It was the same on Reddit, people openly say disturbing things against children. What prompted me to post this is someone saying that babies should be put in overhead bins inside airplanes. Even if they’re joking, this is a disgusting thing to say. I won’t say that about anything else.
Would they say this openly about dogs or cats? I doubt it. If they do, people will be ready with pitchforks.
But no one gives a fuck when it’s said about children? Why is that? I though that the general consensus were that children are cute. Maybe annoying sometimes, but still cute. But with the amount of hate I see about them here, I’m really concerned. Does anyone have any thoughts about it?
I like kids, and want to become a parent. Not because kids are cute - they often aren’t - but to have a family and get to nurture a young person and see them grow up. However, I hate the societal pressure to have kids and the way it pushes people who don’t genuinely want to have kids into parenthood because it’s the default. And it’s often justified with ‘kids are cute’ as if finding kids cute is all it takes to be a parent. So you run into shitty to mediocre parents running around with kids they didn’t want because they were told kids are the fucking meaning of life, but gave up early on because, what do you know, parenting is actually hard. And for a lot of us, those are our parents, grandparents, bosses, friends, or community members, and it’s so frustrating to see that everywhere. It’s really disturbing to be told by shitty parents (like my own mom) that parenthood is the best thing in the world.
As long as it’s not in front of actual kids, I don’t see a problem with jokes like this, and I sometimes find them pretty funny tbh. I’m not interested in giving shitty parents a free pass because kids are cute. It’s not cute when someone doesn’t support their kids or think about their needs, or sees them as a cute accessory instead of a person. I’m with the childfree people on this - usually their hate is not towards the children, but towards shitty parents and towards having kids being seen as the default.
I think it is perfectly ok to hate shitty parents. But it seems to me that many people really hate the children, not their parents. Many of them also tend to generalize and hate all children in a simple children-bad manner. I often see people who are not afraid to say they just hate children. I find those people in all groups - some of them are childless, some of them are good parents and some are the shitty ones. It seems to be the popular edgy thing to say.