"It's very rare for a woman who has children to regret having children," says Hanson. "You will find women who say, on the one hand, 'I love my children, they're profoundly fulfilling and I can't imagine not having had them.' But on the other hand they'll say, 'Boy, this is really stressful. This has really strained my marriage. My health has never been up to par since I had my first or second child. I really regret the impact of having kids on my career. Having children has made me financially dependent and really limited my options for making money.' I hear them say all those things, but you rarely hear moms actually saying, bottom line, I should never have done it."

Yet Cain insists that more women feel that way than might admit it. She points to a famous survey advice columnist Ann Landers took of her readers in 1975. A woman wrote to Landers with qualms much like mine -- she and her husband were torn about childbearing and asked, "Were the rewards enough to make up for the grief?" Landers put the question to her readers, asking, "If you had it to do over again, would you have children?" Astonishingly, 70 percent of her respondents said no.

Hanson agrees that even if mothers say they don't regret having children, as a group they're not more satisfied with their lives than nonmothers. For all the truth about the innate physiological rewards of mothering, he says, "The happy people are the ones who wanted kids and had them or didn't want kids and didn't have them."

This is true even in old age, a time when many assume the childless will suffer alone while their peers are comforted by grandchildren. Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Florida who researches aging, recently completed a study based on surveys of 3,800 men and women between the ages of 50 and 84. "For years we have heard warnings that if you don't have children, you will regret it later," she said in a press release. "But beliefs about childlessness leading to a lonely old age are simply not supported by our study." In a previous report published in 1998, Koropeckyj-Cox concluded that there is "no significant differences in loneliness and depression between parents and childless adults."

Besides, what some parents gain in intimacy with their children, they lose in intimacy with their partners. Hanson says, "Research has shown that on the average the greatest challenge to a couple is becoming parents. Many marriages hold together for a few years when the child is young, but they've been strained beyond repair by everything that comes from having kids and the couple divorces, maybe by the time the kid reaches first grade. Some people think they will save their relationship by having children. It almost never happens." He cites a study by John Gottman, a renowned expert on marriage at the University of Washington, which estimates that couples have eight times more arguments after becoming parents. Hanson says he's seen this in his life as well as his practice. "Many couples overcome all this and having children brings them closer together. That's certainly true for my wife and myself. But during the early years -- our kids are now 15 and almost 13 -- boy, we quarreled and were emotionally distant and troubled in our marriage like we'd never been. We argued about all the issues that new parents commonly argue about -- how to raise the children, who is doing more, the inevitable lack of time for an intimate relationship."

Cain reprints one of those 1975 letters sent to Ann Landers in her book: "I am 40, and my husband is 45. We have twin children under 8 years of age. I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I'm an overly exhausted nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He's got a 'friend,' I'm sure, and I don't blame him. Our children took all the romance out of our marriage. I'm too tired for sex, conversation or anything."

Such alienation is less likely when people don't have children. "Statistics show childless couples are happier," Cain says. "Their lives are self-directed, they have a better chance of intimacy, and they do not have the stresses, financial and emotional, of parenthood."

This assessment is shared by Shari Bennet-Speer, a 34-year-old corporate trainer in Richmond, Va. The decision not to have children, she says, "has absolutely 100 percent" improved her relationship with Geoffrey, her husband of 12 years.

Bennet-Speer says she'd never been very interested in children, but had assumed she'd have them because "that's what you do, get married and have kids." When she met her husband and he told her he didn't want to be a father, it hit her that parenthood was a choice, and she didn't have to choose it. "It sounded perfect to me," she says. "I truly was fine with [not having kids] as soon as he suggested it as a possibility."

"My husband and I are madly in love," she adds. "We hold hands, we cuddle in movies, we take long walks, we talk late into the night, we road trip every anniversary, just to celebrate our time together. We get to live spontaneously and we get to make life choices that are important to us. There are not many people who've made our choice, but I've never regretted it."

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