Hating children is in itself grotesque (because it is bigotry).. it is also invariably a thinly veiled hatred of their mothers. Don’t believe me? Time how long it takes the next conversation you overhear about “children behaving badly”, “over-population”, “social welfare” or “the cost of raising children” to turn its nasty little mouth to mother blaming. Hating mothers is of course really just about hating women, particularly poor women.
Feminists should know better than to buy into this crap, but misogyny is a very powerful thing with seductive packaging.
I presume these feminists don’t really hate women or children; that saying you hate children is really about trying to say you hate the assumption that you are the sum of your reproductive capacities. But these feminists ought to be careful about laying down with a dog of a concept like “hating children”, they’ll most certainly wake up with fleas.. of the oppressive kind. Not only does hating children make life very hard for their mothers, more so than for their fathers ..and you know, when something impacts much more negatively on women than men that should be a clue to a feminist.. but it also involves hating a group of pretty powerless people -children.
Reading “child hating” on a beloved feminist blog was disheartening. Fortunately feminism has your answer to everything, and on another favourite feminist blog this perfect rebuttal appeared in the same week. Bitch PhD gives some poised bitching and I actually first came to love Bitch for her earlier posts on this topic. Here is Bitch with her latest.
And it’s not funny, feminist, “reasonable,” or acceptable to talk about children as things, or to imply that people who “choose” to have kids are crazy or stupid. When you do those things, you implicitly support the idea that women’s reproductive systems are abnormal, that women with kids are fools, and that children and reproducing women are not part of human society.
I get that a lot of women without kids feel beseiged by sexist bullshit about how unfeminine and selfish they are. Y’all 100% deserve not to hear that crap, and y’all 100% deserve for those of us with kids to have your backs on the right not to.
By the same token, women with kids deserve better than to have childless women support sexism by thinking that if they drink the smug libertarian kool-aid, they’ll somehow get treated as honorary men. I expect feminists like Ann and Amanda to be able to see through the game where we’re asked to turn on each other in order to take the pressure off the folks with the real power–in this case, the power to “choose” whether or not to acknowledge that children are people, too.
Thanks to Hoyden About Town for leading me to this particular post at Bitch PhD.
blue milk 
This is a really interesting topic. I’ve often wondered how people, let alone women, can feel comfortable in being so vocally against children (edit: the people, not the experience of raising them). In many countries and situations we are not forced to reproduce. And while having more options would certainly give us more freedom over our bodies our choices, that freedom shouldn’t equate to hating anyone.
I have to admit, while I’ve never ‘hated children’ or said anything to the effect, I’ve spent most of my life feeling uncomfortable around them and frustrated by them. There weren’t any children around when I grew up, largely amongst adults. I’d also managed to make it through my teenage years working around books and libraries rather than babysitting. Although I felt comfortable around my peers, it wasn’t until I had my own child that I started to really open up to them and appreciate how awesome kids are. How very smart and interesting, creative and compassionate. I don’t perceive my experience to be the norm, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty out who had a similar outlook for a time.
Thank you for this post. I was just in a discussion over at Mom Voyage about rules banning children from certain places, which I liken to putting up a “no senior citizens” or “whites only” sign in a restaurant, and I do NOT think that is an inappropriate analogy. It’s ageism on the other end of the scale. Children are horribly disempowered and vulnerable, and our children are lucky to have to parents who try to empower them in safe ways and don’t take advantage of their helplessness. I totally respect the decision to remain childless and I can completely understand the many reasons why a woman or man might not want children of their own. But I expect the same respect in return.
I have been on just about every side of this discussion at one time or another. Until I was 26 I didn’t want kids, and believed I never would. I had held that opinion since childhood. I spent years being told I would change my mind, and it irritated me immensely. They were right, I did, triggered by my father’s death – make of that what you will. Since then I have had 3 kids, and have had a few remarks about having more than my quota. I also know a few people who didn’t have children and deeply regret it. And I know a few who didn’t have them and don’t regret it. I have been known to encourage people to really examine their feelings, because I know it is a regret you don’t want. I try to make it clear that I don’t know whether any one person will regret it, but I have probably made some people feel bullied.
