Child-free spaces, dirty looks on planes and ‘breeders’: Why people seem so annoyed by kids

(CNN) — In some corners of society, there appears to be a shift in the way people talk about kids.

Every so often, a provocative social media post sets off predictably polarizing discourse about the presence of children in daily life. There was the woman who snarkily suggested that toddlers should be leashed. There was the guy who proudly posed outside of an establishment that declared itself “dog friendly” and “child free,” and the person who defended him by proclaiming that it was “fine and normal to dislike children.”

In certain online communities, people sometimes express these attitudes even more jarringly, using terms such as “crotch goblins” for kids and “breeders” for parents.

These attitudes show up offline, too. The issue of crying babies on planes is a frequent source of conflict, with some passengers glaring, yelling or more recently, locking the offending child in the lavatory to admonish them. And as people who seek to avoid loud or unruly children make known their preferences for childfree restaurants, grocery stores and flights, more businesses are catering to them.

The implication (joking or otherwise) is that children are a nuisance and adults shouldn’t have to endure them if they don’t want to.

The brazenness with which people express this attitude, even if it’s more a meme than anything else, has an effect on parents. Some parents (almost always mothers) are so attuned to the possibility that their child might inconvenience others that they constantly apologize for normal kid behavior. Others pass out ear plugs and candy on flights.

Mariah Maddox, a freelance writer based in Ohio, has yet to fly with her 3-year-old because she can’t predict how he’ll react and doesn’t want to experience judgment from fellow passengers.

“It makes parents very apologetic when their child is in a public space or around other people, even if the child is not doing anything extreme,” she says.

As visible as this undercurrent of hostility toward children is online, it’s difficult to measure just how pervasive it is in day-to-day life or who exactly it’s coming from.

Still, some scholars and parenting experts say that these sentiments reflect broader changes in how children are seen in our culture and society — at least, among the very online.

Some are reacting to conservative rhetoric

Adults griping about kids intruding on their comfort isn’t a new phenomenon.

In 2000, Elinor Burkett wrote about child-free adults who had grown to resent the public benefits and workplace flexibility afforded to parents in “The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless.” One person quoted in the book likened kids in the office to a “petting zoo” and described having children as “squirting out spawn.”

That same year, journalist Lisa Belkin explored the tension between people who have children and people who don’t in a New York Times Magazine article titled “Your Kids Are Their Problem.” One man featured in the piece explicitly sought to live in a neighborhood not “infested” with children; another called his friends with kids “child-burdened.” The story also noted countless childfree sites whose names for children included “brats,” “anklebiters” and “crib lizards.”

While openly hostile attitudes toward children could once be considered relatively niche, social media seems to have amplified and normalized them, says Anastasia Berg, whose recent book “What Are Children For?” (co-authored with Rachel Wiseman) explores modern ambivalence around child-rearing.

“You also have precisely these kinds of discourses that were limited previously to something like a subreddit, to certain communities that define themselves through (childfree) identities, but they weren’t sharing them with the broader world,” she says. “You have those opinions being expressed more comfortably and publicly now than before.”

In Berg’s assessment, “anti-children” posts that generate heated debate on X, TikTok and other platforms aren’t especially serious. The people behind them aren’t part of some organized movement nor are they actually lobbying for the exclusion of children from public spaces.

Rather, Berg understands online disdain for kids partly as a performative response to rhetoric from political and religious conservatives. The right has long derided city-dwelling progressives and liberals — namely women and LGBTQ people — who don’t have children (see JD Vance’s now infamous remarks about “childless cat ladies”). “Tradwife” content promoting domesticity and traditional gender roles for women has flooded social media feeds. Even Pope Francis has chided people who he says prefer to have pets over children.

In turn, Berg says, expressing negative attitudes about children and child-rearing has become a self-parody.

“If you, the right, think of us, the left, as children-hating, intolerant, childless cat ladies, then we’ll double down,” she says of the thinking behind such sentiments.

Others aren’t used to being around kids

If some people making flippant online comments about kids are rage baiting, and some are venting about particularly frustrating experiences, there are others who genuinely find children irritating.

Jessica J. used to be one of them.

As a young adult, she rarely encountered children and would get annoyed in situations where they were crying or running around. It wasn’t until she became a mother that she began to see things differently.

