Will you be sad if you don't have kids? I checked the evidence before my window closes

Women are evolved to be mothers. Men are evolved to be fathers.

So does that mean if people don’t have kids, they’ll be less happy? Less fulfilled?

I hear this claim a lot in the right wing sphere of bloggers and podcasts. See the excellent blogger Psychobabble for an example of this, or on the wonderful Modern Wisdom podcast.

The general claim is that women are waiting too long to have kids. They have career but no family life, and this leaves them listless and wondering why they’re so sad and life feels empty. Some talk about men having this too, but it’s usually focused on women.

Since I generally find Psychobabble and Modern Wisdom to be quite wise, I decided to do a deep dive into this question. Are people less happy without children?

Heads up, I am a bit biased or perhaps the best person to be writing about this, depending on how you look at it. I’m a 36 year old woman and I really do not want kids. However, I know this running up towards the end of my fertile years, so if I’m going to decide, it’s got to be now.

Of course, even if on average people are happier with kids, that doesn’t mean I should have kids specifically. People are not averages. I know my situation and self far better than a statistic based on thousands of people.

Same goes for you. If you had kids and they made you happier, that’s probably true for you. It’s also true if it made you less happy.

However, it’s still interesting. Let’s dive in.

The short answer is: having kids doesn’t make you happier on average

It also probably doesn’t change mental health outcomes on average.

It’s really important to understand what the “on average” means. Some women get post-partum depression. Some women are bathed in such deep love that they describe the newborn phase as the best part of their life.

Bell curves and averages don’t mean most people are the average. In fact, 50% of people are above average and 50% of people are below average. Only a tiny fraction of people are actually the “average”.

Let’s start with some important distinctions too. There are two general measures of happiness:

• Life satisfaction. You’re asking “on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”. Very simple.
• Emotional well-being. Usually more complicated. “How often did you experience joy/curiosity/fascination/stress/anxiety/anger in the last [period of time]?” One common one is PANAS (stands for Positive and Negative Affect Schedule).

These often come apart. For example, Scandinavia countries tend to score the highest in the world on life satisfaction, but Latin American countries tend to score the highest on emotional well-being.

You can also have weird responses for emotional well-being, where it’s common to have more positive and negative emotions (Deaton & Stone 2014).

So how does parenting do on these metrics? It’s quite plausible that it reduces emotional well-being, adding stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, and financial struggles, but it increases life satisfaction. People often report having kids as the most meaningful thing in their lives.

You’d also expect us to have evolved to enjoy having kids. People who didn’t like having kids were less likely to invest in their care and they would be more likely to fail to survive and reproduce.

But hey, women are also evolved to pick berries and men are evolved to hunt, and I don’t see many people saying that their life feels empty because they couldn’t pick blackberries last August.

So what do the studies say?

Roughly speaking, it’s a mess. There are about as many studies saying parents have the same life satisfaction, less, and more, clustering around no effect. When they do find a difference, the effect sizes are tiny (Hansen et al. 2009; Blanchflower & Clark 2021).

On the emotional well-being front, it’s similarly all over the place. Some studies show that parents have more positive and negative emotions (Deaton & Stone 2014). Some studies show no difference (Hansen et al. 2009). Some track over the day where they ask how they happy they are while they’re doing it, and people report enjoying taking care of kids about as much as doing household chores (Kahneman et al. 2004).

What about mental illness? Psychobabble makes the claim that not having kids is making women mentally ill. Maybe that is happening but not showing up in the happiness stats?

Interestingly, non-parents do show more mental illness, specifically depression and anxiety, than parents (Andersen et al. 2026; Helbig et al. 2006). But parents more symptoms of depression and anxiety (Andersen et al. 2026; Evenson & Simon 2005)? I honestly don’t know how to interpret that. Surely if you have more symptoms, then you’d have higher rates? Maybe parents are just having chronic low grade symptoms and non-parents tend to be more extreme and bimodal?

But this raises a chicken and egg question: does having kids protect you against mental illness, or do mentally ill people have less children?

There’s some evidence that people who struggle with depression have lower fertility rates (Andersen et al. 2026). There are also interesting studies where they compared three groups:

1. People who had kids
2. People who didn’t have kids but planned on having them
3. People who didn’t have kids and didn’t plan to

They found that people who were planning to kids had less mental illness than people who had kids, and the rates increased once they did have kids (Andersen et al. 2026). This points towards that it’s more likely that if you’re struggling with depression, you’re less likely to have kids.

It’s also really important to distinguish between two groups:

1. The child-free
2. The childless

Did you decide to not have kids? Or did you want to have them and failed to, either through inability to find a suitable partner in time or infertility?

(Not to mention voluntary vs involuntary birth. Having kids on purpose vs by accident surely must have an effect.)

