4 Comments
User's avatar
Tatu Ahponen's avatar

r/childfree must be one of the highest-frequency "misogynists who claim to be feminists" places on the whole Web.

A part of the screen hate - from the crunchy trad brigade, at least - is just a variation of "if it makes the parents' life easy it must be bad for the kid", though.

Expand full comment
Brandon Ross's avatar

I just wanna say I hope I get nursing home robots taking care of me because then if I get neglected or harmed I’ll at least know there was no actual malice behind it.

Expand full comment
Robert G.'s avatar

If you're interested in looking at what childfree people are interested in, you could look here:

https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/childfree

It doesn't look like many of the more popular ones are screen-related, but there's some patterns.

Expand full comment
CJ's avatar

I have a lot of sympathy for families with difficult children as I am pretty much solely responsible for greying the hairs of my parents. I was removed from restaraunts, church, putt putt, and many other public places more times than I can count. And I'm sure for many of those, if I just had a screen, I probably wouldn't have raised a fuss. But I'm not sure if I could have socially adjusted as well without there being an actual downside to the tantrums, or the delayed reward (be good for now, go home and play video games later)

I think you're right about the visibility of it all making phones/ipads and children a hot button topic. From afar, a kid throwing a tantrum and the parent removingtl them or putting it down quickly causes most people to shrug and move on. But if the kid is given a phone, the little judgment bells in our head go off and our instinct to be revolted by parents "not trying hard enough" to raise their kids goes off. Things like this wonder how much private judgement/public shaming is baked into our genetic code.

Expand full comment