“Until then, there was an otherness about kids,” she says. “Raising a child on my own with my partner finally opened my eyes to how kids develop and how they communicate.”

The lack of empathy that some young people have for children has a lot to do with where and how they live, says June Carbone, a law professor and co-author of the recent book “Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy.”

For decades, college-educated, upper middle class adults have moved into cities for better jobs and the kind of lifestyle found in dense urban areas: shops, restaurants and nightlife. Those with children, meanwhile, tend to settle in suburbs where housing is more affordable and spacious.

The result is a segregation of childless adults and parents, meaning that many people who don’t have kids can feasibly go about life without having to interact with children in any significant way, Carbone says. At the same time, parents often stop socializing with their childless friends in favor of other parents, deepening the distance between the two groups.

“I see this happening on a national level in a way that’s much more intense than it was when we had our kids,” Carbone says.

Some are reacting to newer parenting styles

When people say that children don’t belong in grocery stores, breweries, restaurants or other shared spaces, it might also signal a parenting culture clash, says Yolanda Williams, a conscious parenting coach and founder of “Parenting Decolonized.”

Parents who are abandoning punitive or authoritarian child-rearing styles for gentle and conscious approaches are sometimes mistaken for being overly permissive, she says. People typically expect parents to intervene if their child is making noise or being disruptive, and parents who prioritize the needs of their child over the adults in public settings are judged harshly. She recalls an incident at a grocery store years ago in which fellow shoppers glared at her disapprovingly over her autistic daughter’s verbal “stimming.”

“A lot of us are still raised to think children should be seen and not heard,” Williams says. “So when you see children who are just loud and they’re able to be themselves, it’s jarring to people.”

Lauren Kavan, a mother to a 4-year-old and a 10-month-old in Nebraska, has felt this acutely. She’s used to getting stares when she boards a plane with her kids — once while at a pool, someone even asked if her giggling daughter could quiet down.

The online rhetoric and judgment from other adults takes a toll on her parenting, she says. If her daughter starts crying or having a tantrum in public, Kavan tries however she can to stop her so as not to cause a scene.

“It makes me feel bad for my kids,” she says. “I’m not allowing her to regulate her emotions properly because I’ll say ‘Shhh, you can’t be doing this right now.’”

What these attitudes say about us

Underlying all of this perceived antipathy to kids is a broader uncertainty in some liberal circles about the role of children in our lives, according to Berg.

Many Millennials and Zoomers are unsure about having children for a host of reasons, per Berg and Wiseman’s research: Because they feel they can’t ably provide for them, because of how it might affect their careers and personal lives, because they worry about the planet or about the kind of world their kids would grow up in.

Certainly parenthood isn’t for everyone, and no one should be chastised for not having children if they don’t want them. But when people make tongue-in-cheek comments about wanting childfree spaces or when they gloat about the myriad pleasures of life without kids, it feeds into that looming anxiety many people have around whether they want children, Berg says.

“This performance of, ‘I wish this wedding was child free or whatever,’ puts increased pressure on people who are ambivalent because it suggests that when they make this choice (to have children) they are pitting themselves against the ‘child-free’ — as if these are exclusive, opposed identities,” she adds.

Animosity toward children also reflects the American mindset around parenting, says Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.” Parenting in the US is treated as an individual undertaking, she notes, as opposed to countries whose economic and social policies treat the wellbeing of children as a collective responsibility.

“If you make this choice to have children, you should be fully responsible for taking care of them, for making sure their needs are met and making sure they don’t infringe on others in the process, too,” she says of US parenting attitudes.

When a society regards children as a personal lifestyle choice, rather than necessary for “the possibility of a human future,” it enables people to say that they shouldn’t have to put up with a stranger’s child’s tantrum, Berg says. As a result, already overburdened parents feel the added pressure of ensuring their child doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.

Conversely, individualist attitudes can also lead parents to prioritize the needs of their children over the well-being of others, creating what Calarco describes as an “ironic, self-reinforcing cycle.”

“The less we invest in families, the harder we make life for parents, which can lead them to have to tote their kids along with them everywhere,” she says. “It can also make it feel more imperative for parents to try to do whatever they can to help their kids get ahead.”

And when that happens, the cycle of complaints about kids might well start over again.

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