Why I used to “hate” kids.

And what those feelings actually meant.

Image by Bart Kerswell courtesy of Unsplash.

It is child liberation month here on my blog, where we’ve been talking a lot about abolishing the family as a system that owns children, abolishing age as a determinant of who gets to have rights, and the need for us all to take on the collective responsibility of looking after children. We’ve also been exploring some of the common barriers that keep people from taking child liberation seriously.

I wanted to talk a little bit about one factor that kept me from exploring child liberation for many years:

I used to hate kids. A lot.

Of course, I didn’t really hate children. How could I? I hadn’t met the majority of them. Hating an entire demographic of human beings is either a projection of your actual feelings about something else, or it’s overt bigotry that’s indistinguishable from eugenics.

A person cannot really hate all old people, for instance — but they can be bitter about the fact that a small subset of predominately white, middle-class Boomers from the imperial core reaped the benefits of capitalism and lived comfortably without much effort while they personally did not, and have that bitterness warped into a misguided belief that the only act of justice needed is for all of the Boomers to die.

It’s not a humane or even remotely realistic view on politics to generalize a whole age group in this way, but it does make just enough emotional sense that it can take deep roots within a person’s psyche and, if left unquestioned, keep them from connecting with the millions of poor, struggling, and minoritized elders who are very much like themselves.

When I was a younger man, I hated both older people and children for a lot of the same reasons. I believed that human progress moved in a simple line, forever upward, and that technology and education only ever advanced. How convenient it was that I was living in the most socially progressive and informed era yet in history, which had uniquely equipped me, specifically, to know better than anybody who had come before, and to have so much freedom!

My elders were obsolete troglodytes preventing the new world from being born, I thought, and any children that I could have would be nothing but dead weight that prevented me from thinking all the big important thoughts that I needed to think so that I could carry progress forward and make the world an even better place. The only solution was to live as an island, caring for no one who had insulted my productive, hungry youth by being physically weak or having caretaking needs.

It was an incredibly individualistic, selfish understanding of the world. What can I say, I was a libertarian. It took receiving the care of a lot of other people, often care that I actively resisted, for me to realize that I was not fully independent, nor was anybody else.

I hated children with a fervor because of what the cultural symbol of the child meant to me. Not because of anything that any actual children had done. Because children are used as a tool for reproducing society, anything to do with children is handled in an especially conservative and traditionalist way. No matter how much freedom an adult might otherwise have to live and be as they like, their options are far more restricted once they are near children: they’re not permitted to wear certain clothing that’s seen as too sexual, to love multiple committed partners, to use illicit substances, to stop working, or to challenge too many norms, if they wish to be trusted around kids.

In this way, the symbol of the child is used to control people, particularly women, and to reign whatever freedom in society they have managed to find. That was what I hated, when I was a young childfree person who insisted I hated kids. Kids came with the obligation to keep my life tidy, contained, and respectable. Being near them meant enduring constant corrections for my own deviance, and being steadily coerced into a life that hurt me.

Over time, I came to loathe being around any children because this is what they represented to me:

Compulsory caregiving. When I was a child, people thought I was a girl, and so they thought I should be naturally talented at looking after kids. Neighbors volunteered me for babysitting jobs, then found it confusing when I was ungrateful for the work and performed it poorly. I was shunted into unpaid childcare work at my church, rather than getting to choose to focus on Bible studies or performing in church plays, which I would have preferred.

Throughout my youth, adults spoke to me about all the children that I would have and how I would raise them; when I said that I wasn’t sure I even wanted children, it didn’t compute, and they completely ignored me. Everything that I was taught about sex and the functioning of my own body was centered around the obligation to have kids.

This continued on into my early adult life as a straight woman; every boyfriend and his parents would coo at me about what a wonderful mom I would make one day. Whenever I did say I didn’t want to become a mother, people would become angry with me, and to demand to know how I thought society was supposed to continue, if nobody had children. But I hadn’t said that nobody should have children. I just didn’t want to do it. Unfortunately, the role of woman as caregiver was so deeply ingrained in people’s minds that they couldn’t handle hearing a woman question it, or even look at it as a choice.

With time, I came to strongly resent kids, because they symbolized to me the expectation that I take on a parenting role and devote my life to someone else’s desires rather than my own. I believed that if I projected an irate attitude toward children, nobody would tell me that I’d make a great mom, and I could be free to be whatever I wanted.

Dysphoric child-birthing expectations. Part of my distaste toward children came from a visceral disgust with pregnancy. I had always found my body’s reproductive capacity frightening: I hated all the talk of ovulation and periods and how hormones supposedly made a person like me irrational. I hated the weight of my breasts, and the prominence of them, and the creepy messages I received that this part of my anatomy did not really belong to me, it was only there “for” feeding kids.

It seemed outrageous to me that so many people would willingly take on the pain of childbirth, and all the potential for bodily damage that came with it — even worse, it alarmed me just how many women went into pregnancy having never been informed about what the experience would truly be like.

