See, I know this isn’t what you mean and isn’t what’s true, but this discourse is kind of giving a vibe that you were happier before you changed your mind. (Yes, I understand that that’s not true, I’m not attempting some kind of stupid gotcha here!)
But somebody considering parenthood and reading that might get the message “I didn’t want kids and didn’t have kids, so I had no idea what I was missing. Then I changed my mind and had a kid, and now I regret that I didn’t start earlier and can’t have more, and it makes me gloomy and depressed that other people aren’t having more kids and not knowing what they’re missing, and also parenting is very hard and underfunded.”
Um, okay, thanks for the pep talk? (No, I don’t seriously mean that you should be running a pro-natalist advertising campaign of curated positivity in honest IMHO discussions on the Dope, it’s okay!) But you can see how somebody who isn’t particularly FOMO-prone might take in that message and think “Hmmm, I can go on being fine with not having kids and miss a big transformative experience but not really be bothered by it because I don’t know what I’m missing. Or I can take the leap and commit to all that cost and care and uncertainty while simultaneously being sad about the wrongness of my previous choice and despairing about all the other people making similarly wrong choices. Yeah, um, I think maybe I’ll just stick with my blue-pill version of reality here.”
There’s got to be a better way of helping others attain the confidence and freedom and support to choose what they really do want most with regard to parenthood. Because if that won’t be adequate to maintain the human race, I don’t think there’s anything else that will be.
“Oh woe, more people need to put themselves through this because it really is by far the better path, in ways that you’ll never come close to understanding if you don’t choose it, and also we need more people to do it because the fate of the species hangs in the balance” is not really going to cut it as a sales pitch, ISTM.