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. The single-child family is a popular subject in magazines these days. It lends itself to a colour supplement. ‘One and done’ the headline goes, alongside a photo of a smug-looking outdoorsy couple in expensive breathable waterproofs, their lifestyle uncompromised, their handy single toddler stuffed into a rucksack. The text is invariably a bingo card of all the modern era’s most hellish phrases: forever home, fur-baby, me-time, work-life balance.

I read these articles because I have an onlychild, but they leave me disconcerted. I feel that either I’m missing the point, or they are. Yes, of course having just one is easier. They’re cheap to feed and fun to chat to. You can pop them on the back of a bike, hand them over to the other parent and spend quality time with your iPhone. But what’s ease got to do with having children? If ease is your aim, why have kids at all? And why does no one ever mention the only-child situation from the child’s perspective? What if your one child would like there to be others?

I’m not trying to make the mothers of only children feel guilty.