When I asked questions about the husband stitch, or the massive amounts of bleeding that happen after delivery, or the potential loss of pelvic floor control, the women in my life dismissed me angrily, because I seemed to be challenging the decisions they’d made for their lives. They would swear up and down that having children was worth it, and so I shouldn’t question (or even openly discuss) what was required to bring them into the world. A child’s life was so important to others that my body autonomy and informed consent did not matter. And I hated kids for it.

Conservatism in child-rearing. Whenever I did try to interact with children, everyone around me claimed I was doing it wrong. Usually, my big mistake was being too honest with children about the ways of the world, or failing to filter the details of my own life to make it traditionally family-friendly. From this, I received the message that I was not an appropriate person for children to be near, and that a life around children would require fundamentally changing who I was.

I remember that during a Christmas party when I was about twenty, my ten- and eight-year-old cousins were excitedly bouncing around me, lobbing questions about all the ways in which people might die: what would happen to someone’s body if they were thrown into a volcano? What happened to a person if they took too many drugs? I loved their curiosity and tried to give them my best answers, which made my cousins scream with scandalized delight.

Then an adult relative pulled me away and said I couldn’t say such things to little kids. I had no idea how else to interact with them, and all they wanted was for me to keep giving them the candor they had found so refreshing. And so I sat down on the couch, my lips zipped, and my young cousins slunk boredly away back to their rooms.

At any family gatherings that included children, I had to be coy about my life: if a younger relative asked whether I had a boyfriend, I could not tell the truth and list multiple partners. I couldn’t say I was unmarried and lived with a partner. I couldn’t say anything cynical about the government, or my job. Interacting ‘appropriately’ with children meant reigning in every remotely controversial detail about my life and not ever being emotionally honest.

Rather than hating the adults around me for their judgement and their refusal to be candid with kids, I came to hate the repressed, judged feeling that I got when I was around kids.

Ableism & neuro-normativity in childrearing. Other adults never liked the way that I spoke to children. I spoke to kids like fellow human beings, with exact same tone of voice that I used for anybody else, and I wouldn’t shy away from using large words. But whenever I did any of these things, some other adult would interrupt me to say that was not the way to speak to a child, then address the kid in a lilting baby voice with overly simplified language.

If I tried talking to a child in depth about their interests, or share in an observation about something that was happening in the world around us, an adult would interrupt me to say that their kid didn’t care about things like that — I was making the conversation too serious and complex. Conversations with children were supposed to be limited to brief comments about their appearance, evaluations of their behavior, instructions, and occasionally, superficial remarks about the child’s interests that didn’t last longer than a minute or two. Anything beyond that was strange, too much for a child too process, and far more respect than they were owed. I think many adults genuinely found it dangerous that I would speak with a child as if they were a whole person.

A lifetime of such corrections left me believing that I was incompetent at interacting with children, when really I had just committed the sin of being a weird Autistic person who respected kids. I stopped trusting myself to know how to interact, and started fearing that I was creepy and inept. And so I came to hate any moment that I was put in the same room as a child, because it was a social test I knew I wasn’t able to pass, and would only be punished for attempting.

Two adults and a child sitting on a picnic blanket. Image by john amachaab on Unsplash.

Lack of freedom. Like so many neurodivergent and queer people, I was punished for being too ‘weird’ and ‘difficult’ when I was a child. But as an adult I finally had the freedom to live as I liked, covering my body in piercings and tattoos, trying whatever drugs that I wanted, eating how I wanted and on my own schedule, sleeping chaotically, partying, having sex, quitting jobs, and traveling at my own whims. I could even be rude if I thought the situation deserved it, or break laws with which I disagreed. I had freedoms that no children do, to decide what I believed in, what mattered to me, and whether I would live differently from what I’d been taught was “right.”

None of this would have been permitted if I was responsible for children, though. Being an openly sexual, unpredictable, unruly, drug-using parent was the kind of thing that got someone socially ostracized or even locked up. I never wanted to lose the freedom to be myself again — the freedom that all children unfortunately lack. And so, it seemed, I’d have to live as far away as possible from kids.

Rather than recognizing children as prisoners, I viewed them as the shackle that would keep me tied to a home, a job, and a conformist life that would only destroy who I really was.

I want to play guitar all day / eat all my meals from microwaves / only dress up if I get paid /
How can it be wrong, wrong?

Financial & logistical burden. The society that I live in provides very few resources to people who raise kids. For the most part, children live in isolated nuclear families where only one or two caregivers have to handle generating an income, completing chores, providing food and shelter, and performing all childcare completely by themselves. For the average American family, the burden of all this is already staggering, but if any of their children are disabled it becomes insurmountable: there is never enough time or money, never enough hands on deck.

I knew that I didn’t have what it would take to raise a child adequately on my own, and that I would be angry when things started to break down. Though I had enjoyed interacting with children once upon a time, I’d never had the energy required to work a full-time job, commute, and look after myself, let alone to keep young people bathed, fed, and educated. I needed lots of time in the dark and quiet to recover my energy or else I would completely shut down. I could not be trusted to complete mountains of paperwork. How could I ever take on the needs of a child?

