the staff of the Ridgewood blog
New Brunswick NJ, we used to call it ,”keeping up with the Joneses”, some call it, “social envy” or FOMO (Fear of Missing Out ) , these are the key factors that can push people toward things they might otherwise avoid, like buying a car they can’t afford or building an extension they don’t need.
A new Rutgers study finds. this also might be a motivator for becoming a parent.
The study suggests that roughly one in every 14 parents in the United States, about 7 percent, say they wouldn’t have children if they could do it over again. Rates of parental regret are even higher in parts of Europe, such as Germany (8 percent) and Poland (13.6 percent). One of the main reasons.
“Why do you really want to have a child? What are your motivations?” said Kristina M. Scharp, an associate professor in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and coauthor of the study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. “In the context of what it means to be a parent, FOMO could be a valuable consideration.”
Parental regret is antithetical to how parents are expected to feel about their children. Social norms suggest that parents, and especially mothers, are “supposed to love their children unconditionally from conception to eternity,” the researchers wrote.
To understand what moved regretful parents to start a family, the researchers collected narratives from Reddit’s /r/childfree subreddit, an online community of 1.5 million child-free users. Moderators allow parents who express regret about having children to post to the subreddit, which has cataloged 85 such testimonies between 2011 and 2021.
Scharp and her colleagues coded the Reddit posts with items such as “investment of time” and “relationship sacrifices.” Codes were then grouped into themes – such as “resource-intensive work” – which helped illuminate so-called discourses. Three discourses from regretful parents emerged: parenting as heaven; parenting as hell; and parenting as (the only) choice.
Finally, the researchers examined how these discourses interacted to guide decision making about having children. What they found was a new, previously unconsidered, driver: FOMO.
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Who cares what rutgers has to say…
Mature!