The strange grief of not wanting kids

Why you might be mourning a future you chose not to have.

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September 15, 2026 12:45pm EDT

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Life is full of paths not taken — and even when you know, intellectually, that you’ve made the right choice for yourself, you might still experience a sense of sadness as you consider what your life could have looked like.

This week, Allie Volpe explored the strange, complicated grief that can accompany the decision to not have children. “Childfree people may be surprised by their emotions,” she writes. “After all, they’ve made a deliberate choice. But they still experience a loss: a life they don’t get to live, a future they need to relinquish, even if it wasn’t what they wanted in the first place. Rather than signaling regret, this grief is often rooted in a desire to be seen and to be included.” The desire to mourn something you never had, and, in fact, didn’t even want, might feel a little weird, but it’s important to talk about and normalize grief, even when it doesn’t fit into a neat category. The more comfortable we get with our own unexpectedly tender spots, the better we can understand each other.

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