I spent some time this week delving into the world of the regretful moms. It became a strange trend on TikTok apparently: moms expressing all of the reasons they shouldn’t have had children. As I watched and read comments from sorrowful moms, I found myself becoming completely overwhelmed by sadness, too. We were all children once, helpless, annoying, needy, sickly, disobedient, messy, and a constant issue for our mothers. But a mother’s love has been revered throughout the history of humankind as one of the purest forms of affection.
A mother loves without condition, without reservation, without regret. I’ve seen podcasters frame this trend as women revealing that they hate their children. I disagree. These women love their children. But their love for their kids is being overshadowed by what I’m convinced is Satan’s most effective strategy to keep humans from flourishing, doing good, experiencing joy, or seeking God. What is making moms regret having kids? They are hopelessly bent before the idol of self.
Feminism is an easy target, and I get that. But it’s incredible how perfectly that modern feminist ideals speak to the innate desire in all of us to be and do and experience and feel and create and enjoy everything exactly as we want to. It’s practically become a virtue to be stingy and selfish, to draw boundaries, to seek what feels best for ourselves above all. In this culture, it’s a hard time to be a child. Between women and all the lunches on cafe patios, uninterrupted sleep, undivided careers, free weekends, Eurpoean vacations, stand children. Children, with their uncooperative notions and their loud needs. Children, who for a short period of their lives, need an adult to be almost entirely focused on them all the time. Children have become the barrier between women and all of the things that seem appealing, all the things that seem fulfilling, all the things that keep us from “losing ourselves.” At least, this is what Satan wants us to believe.
His message has always been do what feels good to you. We saw it in the garden, when he approached a woman and said, “Don’t you see what you’re missing out on?” I wonder how we haven’t caught on yet that his messaging hasn’t changed, and he has come after women so hard with the very same question in 2026. Satan didn’t give us these children. God did. God gave them to us and uniquely called us to shepherd them through this life, and it requires sacrifice. A shepherd fights what comes after his sheep with his bare hands, and God has given us a very similar job. We are meant to be the barrier between our children and all the things that this culture of death will throw at them in their young lives. Of course Satan hates that. Of course he is coming after us. He wants to lure God’s appointed shepherds away, and in so doing, ruin what God has designed: beautiful, faithful, sacrificial protection of the babies and children of this world.
Satan wants to make mothers miserable. He can more easily devour us that way, and he can more easily devour our kids that way. He doesn’t have to do anything more than convince us day by day through the influence of social media that shepherding our children is an inferior occupation, that it’s holding us back, that it’s making us less than we’re meant to be, that it’s not what we really want to do. He wants us to be thinking about ourselves so much that it hurts to try and think about anyone else. He wants us to idolize dreams of freedom from the snare of our children, and as we believe his lies, we unknowingly step right into the real trap.
The only answer is Jesus. He not only pulls us out of Satan’s grasp, He shows us the true joys of motherhood, the exquisite ways that He forms us and remakes us through this holy calling: being someone’s mother. How good of Him to place us here, how kind of Him to walk through it all with us, the glories and the heartaches and the days when we feel like we failed. Even the days when we would honestly rather be on a cafe patio having lunch. He has given us a rich playground for becoming the women He knows we can be, and He gives us everything we require to love our children more than we love ourselves. The kids aren’t the barriers to happiness. We fight our own joy with both arms flailing because it’s hard to lay your life down for another. But Jesus’ message is so very different from that liar, Satan’s. Jesus says the last will be first one day. He says, “Greater love has no one than this: that she lay her life down for her friends.” Moms, here’s our chance.
There aren’t that many things in this life that matter to eternity. Generally speaking, a career doesn’t, travel doesn’t, being free to eat a good lunch doesn’t, having nice furniture and a pretty house doesn’t. But motherhood does. The sacrifices we make here will echo far beyond us, and the joys of it will follow us to our deathbed and beyond.
In Bible times, shepherds would sometimes lie down across the opening to the sheep’s pen at night, physically standing between them and harm. They may have wished they were in their nice warm bed, but there they laid, night after night. Motherhood is amazing like that. Our kids need us to be heroines, standing between them and a dying world that wants to take them down with it. God has given us an opportunity that we’ll never get back. Kids grow up and move away. What will we do with our little sheep while we have them?
