About 13 years ago, well before I became a parent, I had a conversation with my aunt. She was the kind of aunt a young person could talk to: hilariously frank, slow to judge, and not easily scandalized. We were seated in her rumpus room, me on the couch and her on the floor, as one of her four children (she now has five) toddled back and forth. The topic turned to motherhood. “I’m not sure I like kids,” I said. If she was offended, she didn’t show it. In fact, she seemed to get what I was saying. “Yeah,” she replied, as she looked at her son, “I don’t think I used to like kids either. But I like my own kids.”
Neither of us meant any harm by our bluntness. My aunt, I’m sure, was attempting to be reassuring, and I was just trying to make sense of my ambivalence. In adolescence and early adulthood, I wasn’t someone whom anyone described as being “good with kids.” When a family friend or relative was looking for a babysitter, it wasn’t unheard of for them to ask my younger sister before they asked me. Little kids didn’t usually gravitate toward me, and when they did, I found feigning interest in whatever game they wanted to play a bit laborious. Our interactions often felt nerve-racking or forced, and I wasn’t sure what to make of this; I sensed—or perhaps just assumed—that most women felt otherwise.
Of course, people frequently use reductive language when talking about children: They “like,” “do not like,” or even “hate” kids. Sometimes, particularly in fringier corners of the internet, people appear to mean exactly what they say: They don’t like children as a class of human. But most of the time, I think people are attempting to express more complex emotions in language that feels intuitive. For example, they might be using “I don’t like kids” as shorthand for why they don’t want to become a parent—or regret becoming one. I’ve heard people speak this way to explain why they’d rather not hold a child, or even use the phrasing as a compliment: “I don’t usually like babies,” a young man once told me, “but yours is pretty cool.”
Probably more than anything, people say “don’t like” to express irritation over the disturbances that inevitably occur when children occupy public space: the whining, the shrieking, the knocking-over of things. In those situations, even people who rush to kids’ defense can end up leaning on language that focuses on likability. Children are lovely, they might say, and if you can’t see that, then something is wrong with you.
Stepping back, though—doesn’t something about this feel weird? When you talk about kids in terms of “like” or “don’t like,” you’re basically treating them as objects, the same way you’d talk about cars or handbags or a specific brand of Scotch. But kids aren’t commodities that we accessorize our life with. They’re humans.
In general, I don’t think it’s terribly useful to micromanage the way people speak. But over time, I’ve become convinced that we do need to scrutinize the language many people use to talk about kids, because it reflects and reinforces a view of children as somehow “other”—a view that gets in the way of conversations we ought to be having about children’s place in society and who is responsible for them.
More people than not (I hope) understand that it’s wrong to write off entire categories of humans based on superficial characteristics such as height, weight, skin color, and age. If I were to hear someone say they “don’t like old people,” I wouldn’t hesitate to call them out on it. Yet people talk about children that way all the time. Such broad-based, categorical phrasing effectively functions as a linguistic sleight of hand, allowing people to implicitly dismiss kids as a matter worthy of their concern. If kids are commodities, then responsibility for them falls on the owner and the owner alone. If kids are commodities, then it’s reasonable for me to feel violated when a child who isn’t “mine” throws a tantrum anywhere near my personal space.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be frustrated when a baby cries in the seat behind you on a plane, or when a toddler talks more loudly than social norms would consider polite. Kids do have a tendency to disrupt the tranquility of public life. Yet I believe that as a society, we genuinely need to discuss how adults—parents and nonparents—should engage with and accommodate children, and having that conversation becomes more difficult when people stake out black-and-white positions on kids’ likability.
This is a point that most people seem to understand in other circumstances. For instance, whether someone ought to help a blind person cross a busy road has essentially nothing to do with whether you like blind people. What any of us owe to our fellow humans, with all their different capacities and at various stages of life, is a matter of morals—the social contract we share—and not of preference. The goal here, in focusing on language, is not to shame anyone or to make people self-conscious about their use of words. It’s to open up discussion in a way that reduces the likelihood of endlessly speaking past one another.
As a person who spends quite a bit of time writing about the challenges of modern parenting, I want to talk with other people about, say, their hesitation to raise children. In my view, the interests of parents and the child-free are intimately bound together; we each, in our own way, resent the attitude that parenthood is something to be taken for granted. As a parent, I’d like American policy makers to stop taking my domestic labor as a given, to start appreciating the work that mothers and fathers do to raise decent members of society, and to pair that appreciation with more material support. I also get the sense that a lot of child-free people—in particular, child-free women—are bothered by those who believe that parenthood is a default condition, and who suggest, as our new vice president once did, that people who aren’t raising kids “don’t really have a direct stake” in what happens in our nation. But as soon as someone who is ambivalent about children declares that they “don’t like” kids, a wedge is driven between parents and nonparents. We’re no longer on the same team.
This goes for all of the other pressing concerns about child-rearing that Americans ought to be discussing. Is the country’s threadbare family-policy framework, with its nonexistent paid parental leave and meager funding for child care or other financial support, adequately addressing the needs of children? (No? Then let’s talk about it.) Do we owe it to kids to take their needs into consideration when we’re setting workplace policy? Is the way we’ve divvied up our public resources—with the country spending far more on the elderly than on the young—truly just? Parent or not, whether you “like kids” or not, decisions about policy at some point wind up affecting all of us. And discussing these concerns would be easier if we could dispense with the “don’t like” language and strive to use words that reflect children’s humanity.
I won’t try to offer readers a set of scripts to use in place of our more objectifying terminology. But I would like to propose an experiment: If you find yourself moved to say you don’t like kids, swap in another group of people and see whether that feels like an acceptable thing to say. If it doesn’t, consider thinking in more nuanced terms about the idea you’re trying to express—terms that make clear you’re talking, with all due respect, about your fellow humans. Most likely, doing so will help your position sound a lot more reasonable. And it will certainly improve your odds of being heard.
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