The recent MSN article “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning” is not just a private confession. It is a mirror reflecting a collapsing social order — one where parenting, education, and labor are all defined by debt, exhaustion, and disillusionment.
In today’s America, the family, the school, and the workplace no longer promise progress; they reproduce precarity. The personal regret of parents becomes a collective symptom of a society that demands self-sacrifice but offers little reciprocity.
The Privatization of Care and the Myth of the “Good Parent”
Since the Reagan era, neoliberal ideology has reduced social problems to personal failures. Families are told to work harder, plan better, and be grateful — while the state retreats from childcare, healthcare, and education.
Parenting, once understood as a shared civic project, is now a private ordeal. The “good parent” myth demands endless self-denial while ignoring the structural forces that make family life unsustainable: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, unaffordable education, and the erosion of community networks.
The parent who whispers, “I regret having children,” isn’t rejecting love — they are acknowledging betrayal. They were promised fulfillment through family, but abandoned by a system that commodifies care and isolates suffering.
The Dobbs Decision and the Politics of Coerced Parenthood
The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade — deepened this betrayal. By stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court forced millions into unwanted pregnancies under conditions of economic and emotional strain.
This was no accident of jurisprudence. It was the political offspring of neoliberal neglect and Trump-era authoritarianism — a regime that exalts “family values” while defunding the social infrastructure that makes family life possible.
Dobbs represents coerced parenthood in a nation without paid leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare. It is the culmination of a system that insists on reproduction but refuses responsibility — transforming bodily autonomy into a political battleground while leaving families to fend for themselves.
Trumpism, Despair, and Manufactured Nostalgia
Trumpism feeds on the despair that neoliberalism creates. It promises to restore “traditional America” — stable jobs, strong families, obedient children — but it offers only resentment as consolation.
When exhausted parents or debt-ridden graduates look for meaning, Trumpian populism channels their frustration toward scapegoats: immigrants, educators, feminists, the poor. It converts structural despair into cultural war.
Trump’s America is a paradox: it glorifies the family while destroying the material base that sustains it. It preaches “Make America Great Again” while keeping its base desperate, indebted, and emotionally dependent on rage.
The Rise of the Educated Underclass
Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the making of the educated underclass — the millions of Americans who did everything “right” but found the social contract shredded beneath them.
They earned degrees, followed career advice, and invested in the myth of meritocracy. Yet decades of wage stagnation, precarious employment, and student debt have left them economically fragile and politically disoriented.
Many are parents who believed education would secure their children’s futures. Instead, they see their own children inheriting instability — locked out of homeownership, burdened with loans, and facing a world where credentials no longer guarantee dignity.
This educated underclass, spanning teachers, social workers, adjunct professors, nurses, and mid-level professionals, represents the human fallout of the neoliberal university and the marketized economy it feeds. Their disillusionment — like parental regret — is both personal and systemic.
Higher Education as a Debt Factory
Colleges once promised upward mobility; now they manufacture anxiety and debt. The family that sacrifices for tuition does so on faith that a degree still matters. But as corporate consolidation and automation erode stable work, that faith collapses.
Parents, particularly those from the working and lower-middle class, internalize this collapse as failure — not recognizing that the problem lies in a system that sells hope on credit. Their children, emerging into a gig economy with record debt, form the next generation of the educated underclass: credentialed, precarious, and politically volatile.
Regret as a Rational Response
In this context, parental regret is not deviance — it is rational. It reflects the exhaustion of trying to raise children, pay loans, and sustain meaning in a society where everything, including love, has been commodified.
It reflects the psychic cost of neoliberalism’s lie: that education, work, and family can still deliver self-realization without collective solidarity or public investment.
And it warns of what happens when a nation loses faith not only in its institutions but in the very act of reproduction itself.
Toward a Politics of Care and Repair
To break this cycle, we must confront the intertwined crises of reproduction, education, and inequality. A humane alternative would demand:
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Universal reproductive freedom — protecting the right not to bear children, and the resources to raise them with dignity.
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Tuition-free higher education and student debt relief — dismantling the educated underclass.
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Guaranteed childcare, healthcare, and paid leave — treating parenting as collective labor, not private suffering.
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Living wages and housing justice — reestablishing the economic base of real family life.
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Democratized higher education — ending the capture of universities by finance and corporate boards.
Only by restoring care as a public good — not a private burden — can we move beyond regret toward renewal.
From Regret to Resistance
The parent who says, “I regret having children,” and the graduate who says, “My degree ruined my life,” are not failures. They are witnesses. Their grief exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system that exploits care, education, and aspiration for profit.
Trumpism thrives on that despair, offering nostalgia instead of justice. Neoliberalism rationalizes it, calling it “personal responsibility.”
But the truth is collective: meaning cannot survive where solidarity has been destroyed. The antidote to regret is not silence — it is organizing. It is rebuilding a society where care, education, and dignity are shared, not sold.
Sources
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MSN News, “I Regret Having Children — It Has Stripped My Life of Meaning,” 2025.
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Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).
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Donath, Orna. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis. North Atlantic Books, 2017.
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Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. Verso, 2022.
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Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Zone Books, 2015.
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Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket, 2014.
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Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. The New Press, 2016.
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Shaulis, Dahn. The College Meltdown (Higher Education Inquirer archives).
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