No Grandchild: Parental Regret, Anti-Natalism, and Loving Someone Who Owes You Nothing

The kitchen table question

My mother asked me halfway through a bowl of soup. No buildup, no sigh first. Just: "So there really won't be any grandchildren?"

I'd rehearsed a speech for years. What came out was four words. "No, I don't think so."

She nodded and kept eating. My father was quiet for a while, then asked if I wanted more bread. That was the whole conversation. Twenty years of dread, ten seconds of talking. The bread helped, somehow.

I've wanted to write this down for a long time and kept putting it off, because this is the kind of subject where people hear a judgement even when you're only describing your own life. So let me say the plain thing first. This is my choice. It isn't a rule I'm handing to anybody else.

The arithmetic nobody wants to do out loud

Bringing a person into the world is the most expensive thing most people will ever do, and we've gotten strange about admitting it.

Where most of my readers live, raising a child to eighteen runs into the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands, and that's before university, before the years of grown children moving back home because rent ate their savings, before the eldercare that families quietly absorb. In plenty of cities, full-time childcare costs more per month than a lot of people's rent. Then there's the part that isn't money. Sleep. Time. The version of yourself you'd have become if you'd had the years to become it. A climate that's getting harder to hand over with a straight face. None of that is imaginary.

Anti-natalism, said plainly

Some people hear that word and picture someone who hates children and wants the species to stop. That's not what it means to me.

The version I hold is small and quiet. Bringing a new person into existence is a decision made entirely by other people, on behalf of someone who cannot be asked and cannot refuse. That asymmetry is why I take it so seriously. A life can be wonderful. It can also be unbearable, and the person who draws the unbearable one never agreed to the gamble.

I'm not saying nobody should have children. Most of the people I love were had by somebody. I'm saying it should be chosen the way you choose anything irreversible. Sober, eyes open, without a script handed to you at birth.

The thing almost no parent is allowed to say

Here's the taboo I keep circling. Some parents regret it.

Not the child. The child they love, often fiercely, often more than they expected to be capable of. The regret is for the life that closed off. The work that stalled. The marriage that buckled. The self that got shelved for two decades. You can love your kid completely and still grieve the person you didn't get to be. I've only ever heard this after two drinks and a promise not to repeat it.

We don't let them say it. We hear "I regret having children" and translate it into "I regret you," and then everyone stops talking. So the sadness goes underground, and the next generation gets handed the same story that didn't hold up for the last one.

Raise a child like a pet

This is the part people find strange, so stay with me.

When someone brings home a dog, nobody asks what the dog will be when it grows up. Nobody wonders whether the dog will pay for their nursing home, carry the family name, come home at Christmas, or give them grandchildren. You get a dog because you want to share your days with a dog. The love is the whole point, it runs one direction, and everyone accepts that as normal. Nobody feels cheated.

Then we have children and quietly install an invoicing system. They'll be our retirement plan. They'll be our legacy. They'll be the second chance at the life we didn't manage. They'll be there for us. And when a child grows up and doesn't want to fill that role, we call it a betrayal.

I'm not saying children are pets. They're people, with their own interior lives, and they owe you nothing for having been invited here. That's exactly what I mean. If you can't love someone who owes you nothing, I'm not sure you should be creating one.

That was the test I failed, by the way. Not love. I don't think I'd have loved a child badly. I think I could have loved them the way you love a dog, freely, if I'd trusted myself. I didn't trust that I could do it without wanting something back, and I wasn't willing to find that out on a person.

What I said to my parents

I told them I wasn't withholding anything from them. I wasn't punishing them. I just didn't want to make a person in order to fill a role.

My mother, who had asked the question, was the one who made it easy. She said being a mother was the best thing that ever happened to her, and also that it took things from her she never got back, and that if she'd had a life like mine to choose from, she might have chosen differently. Then she asked about my week.

I don't know what I expected. Not that.

If you're sitting with this too

Maybe you're twenty-six and you already know. Maybe you're forty and you've never said it out loud. Maybe you want children desperately and none of this is for you. That's fine. Want them for the wanting, not for the return.

The only thing I'd ask is that we let the regret be speakable. For the parents, for the childless, for the child-free, for the people who did it and wished they'd had words. A choice made with open eyes and a heavy heart is still a better choice than one made because nobody felt allowed to tell the truth at the kitchen table.

I don't know if I'm right. I know what I chose, I can live with it, and there's a kind of peace in that. #antinatalism #childfree #parentalregret

This one was hard to publish, so I'll be honest about that. Did you ever have this conversation with your own parents, or with yourself? I read everything. Let's keep it kind — people on both sides of this are speaking from real lives.