You Don't Hate Kids, You Hate Moms

When "no kids allowed" conveniently bans moms

I wasn’t even planning on writing anything today, but then this happened:

I actually don’t feel animosity toward this guy. It’s totally fine to not want to be around kids, and it’s fine to prefer dogs. I can’t relate, but I can understand, if that makes sense. Personally, I think dogs are significantly more disruptive than children (I’ve never heard of anyone who wasn’t a Cheerio get fatally mauled by a three-year-old), and I can’t think of any location where a dog wouldn’t be more annoying than a child, but I acknowledge I’m not much of a dog person, and it’s OK for dog people to have places dedicated to them.

However, the tweet made me think about the never-ending discourse about kids in public spaces. I have a conflicted POV on this, because as a mom, I like it when places accommodate children for many reasons: it’s good for kids to experience a world beyond home, preschool and grimy McDonald’s playplaces, plus, it’s easier for parents to do stuff when they can bring kids. I get frustrated when I’m invited to things—including events exclusively for parents, like mixers for my kid’s preschool—that don’t allow kids.

But on the flip side, I had a child-free wedding myself (It didn’t exclude that many people since almost nobody we knew had kids, but if someone couldn’t come for this reason we wouldn’t guilt trip them about it. Also, we still allowed kids who were in the wedding party and teenagers.) I also experienced IVF and infertility, and during that period of time I wanted everything (except my uterus, I suppose) to be child-free because the sights and sounds of young children were anxiety-provoking and depressing. So this discourse always makes me feel weird, because I feel like there are some legitimate reasons not to want every business to be a kid-friendly business.

So, let me make that clear: it’s OK to not like kids. It’s OK to not want to be around them! I have kids and I admit I dread sitting near other people’s kids on planes! Kids can be extremely annoying, especially when you don’t know them or love them.

What does bother me, however, is that the people who feel strongly about not wanting kids to exist in public tend to also have a lot to say about how parents should parent, even inside the home. They are quick to label any kind of childcare outside of mom/dad to be “dangerous.” When a Twitter user posted about using a 24 hour daycare (not using daycare for twenty-four hours straight, but using a daycare that is open for 24h in order to have a two-hour date night) she was blasted by all sorts of people who don’t have kids, who were confident that she was traumatizing her kids and that if she wanted to go out at night she should have thought about that before becoming a mother. Childcare workers who weren’t mothers themselves claimed that parents were “abusing daycares” by…paying for their services, I suppose. On a separate thread, nannies who were not also parents bemoaned working for “cold and detached” parents who didn’t actually love their kids and whose kids clearly had no bond to them.

When I posted that it was neurotic to never allow grandparents or babysitters to watch your child, I was tsk-tsked by people without kids who insisted that this was the right choice because you couldn’t trust anyone other than yourself not to molest your children, and that even your own parents who have never once been abusive toward you or your siblings are likely to suddenly snap and become murderous pedophiles in the presence of your kids.

I don’t know, man, it all feels a bit coordinated.

I’m not saying that there’s a shadowy Childfree Cabal or anything, but there’s an implicit endgame in a lot of these sentiments: moms should not leave the house, or exist in public. I’ve long believed that people who “hate kids” actually hate moms, and this is proven time and time again by the vitriol toward moms on r/childfree, and the fact that whenever any child vs. parent dispute shows up, these people are quick to take the side of the child and insist the parent be jailed, lose custody, or be punished via no-contact, including for things that are simply different parenting choices (so before anyone says it, no, I’m not talking about things like hitting your kids, for which there is no excuse- I’m talking about things like screen time or time-outs.)

Do I know that the guy celebrating a child-free, dog-friendly location is like this? Absolutely not! He could be perfectly lovely. This post isn’t about him, his tweet just reminded me of this dynamic.

Anyway, I don’t know if the hatred of moms is misogyny, but I’m actually hesitant to say it is. At the very least, it’s not straightforward misogyny. A lot of people who share this belief system are women themselves, and while I know it’s possible for women to be misogynistic, I don’t think that it’s deliberate on their part. I think it has more to do with a specific hatred of their own moms. When I posted about childfree people’s hatred of screen time, I was yelled at by plenty of these folks—usually for “defending screentime” (which, if you read my article, I explicitly don’t do)—but interestingly, a lot of them repeated the same talking points. Two, specifically:

1. “You shouldn’t do XYZ because my parents did this and it traumatized me and is the cause of all my problems as an adult”

2. “Take care of your kids” (see 1)

1 is fairly self-explanatory, but 2 is interesting because with the exception of criminally neglectful or abusive parents, every parent takes care of their kids. Lawyers who work 12-hour days and leverage nannies or daycare still do take care of their kids, as do homeschoolers with ten children who don’t have time to devote hours of 1:1 time to each child. “Taking care of your kids” is a spectrum, depending primarily on finances, number of children and time available, and it’s not a straightforward binary command like “feed your kids.”

It’s interesting that so many childfree people, who “hate children” no less, are concerned with mothers being lazy and not taking care of their kids. Surely, if you hate kids, you don’t care if they’re being taken care of properly. Perhaps you don’t want harm to come to any of them, but if you truly dislike them, I’d think that the ins and outs of attachment parenting wouldn’t take up any space in your mind. After all, as someone who doesn’t really like dogs, I quite literally never think about whether people are adequately taking care of their dogs, feeding them the right foods, or training them properly. Sure, I don’t want dogs imperiled, and I’d certainly judge someone who beat their dogs, but do I care if you use a doggie daycare, or allow your sister to dog-sit? Of course not!

This is where I kind of understand the attachment parenting hall monitors who are also crunchy homeschoolers. If anyone is allowed to tell me that hiring a sitter for a date night is child neglect, it’s them. And similarly, if someone thinks that parents are obnoxious for bringing their kids into a restaurant but has no strong opinions on how kids are cared for within reason, that’s fine too. What irks me is the insufferable combination of these two groups: the childfree person who “can’t stand kids” yet miraculously becomes a know-it-all “child advocate” and attachment parenting afficionado whenever the opponent in their head is a parent, usually a mom.

So, to conclude: enjoy your childfree bars. I have no desire to bring my kids to every type of business and perhaps it’s best if there are places out there where kids aren’t allowed. But if that’s something you strongly value, and you claim to have zero interest in children or don’t want to be around children—please stop telling people how to parent.