What’s Behind All Those Posts About Barring Kids From Public Spaces?

 
 

By stacy lee kong

20th Century Fox

 
 

As with so many things on the internet, it’s hard to tell if this is my algorithm or if everyone in the world really is awful, but: the posts about wanting to ban children from public spaces are… something, right?

In case it is just my algorithm, a recap: at least three times in the past few months, my X/Twitter feed has been overtaken with capital-D Discourse because of a viral tweet that joked about child-free spaces in a way that, while not uncommon on the internet, feels… notable. In April, it was the guy who posed with a bar’s chalkboard sign proclaiming itself dog-friendly and child-free. He said it was his new local, implying that he’s been going to a lot of bars where children are also in attendance, and that is very disruptive to his life. Obviously, this sparked days of online discussion. Then, directly due to that discourse, there was the person who said they’d die on the hill that it’s “fine and normal to dislike children.”(Ummm, disagree, but okay.) Fast-forward to this week, and it was the guy who proposed a grocery store where children aren’t allowed which—you guessed it—led to all sorts of commentary, again.

Now, do I actually think these people hate children/are evil monsters/deserve to be on some sort of list? I do not. In fact, for the most part, I don’t even think they mean it when they joke about not wanting to be around, or even see, children. But there are two interesting things happening here. First, the act of complaining about children has become such reliable engagement fodder that it has almost become a meme—that is, a joke that gets endlessly copied, remixed and shared, but also divorced from context or meaning. And second, I think it’s worth thinking about these comments in the context of our current social, cultural, political and economic moment, because a joke is never just a joke, right?

We can definitely trace these comments back to r/childfree

On the first point, when it comes to internet conversations about children, it’s actually pretty normal for the tone to be dismissive or even kind of mean. When I think about my early experiences on the internet, I remember seeing a lot of overlap between feminist and childfree ideologies—and subsequently, a lot of people referring to other people’s children, or their own, as “crotch goblins” or other mildly derogatory nicknames. (According to Know Your Meme, the “exact first appearance of the term online is unknown, but it began appearing as early as the mid-2000s. On September 28th, 2005, Urban Dictionary user Juke Joint Jezebel posted the earliest known definition of the term ‘crotch goblin,’ defining it as ‘A child. Also known as crotch spawn, or runny nosed shrieking brat. Essentially, a baby or small child that is a whining little hell demon. Elementary schools and daycare centers abound with crotch goblins.’” The site also notes that this phrase is heavily associated with “‘cringe’ millennial or Reddit lingo,” which… correct.)

At the time, I don’t think it felt that serious. I always read this tone as mostly joking, but even if it wasn’t funny ha ha, the snarkiness generally felt more like a political statement than an actual opinion about children. That is, it read to me as a rejection of the societal expectation that women would strive for motherhood over any other goal, and would prioritize mothering over any other interest. In these conversations, the proverbial kid—or crotch goblin, I guess—was an avatar for ‘traditional’ values, not an actual, tiny, vulnerable human. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider the roots of the childfree movement, which first gained popularity in the 1970s, ushered in by second-wave feminism. If first-wave feminism was focused on securing property and voting rights for (white) women, second-wave feminism was mostly concerned with establishing equality between the genders and dismantling the patriarchal systems that kept women oppressed, which necessarily required decentring home, family and child-rearing in women’s lives. As a 1970 Time article put it, second-wave feminists were calling for “equal pay for equal work, and a chance at jobs traditionally reserved for men only. They [were seeking] nationwide abortion reform—ideally, free abortions on demand.  [And] they desire[d] round-the-clock, state-supported child-care centers in order to cut the apron strings that confine mothers to unpaid domestic servitude at home.” That is to say, the movement was not about hating children, or even finding them annoying; it was about liberating women from the oppressive weight of domestic labour.

However. What started as an attempt to reject the heteronormative and patriarchal markers of adulthood and/or success (which is fair) has become more diffuse, and parts of it have morphed into a toxic sludge of parental judgment and animosity toward children themselves. And nowhere is that clearer than the r/childfree subreddit. The community exploded in popularity around 2018 or 2019, going from 300,000 members to more than 700,000, according to the WBUR podcast Endless Thread, likely because of a wider interest in being childfree due to a combination of factors, including “economic woes, environmental concerns [and] political unrest,” as Wired put it at the time. And, according to some of the community’s members, this increase in popularity came with both a demographic shift, and a tonal one.

As Redditor borborborbor, who joined r/childfree after spending years seeking medical sterilization, told the Daily Dot in 2019, “in the early days of my involvement there, I’d mostly just weigh in with support on people’s posts when they were in similar situations to me. We’d encourage each other… Childfree was a place that felt more driven by women, at least at first. But more and more, men were posting, hoisting up this flag of childfree as some sort of better-than-thou rally call. The comments on [these posts] quickly devolved into people flaunting how much better they were than their friends who had kids.”

And from there, it didn’t take much for some childfree folks to wonder why they had to be around children at all: “I think what pulled me in was the colorful stories of the poster having a horrid experience involving some mombie and her menagerie of unruly crotch goblins,” another redditor, Jes, told the Daily Dot. “I went from ‘Huh, it does sound like it sucks to have kids’ to ‘Goddammit, why are these children in Walmart existing near me?’ I admit I absorbed a lot of those ways of thinking and began to express those same attitudes.”

What are we actually saying when we joke about not wanting to see or hear children in public?

