Episode Details

Today on Based Camp, we go over the accounts of women who reportedly regret having kids, as covered by New York Magazine, and discuss why they’re so miserable.

Among other things, we explore:

* How the hardest phase is often the early years, especially infancy and toddlerhood, and that regret can be heavily shaped by sleep deprivation, pain, and the shock of being the default caregiver

* How the same events can feel unbearable or manageable depending on whether a person frames them negatively or as part of a meaningful life project

* The utility of thinking through failure modes in advance, building contingency plans, and explicitly discussing logistics before having children rather than relying on vague social assumptions

* How if someone dislikes themselves or their partner, that unhappiness often gets magnified through children because kids reflect both parents

* How online communities like “regretful parents” can reinforce misery by rewarding negative storytelling, though they acknowledge that some parents are genuinely unsupported and hurting

Ultimately, parent regret is often driven less by children themselves and more by a mix of poor preparation, weak reasons for having kids, lack of support, bad partner fit, and untreated personal issues like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or body image problems.

Many of these risks can be headed off by brutally honest parenting discussions, early planning, and choosing parenthood deliberately rather than as a default life stage

Episode Notes

* A lot of conservative-leaning influencers are talking about an article in the New York Times, part of The Cut’s “Oh, Baby” series

* Broadly speaking, they’re trashing NY Mag for discouraging motherhood and/or trashing the mothers for various reasons

* Though some, like Brett Cooper, have more balanced takes: she argues that the viral “I regret having children” discourse is really about unsupported, isolated mothers and bad matching in marriage, not mothers hating their kids

* I disagree with all the takes I’ve seen though

* This article is great

* These accounts are super important

* Anyone who is serious about kids should read them—and more

Here’s why:

* The best way to get through something tough is to:

* Have a strong reason for having kids

* Understand where things go wrong

* Heading off serious issues, especially with your first child in their first years, makes the difference between hating parenthood and wanting a huge family

* A positive experience with first kids was the top common factor Dr. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk identified when interviewing college-educated American mothers of over five kids

* We, personally, have experienced a lot of the negative things (or rough equivalents) the mothers in this article experienced, but because we had a strong “why” behind having kids and we had prepared for a lot of the potential downsides, we were able to weather the hazards

What we would encourage:

* Going through r/regretfulparents and cataloging all the things that go wrong

* Building contingency plans for those things

* We did this with our relationship—in building our relationship contract—and prospective parents would be wise to do this before having kids

* I.e. build contingency plan items into a parenting contract, or adding them to a relationship contract

The Article

The article opens with: “Parent regret is more common than you might think — the r/regretfulparents sub-Reddit alone gets around 70,000 weekly visitors who anonymously commiserate — though stigma makes it hard to admit in real life. Below, three moms of young children talk about why they wish they could go back to their old lives.”

The Cut - I regret having children: https://ar