So the big question is: do people later regret not having children? They might not.
"[We] found no evidence that older childfree adults experience any more life regret than older parents,” Jennifer Watling Neal, the co-author of the aforementioned Michigan State University study, said.
“In fact, older parents were slightly more likely to want to change something about their life.”
Sometimes the other party might doubt their course, too. YouGov data from 2021 found that 1 in 12 British parents (8%) currently regret having kids.
Younger parents aged 25 to 34 (one imagines the most sleep-deprived group) were the most likely to feel his way, while those aged 55 and over were the least regretful.
Similarly, a 2013 Gallup survey found that around 7% of American parents older than 45 wouldn’t have any kids if they “had to do it over again.”
Parents in Germany seem exceptionally unhappy: a study discovered that 19% of German mothers and 20% of fathers say that if they could decide again, they would not want to have any more children.
We reached out to the moderators of the subreddit, and one of them, Mel, agreed to tell us more about it.
They explained to Bored Panda that it's important to understand that "we're not the right community for parents to wax lyrical about their kids, and we're not here to provide an emotional labor 'village' for parents."
"We see limited interactions between parents and childfree people on our subreddit, and we lock comments should they become uncivil," Mel added. "We acknowledge that we are one of the bigger online childfree-centered communities, and one of our primary aims is to maintain a safe space for childfree people."
The ultimate takeaway from all the research and people's activity on the subreddit could be that having kids isn't good or bad per se. It may sound cliché but there is more than one way to live a happy and fulfilling life.
Parenthood should be a choice. Not an inevitable duty.
As my colleague Jonas wrote in our earlier publication on the subreddit 'Childfree', the grown-up thing to do is to respect each other, even if we might do things differently.
As for the future of 'Childfree,' Mel said the moderators anticipate the subreddit will "hold steady" for some time, and continue to see slow but consistent growth.
"We do every so often see trends and changes in posted content and we expect these ebbs and flows to continue. For example, some weeks I'll have 20 new submissions for the childfree-friendly doctors list and others I'll have 3," they explained.
