Aug 17, 2026 · 30 min · 10 segments
Having children is one of the most rewarding and meaningful things we can do. But what if you wish you'd never become a parent? For mothers especially, the taboo of admitting they regret their…
Yumi StynesHost
Ella ReedGuestGGuestHannahGuest
That is something that sociologist Ella Reed found again and again in her research.
These women were as fantastic a mother as anyone else that I know, and it was just their own internal struggle.
It was, uh, really heartbreaking for them to explain to me in such great detail that yeah, they can just look at this perfect child and be like, "I wish that this child had a different mother.
Ella reckons that there are deep societal forces connected to the motherhood fairy tale.
I think everyone's obsessed with women having babies because it's easier to just shove it onto women.
It's easier for us to pretend like women are monolithic, and that's our role in society.
And if we just don't examine that and we don't put any microscope over [laughs] that, then we can just continue business as usual and not worry about it.
So I think that obsession of women should want this is because we're still not comfortable with the idea of that maybe women want [laughs] anything else.
Maybe women want a really high-flying career, or maybe women want to have different partners or go overseas and do other things.
... then the whole structure of our culture and our society would start to disintegrate.
If women really got together and started talking about the realities of it, the, like pregnancy, birth, you know, the whole shebang, yeah.
But we're seeing this now, everybody panicking 'cause the birthrate's dropping in most countries globally, and everyone's going, "Oh my gosh, what do we do about it?" It's like, why don't you just support people to have children then-
That is something that sociologist Ella Reed found again and again in her research.
These women were as fantastic a mother as anyone else that I know, and it was just their own internal struggle.
It was, uh, really heartbreaking for them to explain to me in such great detail that yeah, they can just look at this perfect child and be like, "I wish that this child had a different mother.
Ella reckons that there are deep societal forces connected to the motherhood fairy tale.
I think everyone's obsessed with women having babies because it's easier to just shove it onto women.
It's easier for us to pretend like women are monolithic, and that's our role in society.
And if we just don't examine that and we don't put any microscope over [laughs] that, then we can just continue business as usual and not worry about it.
So I think that obsession of women should want this is because we're still not comfortable with the idea of that maybe women want [laughs] anything else.
Maybe women want a really high-flying career, or maybe women want to have different partners or go overseas and do other things.
... then the whole structure of our culture and our society would start to disintegrate.
If women really got together and started talking about the realities of it, the, like pregnancy, birth, you know, the whole shebang, yeah.
But we're seeing this now, everybody panicking 'cause the birthrate's dropping in most countries globally, and everyone's going, "Oh my gosh, what do we do about it?" It's like, why don't you just support people to have children then-
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