If you need a reminder of how awful the media are, look no further than New York Magazine’s culture website The Cut, which published an article last week compiling the complaints of mothers who “wish they could go back to their old lives” before kids.
“Sooner or later, everyone has to decide whether to give up lazy weekends, disposable income, and overall peace of mind to have a baby instead. For many of those on the fence, one anxiety looms large: What if I make the wrong choice?” New York Magazine posted on its X feed over the weekend.
The Cut article accompanying the post is one in a series dedicated to “exploring how we made the choice — and whether we regret it.” Other stories featured in The Cut’s “Oh, Baby” collection include “What If My Baby Inherits My Medical Condition?” and “‘He Changed His Mind’ What happens when your happily child-free partner decides he actually does want a baby.”
The“‘I Regret Having Children’” piece starts with the confession of a 34-year-old mom of two who gets “hung up on thoughts like, What I really wanted to do today was painting, or reading, or doing these chores alone.”
“I love our children and would never want them to think, Mom and Dad would be happier if I wasn’t here. I’m giving them the best life I can. But thinking about life without them, I’d be happier overall,” she said.
The second mother featured lamented how she feels “so angry and alone” after kissing her dream career goodbye to devote more time to raising her 3-year-old daughter.
“If I could go back, I would redo everything. My fantasy is an alternate universe where I graduated, went straight to a doctorate program, and lived alone,” the 30-year-old continued. “I would go for walks whenever I wanted and go swimming at the end of the week. It would be an isolated life but a peaceful one.”
The last woman included in the article admitted she plans to give her soon-to-be ex-husband the responsibility of raising their 1-year-old, “which makes me feel incredibly guilty.” The guilt isn’t enough to keep her from also admitting, however, that “I don’t feel anything for [my son], and I don’t want to wait it out for years and walk out when he has actual memories.”
“Right now, he’s very young, and you can fake things. But I can only fake it so much,” she said, apparently ignorant of the significant physical and emotional consequences of early mother-child separation, including “elevated aggressive behaviors” and difficulty developing language as well as managing stress.
“Genuinely, if there is a hell, I’ve been living in it since I gave birth,” she claimed. The 27-year-old justified her feelings with complaints that her toddler has “a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair,” all on-brand developmental behaviors that can be mitigated with a mix of attention to needs and discipline.
“It was just that I was stuck inside a role not meant for me. I felt fine when I wasn’t around my son,” she concluded.
The mothers and their promoters at The Cut appear to have bought into the feminist lie that children — or sometimes even a man — keep them from feeling fulfilled and successful. On the contrary, married women with children are twice as likely to be “very happy” as unmarried women without kids. Married men with children similarly report greater happiness than single, childless men.
Not only is the parenting regret situation posited by The Cut “a false choice,” it’s bad journalism that borderlines exploitation and the normalization of mental illness. The three mothers featured are clearly struggling with symptoms of depression, anxiety, unprocessed birth trauma, body dysmorphia, and other ailments linked to pregnancy and postpartum. The last thing they need is for their deepest and darkest thoughts to be used as an advertisement for divorce and childlessness.
Yet, that’s exactly how The Cut article presents itself. The author cites the r/regretfulparents sub-Reddit, which “gets around 70,000 weekly visitors,” as proof that “parent regret is more common than you think.” On the contrary, a decade of data suggests that more people regret not having more children than regret having them at all.
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Even those who balk at the idea of having children, however, do not claim lack of sleep, free time, or identity as the reason for their hesitancy, as the mothers in The Cut story suggest. The top reason people question expanding their broods is the increasing cost of raising a child.
People, especially women, who think the best life has to offer is “lazy weekends, disposable income, and overall peace of mind” have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to lead a happy, healthy, and purposeful life. Motherhood can and does change women for the better. The catch is, they have to let it.
Unfortunately, lies like those of “parenting regret” advertised by The Cut are pervasive, spreading rapidly through society with amplification from corporate media outlets such as New York Magazine, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and others. The same culprits sell women specifically on the idea that they can delay weddings and babies to climb the career ladder without explaining that what’s left will be a severely shrunken pool of eligible men and rapidly declining fertility. All while women who have multiple children are mocked.
As a result, women’s first marriage rate since 1970 declined from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 31.3 as of 2018. The fertility rate over the last 50 years, similarly, plummeted from above the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman to 1.6.
We know strong society is closely related to the flourishing of the indispensable nuclear family, but families won’t exist if people decide not to get hitched and make babies due to fearmongering disguised as an exploration of an untold viewpoint.
Parenting is undoubtedly a difficult task, but it’s much harder when the adults try to keep their needs and desires front and center. When kids come into the picture, they become the priority period. Even if that means temporarily giving up menial “go[ing] for walks whenever” and “swimming at the end of the week.”
It’s easy to lose oneself in the sleepless nights, diaper changes, endless laundry, and toddler tantrums. But maybe, just maybe, sacrificing self to cultivate a legacy and life that goes beyond LinkedIn and the landfill is the point.
