Ask HN: Do you regret having children?

You have captured and written down my exact feelings on being a father. I’m unable to quantify, express or write down my emotions in any shape or form, so thank you for this!

Very true. I didn’t want a child, my wife wanted nothing more. I was afraid I would screw up, worried my self-centered life would end, that I couldn’t love a child. I had those thoughts until the moment I held my first daughter. Now I can neatly divide my life into 28 years before I had children and the different person I became after. It was like a switch flipped that day, and I never looked back with regret.

Definitely not.

There is a lot of bad information about child raising on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, and even HN some times. You can safely ignore anything on the internet that resembles the /r/childfree subreddit.

Having kids isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. The happy child-free couples I know actually like children but decided against having their own. Some of the childfree people, particularly on Reddit and other internet sites, try to make having children sound as terrible as possible to help justify and defend their own decision. You can safely ignore their complaints, too.

Parenting is work, but it’s not the end of the world. Raising kids costs money, but it’s not the bottomless money pit I thought it would be based on what I saw on the internet. In fact, parenting in general is almost nothing like what I read about online. My advice is to seek out some happy parents around you and ask them for advice. The happy parents tend to blend in and not broadcast to the world that they like their kids, because nobody likes hearing people brag about their own children endlessly.

Are your grandchildren really that bad?

I think though the overly positive replies in this thread are a bit... misleading. And frankly read a lot like something extremely religious people would write about their newfound religion. It doesn't read like rational discourse.

Of course, once you already have children, you are not going to be regretting it. It would just feel horrible to do so. The children, no matter how difficult they might make your life, are innocent little creatures, and you make it work - what else are you going to do? And the effort you put in, helps with the bonding. And of course you try to focus on the positives and forget the negatives - for your own wellbeing and sanity.

What's misleading is that the people replying are not considering the counterfactual in good faith. What would their life be like had they not taken the plunge? After all, it probably wasn't all that horrible before they made the decision either. Could it be that other options would've made their life better? Perhaps, the stress of children had led to deterioration in their relationship with their spouse, or made both of them age a lot, and they would've been able to enjoy each other's company so much more without. Perhaps it meant they had to give up some of their childhood dreams. Perhaps they had to cling to a job they didn't particularly like (or, indeed, hate) because they could no longer afford to take risks. Perhaps they no longer had the time to grind leetcode and get into a FAANG. Perhaps they would've got the benefits of having children and fewer of the downsides by caring for their nieces and nephews instead, or by just getting a cat.

Otherwise it becomes meaningless. You could ask someone that had children at the age of 16 if they regret it, and you would probably get the same responses as in this thread - 'of course not, best thing that ever happened to me; yes it has been tough, yes it meant I had to make sacrifices with my education and career, but I wouldn't trade the experiences with my child for anything in the world'. Yet we all recognize that having children at 16 is not the smartest idea.