Earlier this year Kelley Daring started collecting anonymous stories on social media from people who questioned their decisions to have families. A question for all the parents out there: do you ever regret having kids? It’s a controversial one, but if you’re brave enough to answer it — and answer it honestly — then Kelley Daring wants to hear from you. For the past few months Daring, 45, an entrepreneur, women’s advocate and TikTok star (@kelleydaring) from Sacramento, California, has been collecting anonymous stories from women around the world who have something to confess: they wish they had never had children.
The resulting series, in which she reads their words — frank, visceral, innermost thoughts — aloud in online videos, has racked up millions of views, with Daring building a fanbase of “regretful parents” who say they have finally found a voice. “There are so many,” she tells me. “The women who are bone-tired from struggling day in and day out to make ends meet.
The women whose children are adults and they still feel regret. Those that say they would welcome being hit by a bus. Their despair comes through in their messages and it brings me to tears.
” Daring doesn’t feel any such regret. She has no children, a decision she made as a teenager, and though she now has three grown-up stepdaughters, she insists she has never felt the urge to be a biological mother. “I have the utmost respect for motherhood and the relationships of mums with t.