In this world, with its socially constructed family and its lack of external supports, playing a role in a child’s life is an all-or-nothing deal: either you contribute everything that you’ve got to a kid that is yours, or you can’t play much of a role in kids’ lives at all. I could have made an excellent part-time babysitter. But instead of viewing children as friends and neighbors whom I could show up for graciously whenever I was able, I came to see them as a heavy obligation I could never stand.

Coercive gendering. When there are children in your life, you can’t escape society’s unrelenting and coercive gendering of everything. The doctors assign your kid a sex whether you’d like them to or not, and it comes with all kinds of assumptions and pastel-colored gifts that signal the type of person everyone thinks your kid should become. The clubs and activities are gendered, the toys are gendered, the parenting roles are gendered, the way people speak to your child are gendered, the entire world is absolutely fixated on whether the child is a girl or a boy, and if you do anything to resist this, you’re viewed as an annoying activist pushing their beliefs onto kids, or a perverted abuser.

As a transgender person, I was very negatively affected by all the ways that gender was pushed on the younger me. I have an instinctive revulsion toward mainstream parenting & childcare spaces because of this — it’s all awash in the pastel blues and pinks of a reactionary, binary gender ideology that finds my existence threatening. As gender-variant people like me have become more visible, parenting norms have in turn become more gender essentialist. Gender reveal parties weren’t a big thing until after the transgender tipping point happened. The way that people insistently gender their infants & kids reflects a hatred of people like me.

I have had to work hard to build a life for myself that is removed from all this compulsive gendering — I live in a small pocket of queer and trans people who accept me for who I am and question most of the boxes society puts people in. But if I were to ever have a child, or bring children more closely into my life, I would be surrounded by people who equate a kid’s body with their identity all over again.

Institutional control. When you have children, you are required to interact with a great number of bureaucratic systems, and your life is more closely regulated by the law. From the moment a child is born, you must log their existence with the state, and declare who you are to them, and who their other parent is. This ties you to a co-parent for the next eighteen years of the kid’s life, no matter how dysfunctional or abusive the relationship becomes. In a messy custody battle, you may even lose control of where you’re allowed to live.

As a parent, you must enroll your child in school, where both you and the child will be closely monitored, and if anything seems unusual about how either of you look and behave, you might be thrown in prison, or lose access to your kid. Anything from affirming your trans kid’s gender, to raising them vegan, to giving them an unusual name can cause your child to be taken away. If you are polyamorous, queer, or kinky, your neighbors might report you for child abuse, and you might lose custody.

As a person who has always feared institutional control, I have never wanted to subject myself to the degree of scrutiny that parenthood requires — and I’ve sometimes mistakenly thought that I hated kids for threatening to restrict my own freedoms.

Abuse and neglect. Sometimes, we come to “hate” children because they remind us of the horrific experiences we endured at their age. Seeing how vulnerable and fragile a young child really is can make some people with abuse histories emotionally regress, or it can make them confront just how moldable their young minds were when the abuse was happening.

When I think back on my abuse history in abstract terms, the person that I see is me, as I am today, but when I look at an actual five-year-old and really confront what it would be like for them to be inappropriately touched or screamed at, the reality is far more terrifying. Trauma can make even being around children triggering, and for me, I sometimes mistook this reaction for a hatred toward kids.

Early childhood trauma can morph into quite unsettling shapes inside of us. It’s not uncommon for survivors to feel resentment when they see young children receiving the care that they never got. Some survivors feel that they can never become parents because they don’t know what a healthy relationship between an adult and a child looks like, and they fear that their histories have tainted them and made them an abuser.

I’ve had a lot of these feelings swirling around in me over the years. I felt so certain that if a child ever relied upon me, I would be short-tempered and emotionally absent. I wouldn’t have enough to give and would hate them for demanding so much. I was sure that my father’s words would come tumbling out of me when I was around them, making inappropriate comments that would scar the child for life as I had been scarred.

It didn’t help that all my life people had told me I did not know how to properly interact with children, that I lacked the nurturing instinct that I was supposed to have, that I didn’t want what I had been expected to want without question, that I didn’t have what it took to keep a kid healthy, that there were fundamental things about me that were unsettling and dangerous for a child to ever see.

I hated children for all of the reasons that society had made me hate myself. Everything about me that was weak, unreliable, strange, loud, incapable of reading the room, disagreeable, ugly, messy, impulsive, and inconsiderate was childish — and I wanted to cut myself off from anything that made me feel those ways. But the more that I denied those aspects of myself, the larger the fear of them loomed. My weakness and need kept leaking out, and I never stopped feeling like a child in society’s eyes — not so much a person as a burdensome problem to be contained and managed.

The only way to move past it, and to stop hating myself, was to stop hating the figure of the child.