In most studies both people are put in the same box of no-children, but there’s every reason to expect them to be deeply different. Having a strong desire constantly thwarted is bound to make anybody sad. And I’ve read accounts of people dealing with their longing for kids and it breaks my heart.

Meanwhile, I am child-free by informed choice and I’m jetsetting around the world as a digital nomad and absolutely cherishing my freedom. Whenever I hear a child screaming, I say a little prayer of thanks that I didn’t have kids with my ex-husband. If I think of spending a year changing nappies and being sleep deprived instead of writing and exploring, that seems like a total waste and loss of meaningful work, not more. Surely my happiness rates are going to be different from somebody who’s gone through multiple rounds of IVF to have a child.

Of course, it also depends on why you’re childless vs childfree. Some people are childfree because they think the world is on fire and they don’t want to bring a child into that, or you think humans are plague on the environment. Some people are childless because they were so enmeshed in a career they’re so passionate about that they missed the boat. You’d expect very different emotional profiles on each of these.

As always, there is so much diversity and complexity in psychology

Unfortunately, there aren’t many studies on this, but the evidence does support the general direction that voluntary child-freeness feel better than the involuntarily so (Jeffries & Konnert 2002; Connidis & McMullin 1993; Gameiro et al. 2014).

What about regret? Won’t childless people regret not having kids?

The short answer: yes, some will. And some will regret having children.

Across the studies asking parents if they regretted or somewhat regretted having children, it ranged from 4.7-20% (Newport & Wilke 2013; YouGov 2016; YouGov 2021; Piotrowski 2021; Meil et al. 2023). If you want some great portrayals of what it feels like to regret children, I highly recommend the movie The Lost Daughter. The Marriage Story and The Letdown both don’t show regretting children but it shows why one might and are very well done. Also check out r/regretful parents where people discuss their own experiences.

I also think regretting having children is going to be underreported. For one, many will simply not let themselves even think it. It would be too devastating to them and would probably make them a worse parent. Not to mention there is so much stigma about this that it will lead to more self-delusion and less reporting of the experience.

Across the studies asking non-parents if they regretted not having children, it ranged from roughly 20-50% (Newport & Wilke 2013; Greil et al. 2022; Minkin et al. 2024; Stegen et al. 2025). Of course, they usually didn’t distinguish between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, which totally ruins the data. Another interesting study showed people who never wanted children reported no more life regret than parents (3.30 vs 3.87, not significant) (Watling Neal & Neal 2023). This is regretting anything about life, rather than kids specifically. Which might be pointing out that some people just regret choices more retrospectively.

So overall, there is a risk you’ll regret it. This is more common among the childless than the parents, but it’s really hard to tell if that’s just mixing together the voluntarily and involuntarily childless.

Other interesting confounding variables:

• Marriage. Marriage does increase happiness on average (Hansen et al. 2009). And people with kids are more likely to marry (Bhargava et al. 2014). A lot of the studies that showed an increase in happiness disappeared when you controlled for marital status (Nelson et al. 2013; Bhargava et al. 2014).
• Societal support. Having children was more likely to make people happier or not affect their happiness on average if they lived in a country with generous parental support. People in Scandinavia felt better about kids than those in America (Glass et al. 2016).
• Number of kids. Some studies looked into number of kids, and usually there was jump at the first kid, none with the second, and after that having more kids would lead to a decrease (Kohler et al. 2005; Myrskylä & Margolis 2014).
• Age of kids. Happiness peaked pre-birth (Myrskylä & Margolis 2014), was lowest in the first year, and got highest after the kids had left home. It might fit with the idea that kids are like the classics. Having had them is better than the experience itself.

Conclusion: it depends

Overall, the evidence points to that, on average, having kids doesn’t not change your happiness. Of course keeping in mind that almost no individual is average. For a large percentage of people, having kids will have made them moderately happier. For a large percentage of people, having kids will have made them moderately less happy. And for a small percentage, it will either have dramatically changed their lives for the better and others, for the worse.

So unfortunately we cannot look to the science to decide whether having kids will be a good choice for you. Although I do think you can do some minor, imperfect taste-testing first. Try taking care of nieces or nephews for a few nights or take up babysitting for a bit. See if you like the reality as much as the idea of it. (That’s how I ended up deciding against children, despite previously deeply wanting them.) But in the end, you’ll just have to decide to take the jump or not. It’s up to you as individual.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy:

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Cross-posted from my Substack where I write about a wider variety of things.

1. Yes, it’s not just women who have parental instincts. Read more about it in this excellent book A Billion Years of Sex Differences. Fascinating read.
2. (No difference: Bhargava et al. 2014, Deaton & Stone 2014, Watling Neal & Neal 2021. Negative difference: Glass et al. 2016, Nelson-Coffey et al. 2019, Blanchflower & Clark 2021. Positive difference: Hansen et al. 2009, Nelson et al. 2013).