When my mother lost her temper, her most frequent complaint was the existence of her children.
“I could have been someone if I hadn’t been saddled with three kids and no damned man to help me,” she’d yell between puffs on a cigarette.
Lacking their own firsthand experience of motherhood, some of these women bolster their arguments by remembering the hell they put their own mothers through.
Back in the ’80s, I didn’t know any other mothers who blamed their children for ruining their lives, or who said out loud that they regretted that their children were born. They surely existed, but decent people didn’t express such dark thoughts in public.
Ball and chain
We’ve come a long way, baby. In the 21st century, it’s socially acceptable to talk about children as a ball and chain, a fetter on freedom, the reason a mother’s life never took off. Children were once thought of as a gift. For an increasing number of women, they’re seen as a burden.
Modern women are telling each other and the world how they refuse to have their lives ruined by children. Those who have had them and wish they hadn’t confide their resentments to magazine reporters.
Last month, the Cut published an article titled “I regret having children.” The writer speaks to three anonymous mothers who relate their depression, frustration, and resentment at how having children derailed what they thought their lives would be.
One says having kids made it harder to enjoy her “stressful but fulfilling” job as a nonprofit executive. For a whole year, her baby was colicky and wouldn’t stop crying. In fact, her child was so unbearable that even the babysitter said, “I can’t do this anymore,” and quit.
Mother load
Childlessness also used to be a private matter. Not now. Everywhere you turn, there’s another middle-aged woman with a brittle smile proclaiming how happy she is to have forsaken motherhood in favor of her hobbies, her career, and her ability to sleep in.
Lacking their own firsthand experience of motherhood, some of these women bolster their arguments by remembering the hell they put their own mothers through. As a child, 40-year-old Victoria Peel Yates
watched my mother work six days a week running her esthetician business while doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and child care at home. She was so busy being a working wife and mother to two kids that she put off many of her dreams until retirement.
Yates never tells us what these unfulfilled dreams were, just that her mother “loved her work” (only retiring when the U.K.’s COVID lockdowns forced her to) and that her “lifelong wish was to become a grandmother.”
The life Yates remembers sounds hectic, but also rich; through a different pair of eyes, this balancing act could look like “having it all.” Could it be that her mother found meaning and fulfillment in her life of “sacrifice”?
Birth dearth
It doesn’t seem to occur to Yates, who needs a cautionary tale to justify her own choices. What kind of life did not having kids allow Yates to have, anyway? She’s vague on the details, mentioning something about a freelance writing business. Mostly, it seems to be about what she avoids — the “upheaval” that would make dealing with her grief, anxiety, and financial precarity even more difficult.
Business Insider filed Yates’ essay under “Parenting.” This seems like an odd choice, until you realize that the whole “child-free” movement is about turning a lack into something more like an equally productive alternative.
National Public Radio’s “It’s Been a Minute” podcast puts it plainly. It’s a bit painful to listen to or read given the Valley Girl dialect of host Brittany Luse. Here’s how she opens the March 24, 2026, episode on being “child-free.”
Childless implies that being a nonparent may be a matter of circumstance, like maybe you wanted kids, but it didn’t work out. But the term child-free is much more rooted in the choice to be a nonparent. That’s the group of people we’ll be discussing today.
They’re not just people without kids; they’re nonparents. Instead of lives, they nurture their own freedom, modernity, and self-determination.
RELATED: My mother was evil; here’s how I help others face their own abusive childhoods
Neil Libbert/Getty Images
Ma’am Solo
Luse’s guests include author Emma Gannon, who wrote a novel about being “child-free by choice.” Gannon wants us to know about the vital contribution she’s making by not reproducing:
I feel like child-free women bring a lot to society. You know, if someone is sick, if someone has aging parents, if someone needs someone with free time, someone with more finances ’cause child-free women normally have more money, I think it’s sort of like, well, let’s celebrate the auntie figure. Let’s celebrate the godmother. Like, these are people in society that I think get stuff done as well.
Like, yeah. It sounds less like a celebration and more like whistling past the graveyard. Any honest adult who gets to middle age knows that we look back on some of our choices with regret. But the child-free advocacy ladies put on their brightest smiles and assure us (themselves, really) that they won’t regret not building a family. They won’t feel lonely in their old age when they have no one to care for them but a low-paid staffer at a nursing home.
Womb and doom
It’s no surprise that the “child-free” discourse attracts the more extreme end of the feminist spectrum. A surprising number of these feel no shame in weaponizing their wombs. Such feminists treat the children they might or might not have as bargaining chips in the never-ending war between left and right.
This woman put out a 30-second social media video telling the world — presumably all the misogynistic, white, conservative patriarchs — she wouldn’t be having any babies for the oppressive regime we call the United States of America. She’s surprisingly confident in her fecundity for a woman of 44:
I have lots of eggs left. I’m very fertile. I got it tested. And I want you to know I’m not going to have any of your babies. Not going to reproduce my amazing genetic composition for this country. … And you’ll kill me before you rape me.
Something is profoundly wrong with a culture in which it’s not only acceptable, but applauded, to discuss child-bearing as a jail sentence and a buzz-kill for women. As a culture in general, we barely even give lip-service any longer to the idea that we adults have a moral responsibility to children. Look at how “The Simpsons” turned the expression “Won’t somebody think of the children?” into a joke — the kind of thing only a stupid, pearl-clutching “Boomer” would say. It’s gross and cringe to think of the children, right?
As a former child who knew from birth that his mother experienced his existence as an assault on her personhood and her dreams, I can confirm that these attitudes have sad and lifelong emotional and moral effects on a person. Say a prayer for America’s children; God knows many of their mothers won’t.
Lifestyle, Family, Child free, Parenthood, Motherhood, Anti-natalism, Intervention