The other key reason for parental regret is that some parents simply never wanted kids in the first place. Mary is a stay-at-home mother of two in South Dakota. (She also requested to be identified by only her first name, for freedom to discuss the subject.) In 2014, she accidentally became pregnant and experienced a stillbirth. Around the same time, her mentor died by suicide. Feeling that she wanted to prove she could do pregnancy “correctly,” Mary conceived again. “I let hormones and feelings and trauma trick me into having kids,” she told me. When her first son was nine months old, she accidentally became pregnant again.

“I hate it,” Mary said. “I just don’t like kids.” She reads aloud to her children, cooks for them, and generally adheres to textbook parenting strategies for well-adjusted children. But Mary also ruminates about what she could do and who she could be without them, and counts down the days until they’re totally independent. When her friends who have teenagers bemoan their babies’ growing up, she told me, “I’m like, ‘You lucky bitch.’” Roskam said that for many of her parental-burnout patients who regret having children, the feeling is not permanent—but Mary told me that her therapist has ruled out both postpartum depression and burnout. Her regret isn’t a phase.

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. Some of Donath’s female subjects had supportive partners and the financial resources to raise kids but still felt an “ever-present” burden, she wrote.