Strange how those that don’t want kids don’t just nonchalantly allocate their “quota” of kids to those who want lots of babies and vice versa. We all seem to want everyone else to be in the same boat as us. Maybe it’s just that whichever call we make, there will be times when we have genuine doubts about whether we made the right one.
I know childless couples who “hate” kids and make disparaging remarks about lax parents all the time, and I’m convinced they’re actually in denial of their own regrets about not having kids. It’s fine to not want kids, but why ‘dis everyone who has them? The ideal behavior would be to derive pleasure from other people’s kids, and without the responsibility. Hah! That’ll be the day.
Yes, yes and yes. I suspect this comment with be longer than the initial post but anyways …
When we were standing in line to board a plane with our two girls the man behind me actually said to me and Lucy, “God, I hope I don’t have to sit next to you!” As if he’d say that to someone who was Aboriginal, for example, or old. Some kids are hard to sit next to on a plane, but so are some business men with territorial aspirations over a fraction of my seat; ‘m pretty sure the Australian cricket team has on occasion been hellish to have on board…
Al said the guy was probably only joking but I know those kind of jokes – it’s meanness poorly disguised as funny. Being openly discriminatory against kids is one of the last acceptable forms of rudeness and unkindness and the perpetration of disadvantage. There are some pretty horrible kids but there are some pretty nice ones as well – same as any other group. And for every judgement against the childless woman is one against the woman with children.
I don’t care if people do or don’t h ave kids; I don’t care how many they have. But the thing about not wanting kids in your social or physical space because you ‘don’t like them’/ they are loud/ annoying/ rude/ messy/ boring is that it denies the validity of difference in our society and it denies the importance of tolerance (maybe acceptance is too much to ask) and civility towards those who don’t fit your personal vision of how the world should be. Also, to reiterate my earlier point, kids are no more loud or annoying as a group than most others in society (I think here of being woken one night by some childless 20-something screeching home after too many cocktails at some chi-chi bar and breaking her ankle because her heels were stupidly high.)
I obviously take this personally, partly because I’m a mother and mostly because I’m a feminist who has always been careful to advocate for women’s freedoms and rights even when those freedoms and rights are not things I’m personally comfortable with. I do this because I recognise that other women’s choices and needs do not match mine – and sometimes encroach upon mine – but as women we should be sticking together because in the end, our gender does shape our lives in often very negative ways, and irrespective of how we live out our ideas of what it means to be a woman. If I do that for you, you should extend me the same courtesy.
Also, my kids will be paying these people’s pensions. Indeed, I’m thinking of doing up some T-shirts: Be nice – you’ll need me in thirty years time.
Here endeth the lesson.
This reminds me of the “parent-blamers” — those who insist that parents are 100 percent repsonsible for how kids turn out; yet they ridicule “over-protective” parents. I feel a post coming on ….
[…] haven’t lived until your parenting has been judged in a supermarket Just two posts ago I was talking about when feminists, women you take to be your allies, go proudly proclaiming their …. Yeah, you don’t want children, right behind you, ok you don’t want to hang with […]
what irks me is the assumption that childhood is static – that our children are like pets and will be dependents forever. There is a curious blindness to the generational transition of child to adult, child to adult. To listen to these people talk anyone would think they hatched out of eggs.
every time I hear the term ‘crotchfruit’.. and the sneers about what ‘we taxpayers'( because parents don’t pay tax?) expect for their money, I feel like weighing in about what my parents had to stump up for their child endowment, their public school education, their medical bills, the roads their parents drove them around on. Perhaps they should realise they they are currently paying back what they have all ready had – the care and support of their communities when they were small and vulnerable. And that should include paying back the tolerance of their community for their tantrums, their antisociaa hiccups, their learning curves – and their mistakes.
It’s an electronic age. Many of these comments will stay on the record for a long time, discussed, rehashed and reconsidered. Helen Razer will one day be an old woman. Perhaps todays children may well resent those who wwere so savage in their criticisms( I still remember school teachers who I would cheerfully – and silently – watch a bus reverse over.) And being old is once again being vulnerable.
