Fertility regret

Definition

Fertility regret refers to a phenomenon where people post facto regret their fertility decisions. Fertility regret is best studied for women who have already completed their childbearing years.

Asymmetry in fertility regret

It seems that women are generally more likely to regret having had fewer children, and regret it more strongly, than to regret having had too many children. Possible reasons include:

• The gap between desired fertility and expected fertility and the gap between expected fertility and completed fertility are both positive, i.e., desired fertility > expected fertility > completed fertility in most regions where there is no unmet need for contraception (regions with an unmet need for contraception have completed fertility slightly higher than desired fertility, but not by a huge margin, only about 10%). Fertility regret makes sense in situations where women have had fewer kids than they desired.
• People have a strong endowment effect with respect to their children, so it is hard for them to want to have had "fewer" kids because that would mean not having had one of the kids they actually had.

Empirical research

See Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, reviewed by Bryan Caplan here.