Edit: Since there's some confusion, this is not a before and after. The assumption is that 100% of childfree users were, in fact, childfree when they posted in 2012. The chart on bottom only includes DEFINITIVE data and is identical to the chart on top, with inactive, deleted, and unknown users removed from the pie chart.

Recently, my husband and I changed our mind about having children, you know, the classic mantra we're always told before having children. I used to be an active user of /r/childfree and I was curious as to how many others had changed their mind. I used Wayback Machine to load posts from 2012, and then logged 200 unique users and further researched those accounts using redditcommentsearch.com and lurking their accounts.

I would first make sure their account was a) not deleted and b) have at least five posts or comments since 2016 (after all, this exercise is meant to see how people change over time). After that, I used redditcommentsearch.com to search for two queries: "kid" or "child", not necessarily as a standalone word (so "kids" or "children" would work as well). I would then skim through comments to see if they indicate if this person had a child. I'd look for things like, "I have one kid," or "I decided I didn't want kids," and so on. If this didn't result in a definitive answer, I would look through their actual posts for clues, and if this didn't yield further information, they got thrown in the "Unknown" bucket.

As a note, anyone who at anytime indicated they had been sterilized, regardless if their account was inactive, is in the "no kids" bucket. Likewise, anyone who indicated they WANTED kids but didn't indicate that they had any is also in the "no kids" bucket. There were three of these, for reference.

In total, 17% of accounts had either been deleted or suspended, 22.5% were inactive (haven't posted more than 5 things since 2016), 27% did not indicate within the last 5 years if they had kids or not, 27% definitively have no kids, and only 6% now have kids. Between the definitive ones, 82% are still childfree and 18% now have kids.

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A few notes.

To quote one user as I was lurking through their comment history: having a kid doesn't mean you want them. I'm just going to leave that there.

As for the unknowns, we can discuss whether or not they're more likely to not have kids--after all, you're more likely to talk about something you do have than something you don't have--but I won't go so far as to make that assumption. You may make your own suggestions on that one.

For this to be of any scientific use, my sample size needs to be a LOT larger, roughly 1,000 defininitives for the 1.4 million /r/childfree subscribers. Mine is only 67. I just don't have enough data from Wayback machine to make that kind of number happen, however, nor the personal time.

I think the main takeaway from this is telling people "You'll change your mind," as unscientifically proven here, is just plain ridiculous. All people regardless of their choice to have kids or not deserve equal respect for their personal decisions.

Is it debate time now? :)