Is It Ok To Dislike Children?

While the internet fights about child-free bars, it's the people who claim to love children the most who are actually harming them.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

If you are, like me, terminally online, you may have seen that the social media Discourse of the past 48 hours has been “is it ok to dislike children?” As far as I can tell, this stems from a tweet wherein a man posted his approval of a pub sign reading “Dog friendly / child free” and everyone lost their collective minds. Child-free pubs were characterized as examples of colonization and social decay, were accused of banning parents and women in particular, and were said to be discriminating against the most vulnerable class of humans. Many, many people were clear that, unlike the colonizing yuppies, they prefer children to dogs. And many other people were clear that they had no problem with children, but they definitely had a problem with entitled parents (many others did, in fact, just have a problem with children).

And then: A whole second day of Discourse when someone else tweeted that “it’s fine and normal to dislike children.” Many, many people tweeted in response that it is neither fine nor normal to dislike children, especially given that children are the world’s most vulnerable group (that argument was repeated many, many times).

I personally like children quite a bit, even if I have spent most of my adult life actively trying not to have them. I do not always love parental decision making, such as playing any child’s device out loud in public, and I can very much understand why someone would not want to have children or even spend time around them. Kids: I think they are great, but they not for everybody! But I also think it’s generally unhelpful and petulant to complain about the simple presence of children either in public spaces or in places like airplanes where there’s really not a better option when you have to get from A to B. As for kids in bars, I will be honest, I think it depends on the bar and the kid. I generally don’t really care as long as I don’t have to listen to Miss Rachel out loud on the tablet, but I also don’t think it’s so entirely unreasonable for adults to desire some adults-only spaces. If your bar is child-free, that is fine, many people will enjoy that and others will decide it’s not for them. And if other adults are annoyed at children or go out of their way to avoid them, well, that’s ok too as long as they aren’t jerks about it.

But as we go in for the one-thousandth round of “is it ok to dislike kids” or “should kids be in public spaces,” it seems worth pointing out that the surface discourse on loving or hating children actually has very little to do with the very real vulnerability children experience in the world — vulnerability that is innate, being that children are small humans who generally cannot fend for themselves, but also exaggerated by laws, customs, cultures, and acts of individual and social neglect that leave children far worse off than they should be.

In the US, it’s overwhelmingly the same people who style themselves as pro-child and pro-family who are the most politically hostile to the actual well-being of children. Conservatives have for decades emphasized their love of children and babies, while cutting funding for public education and children’s healthcare, doing nothing to stop the gun murders of children in schools, opposing paid leave for the people who birth and raise those children, stripping school lunches of any nutritional value, and sometimes putting deadly weapons in their own children’s hands and then taking family Christmas photos. These are not generally people who identify as “child-free.” They are overwhelmingly people who say they love kids. But they are people who are really, really bad for children.

On an individual level, it’s also generally not the “I don’t like to be around kids” people who are neglecting and abusing children — they’re just ignoring them, or perhaps complaining about them on the internet. Child abuse and neglect are nonpartisan behaviors, but it is notable that many conservative, religious parenting philosophies overtly promote and condone child abuse, including hitting your children to get them to submit. They often encourage and romanticize large families, pushing parents to have more children than they can actually care for financially and emotionally — a recipe for neglect. And many abusive parents have managed to cover up their crimes by pulling their children out of public school, a tactic the Republican Party has enabled by encouraging and then overwhelmingly refusing to regulate homeschooling (conservative states are also those where you generally still find corporal punishment in schools).

We also know that child abuse and neglect are tied to poverty and other stressors that American conservatives do very little to eliminate, and much to exacerbate.

Most child-free people, as far as I can tell, do not hate children. Many adore children, they just don’t want to raise them; others don’t adore children and generally avoid them but don’t hate them either. And no doubt many people who really dislike children or are hostile to children in public spaces are also parents. But regardless of the reality, the childfree are generally the ones presumed to be hostile to children. So it’s interesting to look at the demographics of the child-free in America, where not having children is disproportionately common among highly-educated city-dwelling liberal women and gay men, and realize that the same people being tarred as child-haters are also the ones overwhelmingly voting and advocating for the policies which most benefit children and mothers. If that goes along with preferring a dog-friendly child-free local pub and allowing a look of annoyance to cross one’s face when one hears a screaming baby in a fancy restaurant, honestly, I’ll take it.

None of this is to say that “I dislike children” is a good way to move through the world. It can be incredibly socially septic for parents and mothers especially to feel as though their public presence with children is consistently met with hostility or resentment. And I do think this hits mothers harder than fathers, given all of the messages women get about being quiet and not inconveniencing other people, not to mention all of the messages about how insufferable and uncool mothers are. I have personally seen so many mothers I know twist themselves into pretzels to keep themselves in the world and socialize their children, but try to do it in some perfect and impossible way that annoys no one. Children are people in the world, and they are sometimes going to act like children, and that is not a parental failure. We’d all be a lot better off if we generally met each other with more grace and patience, and if we realized that living in a society alongside other people means living alongside other people’s foibles and annoying behaviors and inadequacies and developmental differences.

But let’s also maintain a sense of proportion, and an understanding that what one says about children does not necessarily correlate with how one actually treats children — especially children as a group, not just your own personal adorable child. In fact, political and social identities premised on loving children have often been used to push incredibly damaging anti-child laws, policies, and norms. Insisting that childbearing is (or should be) a choice, and that people (women especially) are valuable for our humanity and not our reproductive capacity have been great victories for women and society, but also for children, who are today better treated, supported, and esteemed than at just about any other point in human history. It turns out that when having children is not required to be considered an adult of decent character and social standing, and when the social consensus moves toward an ideal of children being wanted rather than religiously, socially, or legally mandated, children wind up much better off. A whole society that hates kids is obviously not going to be a very good one. But some members of a diverse and free society concluding that they don’t want to have children, some because they legitimately do not like being around them? It turns out that by making parenthood less socially compulsory, those ostensible child-haters also made parenthood, and by extension childhood, better.

So be mad on the internet, it’s very satisfying. But reserve some of your ire for the people who are actually making children’s lives worse — and that’s overwhelmingly not the child-free, but the very vocally “pro-family.”

xx Jill