I regret not having more children

Life doesn’t always work out perfectly. You can make the wrong decisions. You can leave things too late. I wish, though I’m not distraught about it, that I’d had another child, maybe two even, and given my small son siblings.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of our shrinking population – the great global baby bust – and wondering why more women don’t express regrets. Often, for any number of reasons, the decision to have children is out of our control. But even so, there must be many hundreds of thousands like me who wish with hindsight that we’d got a move on, had some or more. Why don’t we say so?

Instead, in every paper and on every screen there’s a constant drip of articles which insist that no childless women wish they’d started sooner and that having only one is a great boon.