The Institute for Family Studies surveyed 1,518 US adults in 2021 and found a persistent asymmetry in how people feel about their family size decisions. Roughly 34% of parents wish they had more children than they currently have, while only 14% of parents wish they had fewer — a ratio of more than two to one in favor of wishing for more. The 0.08 action-side rate represents a narrower construct: regret about having one additional child specifically, rather than cumulative family-size regret across all parities. Cross-national qualitative research on parental regret (Donath 2015, Signs) documents that roughly 5-10% of parents in various study populations express regret about a specific child, which anchors the action-side estimate. The desire-for-more gap reported by IFS is structural: Americans’ stated ideal family size has risen to a 50-year high while actual birth rates have fallen, meaning the aspiration-actuality divergence is widening, not narrowing.
The Gilovich and Medvec inaction-dominance model predicts that long-run regrets accumulate more on the side of things left undone than things done. The fertility evidence fits this prediction. Parents who had one more child and feel stretched rarely express the kind of persistent, escalating regret that would exceed the regret of those who stopped and later wished they had not. The IFS data show that among parents, the “wish for fewer” group (14%) is less than half the size of the “wish for more among parents” group (approximately 24-34%), consistent with inaction-dominance. A Gallup tracking poll from 2023 found that 6% of all American adults who do not have children say they wish they had had them — a separate signal that under-reproduction is more commonly regretted than over-reproduction at the population level.
Several limitations qualify the comparison. The action-side 8% is a downward estimate from the IFS 14% figure, not a separately published statistic; the adjustment reflects the marginal framing of this entry but introduces imprecision. A significant share of “stopping” decisions are involuntary — fertility decline, partner disagreement, financial constraints — meaning that many people counted in the inaction side did not face a clean choice to have another child and declined; conflating structural barriers with decisional inaction can inflate the inaction-regret estimate. The IFS sources are from a think tank with a stated pro-family orientation, though the underlying survey data (US Adult Sexual Behaviors and Attitudes Study) is publicly available. Both sides of this entry measure wish-for-more or wish-for-fewer as a current preference, not a retrospective decision-regret with a validated instrument; the gap is directionally robust but should not be read as a precisely calibrated effect size.