Is it normal to regret having a baby

And two-thirds report that their relationships suffered during the first three years of having a child. Taylor says she often counsels parents who feel guilty about wanting to leave and being unable to cope with day-to-day challenges.

Taylor says regrets can be rooted in something as simple as not having enough support. I find it crazy that anyone can reproduce without being required to even take a first aid course. The responsibility starts far before conception. Relationships Australia: ; relationships. Start your week with practical tips and expert advice to help you make the most of your personal health, relationships, fitness and nutrition. Sign up to our Live Well newsletter sent every Monday.

Please try again later. We were in agreement that, in no shape or form, did we want kids. But when I became miraculously pregnant a couple of years later everything changed.

I discovered I was pregnant after checking myself into hospital for having bouts of random rage which far exceeded being pre-menstrual. It was not long after my epilepsy diagnosis, so I feared there had been a complication. But when the doctor told me I was two months pregnant, I was beyond disbelief. To my surprise, he convinced me that there was no reason not to have it; we were getting married, we were old enough, we were financially stable. The whole pregnancy felt like when a friend talks you into skydiving: how did I say yes to this?

I was completely terrified, in a constant state of fear. After the long and traumatic birth, I held my daughter and I did love her. When I came home, my husband did everything. I was clueless and everything to do with babies was alien to me. But for parents who continue to parent well in spite of their sense of regret, the guilt and shame surrounding this feeling will only silence them and make matters worse.

To improve circumstances for both parents and children, society needs to openly discuss parental regret — and not just with the protection of online anonymity. Ethical living. Sikh ethics sees self-centredness as the source of human evil. Ageing and death. Older people are battling despair, but Erikson offers us hope. Thinking and intelligence. Hiking holiday in Slovakia. It should be OK for parents to express regret about having children.

This kind of regret is complicated and rife with contradictions: having your child with someone else would have resulted in a completely different child We found that regrets about parenthood fall into one of two categories. Email Tweet Share. Parenting and families Difficult emotions Decision-making and attention. Around the same time, her mentor died by suicide. When her first son was nine months old, she accidentally became pregnant again.

Orna Donath, an Israeli sociologist and the author of Regretting Motherhood: A Study , confirms this second route to regret. In her research, she interviewed 10 fathers who regretted becoming parents; eight of them reported not wanting children but having them to appease their partner.

Piotrowski concluded that choosing parenthood is a predictor of adapting to it; he noticed apparently higher rates of regret in Poland relative to Germany, which tracked with considerably lower access to abortion in the former. Research from UC San Francisco supports this idea: In one study , mothers with a child born as a consequence of abortion denial were more likely to report having difficulty bonding , as well as feeling trapped or resentful, than mothers who had an abortion and subsequently had a child.

Kara Hoppe has seen this reflected in her adult patients. Read: What it means to be a bad mom. But perhaps fewer parents would be regretful if society didn't make parenting so hard. Decreasing parental regret could be possible, with a host of structural shifts: access to reproductive choice as well as individualized treatment for parental burnout and change to policies regarding child care , family leave , work schedules , and the gender pay and promotion gaps.