone in their struggles can help them find solutions to problems, get ideas and tips, and be good for their mental health because they feel seen.”
Certainly there’s a lot to be said for opening up about the harsh truths of parenthood, even if “regret” might feel too strong a word. “I haven’t had a day on my own in seven years,” confides Georgie, 32, who had children — a boy and a girl, now aged seven and four — in her twenties and now wishes she’d waited. “Looking back I feel like I missed out. I could have travelled, changed careers, experienced more of life. I love my children more than anything, but some days I wonder what it would be like if they weren’t here.”
Petra, 45, says she feels “trapped” by her brood: three girls, aged 14, 12 and 9. “I didn’t love the baby stage, and I hoped by now that they’d be less demanding,” she says. “But every day there is more responsibility and more of a financial burden. The teenage angst and mood swings are unbearable. A lot of the time they’re not very nice and I don’t want to be around them.”
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For Lily, 34, her regret focuses on how her body has changed since having her son, now three. “I gained loads of weight during pregnancy and never managed to shift it,” she says. “I can’t find the time to exercise and when I feel low I eat.” She used to be a personal trainer, a career she sacrificed for motherhood. “I’m looking at retraining as a travel agent, but it’s not my passion. I haven’t set foot in a gym in almost four years. I look at myself in the mirror and don’t recognise the woman looking back.”
Anita Cleare, author of The Work/Parent Switch, says the shift to having children later in life — the average British first-time mother is now 29 years old — can exacerbate feelings of loss and regret. “We have more at stake when children come along,” she explains. “Many new parents have had over a decade to get used to adult independence. We build our identities around our jobs, our achievements and how we spend our time. When children come along it can be a huge hit to our sense of self.”
Though this also applies to fathers, it’s predominantly women, who have carried their babies, fed them and taken time off work to raise them, who feel the biggest sense of “regret” in the days, months and years that follow. “It has always been more acceptable for men to retain more of their lives, jobs and hobbies when they become dads,” Cleare says. “But when women express that wish, we are accused of being unmotherly or unnatural, which can make it really hard to reconcile ourselves to the mixed emotions that come with loving a small child.”
Caroline Penney, a family therapist and the author of The Parenting Toolkit: Simple Steps to Happy & Confident Children, says that, rather than regret, a better term for these emotions might be “reflective parenting”. “Parenting is the most difficult job in the world and there’s no manual about how to do it,” she says. “For any other job of such importance you’d have training.”
Call it what you will, honesty around parenting takes many different guises. For some it’s simply about admitting you would like some time off. “I dream of driving to the airport and buying a ticket to a faraway place,” says Lucy, 39, who has two under-fours. “I wouldn’t tell them I was going, where I was or when I’d be back.” Others feel more sorely the impact having children has had on their social life and adult relationships. It’s a running joke in my female friendship group that deep and meaningful conversations with our partners now consist of shopping lists, what to watch on Netflix and whose turn it is to do the washing-up.
Though honesty is to be applauded, the parenting expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith says the regretful parenting trend is “hugely problematic … While it may aim to be respectful of the needs of parents, it is incredibly disrespectful of children and their needs. The morals of this are complicated and uncomfortable, especially if one day children may be able to identify themselves in these complaints.”
Cleare warns against channelling negativity in the wrong way. “Blaming our children for our own sense of loss endangers that precious parent-child relationship,” she says. “When parenting is hard, offloading on our friends can help, but wishing our children away won’t. We need to be kind to ourselves, but also seek out support — practical, emotional or therapeutic — to be the parent our child really needs.”
Daring agrees. It is for this reason that she keeps her followers’ stories anonymous: the point of regretful parenting is not to blame or shame the children, but to offer a space for parents to be truly themselves. And she is at pains to point out that admitting “regret”, though it seems a loaded word, has no bearing on women’s love or affection for their kids: “It’s not the children they regret, it’s motherhood. Two things can be true at once. You can love your children and still wish you weren’t a mother.”
Written by: Sarah Rainey
© The Times of London
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