Despite being childfree, I’d never say I ‘hate’ kids because I don’t. IMO many people say stuff like that as part of a pose in response to the pressure to parent and don’t really think it through. Nevertheless, the ‘hate kids’ line is tossed out way too casually. Posts like these are a great wakeup call.
I’m also not keen on parent-blaming because a) what would I know and b) parent blaming often falls disproportionately on mums. As a feminist I’m not interested in buying into the kinds of behaviors that have potential to hurt other women.
“I have been known to encourage people to really examine their feelings, because I know it is a regret you don’t want. I try to make it clear that I don’t know whether any one person will regret it, but I have probably made some people feel bullied.”
I don’t have kids and have had quite a few people press me about possible future ‘regrets’. However well-intentioned they are, I always feel bullied.
Thing is, my partner and I have never been able to conceive. While this isn’t a heartbreak for me, being deeply ambivalent about parenthood, I don’t particularly feel like explaining it to one and all.
Those who do know about our situation and persist in pressing me (it’s always me, not my partner) to get with the IVF in case I MIGHT feel some regret later are doing more than bullying me, they’re oppressing me with the insistence that the only option for each and every female is motherhood. I also feel resentful that they seem to want to fill me with fears about the future and the life we’ve built.
Tee, I take your point, and I try to be careful who I talk to in this way, and every comment like yours reminds me to do so even more. I would *never* push IVF, that is so far out of my business, even for people who are close friends.
[…] When feminists catch fleas "Hating children is in itself grotesque (because it is bigotry).. it is also invariably a thinly veiled hatred of their mothers. Don’t believe me? Time how long it takes the next conversation you overhear about ”children behaving badly”, ”over-population”, “social welfare” or “the cost of raising children” to turn its nasty little mouth to mother blaming. Hating mothers is of course really just about hating women, particularly poor women. […]
Awesome article! This also relates to some people calling people (specifically women) who have children “breeders.” It is an excessively classist, sexist, and racist term that needs to be rid of. It is no wonder, too, that a hatred of children, and by extension, mothers, as well as a contempt for those with big families typically comes from those of a middle-upper class background. Only recently has the mainstream feminist movement even paid good attention to, and spoke out on, the sterilization of women of color here in the United States. This is partially because of this attitude that not only do mostly poor and “ignorant” people have children, but also that those women having children are “overpopulating” the world.
I also used to work with children at an after-school program for almost three years, and I will attest to the ways that children are oppressed and dehumanized, as well as their mothers. And this is coming from a woman who has to deal with her mother pressuring her to have children… 😛
Anyway, if that was rambling, my apologies. But the article just really spoke to me and proved a good point.
Sorry for the serial posting, but I just wanted to point out too, how conservatives in America will on one hand say that couples should marry to procreate, that women’s duty is to have babies, and yet on the other hand they oppose funding or support for medicaid and money aid to poorer families (women and children). Libertariansim at it’s best
And it’s seeping into the feminist community, sadly.
[…] When feminists catch fleas – “Hating children is in itself grotesque (because it is bigotry).. it is also invariably a thinly veiled hatred of their mothers. Don’t believe me? Time how long it takes the next conversation you overhear about ”children behaving badly”, ”over-population”, “social welfare” or “the cost of raising children” to turn its nasty little mouth to mother blaming. Hating mothers is of course really just about hating women, particularly poor women. […]
[…] mommy by Lynn Harris is essential reading as it says pretty much everything there is to say about the animosity running hot right now towards mothers, well the middle-class ones anyway*. They’re […]
[…] When Feminists Catch Fleas […]
[…] Just, maybe, something similar happens with babies and little kids in public space. I say this because whenever the topic of babies in public space comes up you see a lot of very angry personal stories from people about how terribly disruptive little ones are in public and how completely rude and indifferent to this disruption their mothers are. This surprises me because I hang out quite a bit with mothers and babies and I don’t see a whole lot of this stuff happening. You would think I would be seeing some of this epidemic of bad behaviour. But what I see is the occasional rude parent just as I see the occasional rude elderly person, or the occasional rude teenager, or the occasional rude twenty-something person. I don’t see an over-representation of mothers with babies and small children in my experiences of rudeness in public. Maybe there’s a bit of confirmation bias going on, just maybe. And maybe that bias has its roots in misogyny.. […]