Childfree People Act Annoying When You Demand an Explanation
If people won't accept "I don't like kids" they get much more annoying answers.
When I first embarked on the whole “infertility journey” thing, I read a lot of voluntarily childfree content to prepare myself for what my life might look like if our infertility treatments didn’t work. I wanted to know there were benefits to a childfree life that I could look forward to, given that having children was always my life’s dream (and remains the thing of which I’m proudest, even after achieving plenty of other, less common accomplishments like forcing GQ to publish me under the name “Cartoons Hate Her.”)
During my “research,” I noticed that almost every childfree person had stories about people pestering them about why they didn’t have kids or telling them (unprompted) that they would regret not having kids. At first, I chalked this up to Main Character Syndrome, partially because r/childfree is full of some of the most obnoxious people on the face of the Earth (people, for example, who don’t think anyone should be allowed to do IVF because “that money should go toward helping the environment.”)
It wasn’t until I got into pronatalist/trad spaces on Twitter that I started to believe them, even if they were unthinkably annoying. Arguably, I have much more in common with pronatalists than with the Reddit childfree community, but after witnessing the antics of the judgy pronatalists, I immediately understood how childfree people can begin to feel aggrieved. I noticed that whenever a video was posted on Twitter from a childfree person talking about the benefits of childfree life—not taking digs at parents, or saying they hate children, or saying anything remotely antinatalist, just stuff like “Since we don’t have kids, my husband and I can spontaneously go on road trips!”—some parents got extremely mad. I’ll admit I’ve been bothered by rabidly antinatalist content about why nobody should have kids because “the world is tumbling toward extinction” or something like that (when I announced my pregnancy on my CHH Facebook page, I was attacked by a bunch of childfree people for “not just adopting teenagers from foster care”) but a video of a happy couple going on vacations that they couldn’t have afforded if they had kids? People who admittedly wouldn’t enjoy being parents…not becoming parents? Why would anyone give a shit?
But repeatedly, people do give a shit. People respond with things like, “Sorry you’ll never know the joy of your child saying ‘I love you!’” or “It’s SAD what people care about these days—what LOSERS” or “What a pathetic, immature degenerate you are, putting VACATIONS in front of your CHILD” as if these people have children who they’ve chosen to keep in cosmic suspended animation instead of bringing into the world. It’s giving, “not actually happy being a parent.” Surely, if someone who wouldn’t make a good parent—who you just admitted is too “selfish” to have kids—chooses not to be a parent, that’s a good thing, right?
Lately, the most recent person to come under fire for this decision is actress/writer Jameela Jamil, who, to her credit, is one of the only celebrities who actually writes on Substack on a semi-regular basis, and who I believe is definitely writing her articles herself. She’s also a decent writer, but reliably gets crap every time she posts here because she embodies a certain late-2010s voice that doesn’t resonate on Substack the way it might resonate on, say, Threads or Bluesky. Almost everything she says and writes would be a slam-dunk universally loved hot take in 2015. Just as an example, she responded to a recent critic on Substack by accusing her of being “embarrassingly white,” which would have killed on Tumblr ten years ago.
Either way, her recent article covered all the reasons she didn’t have kids—the kind of article that would have been a runaway viral success in a different era—and the backlash took an interesting turn. But ultimately, the most annoying parts of her article only had to be written because people refuse to accept “I don’t want children” as an explanation.
