Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

To play devil’s advocate to this mindset: life isn’t an optimization game. When you’re being nibbled away at by maggots or a pile of ashes, you will receive no trophy for how you optimized your life in a particular order.

You don’t need to perfect one thing to do something else. Nor does getting your ducks in a row on one thing guarantee you’ll be better off in another.

Sometimes you hurl yourself into the fire and you get burned. Sometimes you hurl yourself into the fire and you figure out everything else because you did it.

I know several once lost and now successful adults who found their drive and focus in the moment they held their first child in their arms. Others who, like you said, are still lost.

If you want to have kids, have kids. You’ll figure it out. Sometimes you won’t. Don’t sit around and wait for the optimal circumstance and opportunity. If there is an opportunity, take it. It may never come again.

Existential: I am glad you are still doing therapy. Have you talked to a psychiatrist? That may be helpful in your situation.

Tactical: Do you have any family or friends or house of worship kin with kids? Offer to take them out to do something fun - go to the playground, go on a hike, go rollerskating. The best part of “other people’s kids” is you can give them back once you’ve spoiled them.

Check out hedy.org and go to your local library and offer to teach kids to code. All it takes is a web browser.

It's not too late to have children. My sister is 42 and had a wonderful little miracle happen around the same time that my wife (31) was pregnant with my son. She turned out fine and perfectly healthy. You can also always adopt.

I just want to say you should definitely deal with the depression first. Having children is that single hardest thing you will ever do and being depressed will only make it harder. Continue therapy (even if it feels like it's not working - that's the depression - and it's a process not a magic cure), maybe even medication for a bit, start "planning" and giving yourself something to look forward to and towards and that will help with the depression because then your life will also have a direction to go in.

Taking aside all of your emotional concerns, you should know right away that women absolutely can have healthy biological children at or past the age of 39. Obviously I can't speak for your wife and her specific health or reproductive situation but in general, the idea that "the window has closed" is more often than not totally false. Look into this in more detail with real medical professionals. One interesting observation comes from the article I link to below, which points out that many of the supposed female fertility window statistics are actually based on extremely old information from pre-modern times. Worth reading for a bit of optimism and perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-lon...

noteworthy quote from the article:

"The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless—30 percent—was also calculated based on historical populations.

In other words, millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment."

It sounds like you have a lot more going on than just regret over not having children. I would wager that introducing kids to your life right now wouldn't magically fix everything else, either.

To be honest, this sounds like a mid-life crisis. Which is just another way of saying FOMO. We cannot do everything we dream of doing, we will not achieve every measure of success, there are absolutely going to be things you could have done but did not (for perfectly valid reasons!). Some of them you can do later, some you have to just accept are gone forever.