To be clear, I’m not worried that people are complaining about being pressured to have children to fulfill some patriarchal, heteronormative, classist and frankly white supremacist idea of ‘normalcy.’ (White supremacist because even as our society continues to position parenthood as the default for middle-class and wealthier white people, it simultaneously tells poor and/or racialized people that they’re having too many children, and that this reckless contribution to overpopulation is detrimental to the environment and the world at large. Which is ecofascism, btw.) Being reduced to your reproductive choices is annoying, and also incompatible with a just and equal society, so yeah, sometimes you just need to vent in a safe space. What I find troubling is the logical leap that says actually, people who don’t want children—or who find children annoying, or whatever—shouldn’t ever have to be around them because they’re loud or disruptive or don’t perfectly follow the spoken and unspoken rules of society.

But… we cannot restrict people’s access to public life based on how annoying we find them, otherwise I would never have to awkwardly dodge slow walkers or the people who work at those kiosks in the mall that are always trying to get you to try their random skincare products. I’m not sure hearing evidence that a child exists is more annoying than either of those things, tbh. I also can’t really recall a time when a child has been so loud, or so annoying that it had any kind of lasting consequences for me. Like, I’ve been on a plane with crying babies, and in malls when toddlers are throwing tantrums, and I live by a high school, so there are always roving packs of teenagers speaking at top volume in my vicinity, and I gotta tell you, it’s fine. Even if I feel momentary annoyance, none of these things have ever once ruined my day, much less my life.

And to be serious for a second: even if we don’t always think about them this way on a broad, societal level, children are people. In fact, they’re especially vulnerable people. According to the National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health at St. Francis Xavier University, “marginalized populations are groups and communities that experience discrimination and exclusion (social, political and economic) because of unequal power relationships across economic, political, social and cultural dimensions.” So: racialized people, women, LGBTQ+ people, people who are experiencing poverty, disabled people, senior citizens, etc. There have been recent conversations about whether children should be included in that definition. In a June 2023 episode of NPR’s It’s Been A Minute, host Brittany Luse explores that question, saying, “many kids experience structural and personal harm without any power to change it. Children make up almost a third of all people in the U.S. living in poverty. One in 8 children in the U.S. struggles with hunger, and 1 in 4 experiences child abuse or neglect. Even children from more well-resourced families can still experience harm from parents, caregivers, teachers or coaches who are put in charge of their care… [And] there are still a lot of children who are treated like adults in different ways—put in jails or detention centers, working illegally in dangerous jobs, tasked with caretaking responsibilities at home. No matter how they're treated, children have next to no political power to change their circumstances.”

I think this goes back to community care, and the ever-increasing cultural messaging that we receive around individualism. I’ve written about this before in the context of therapy-speak and friendship, but I think it applies here, too. We’re constantly being encouraged to see ourselves as individuals who should not need anything from other people, and don’t owe anything to other people, but this is a lie. We do need connection and communication and love and support; that is what it means to be human. And importantly for this conversation, we also owe those things to other people. And not just those we know personally and love; I really believe that we can’t have a just world if we don’t feel a sense of collective responsibility for one another. Even strangers. Especially children.

Also, this feels like an extra weird time to talk about barring children from public spaces because that also often equates to banning women from public spaces. Because let’s be real: who’s mostly caring for children? Women. According to Statistics Canada, “in 2022, more than half of women aged 15 and older (52%, or almost 8.4 million women) provided some form of care to children and care-dependent adults, whether paid or unpaid. Regardless of whether they cared for children or adults, women were much more likely than men (42%) to provide care [and] more likely than men to participate in caregiving activities that often need to be completed on a regular basis or set schedule, such as providing personal care (40% vs. 30%), scheduling and coordinating appointments for the care receiver (48% vs. 37%) and helping with medical treatments (37% vs. 30%). Women were also more likely than men to provide emotional support (83% vs. 77%).” So, if you don’t want to see children on the street, or in the grocery store, or at the mall, or in a park, or on transit, or in cultural spaces, or at doctor’s offices, or whatever, what you’re also saying is, you don’t want their mostly female caregivers to take them there. Considering the wider conservative plan to push women out of public spaces and back into the domestic sphere, where they can more easily be financially, socially and physically controlled, this seems… short-sighted.

And lastly, it feels really weird to post about wanting a space without children when our feeds are full of images from Palestine, not to mention Congo and Sudan, where actual children are being maimed, tormented and killed—that is, being literally removed from this world. I know the people who tweet their little jokes aren’t thinking about those children, nor are they really trying to express hatred or a desire to see kids removed from public spaces; they’re just trying to get more notifications because that dopamine hit is addictive. They’d probably think I’m taking this too seriously. But these discourses are never just conversations—they say something about us, and sometimes that something is kinda troubling. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing this James Baldwin quote going around a lot recently, in relation to the children of Gaza: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” I think he was right, and I think that applies to children right here in our daily lives as much it does to the ones who are trying to survive in conflict zones.

Which is to say, if you think too deeply about everything that’s happening in the world, none of this is actually very funny.

And Did You Hear About…

This thoughtful Glamour UK essay about allegedly predatory men (think, Diddy, Andrew Tate, Russell Brand) turning to religion when they need to absolve themselves, and what religious orgs can do to protect their congregations.

Music writer Dan Charnas’ deep dive into Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”—and the nameless ‘80s genre it owes its existence to.

The “Succession-level family drama” at a little family-owned footwear company called… Birkenstock.

This Sister Act 2 reunion 😭

Food writer Ahmed Ali Akbar’s very important annual mango article.

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CultureStacy Lee KongJames Baldwin, Diddy, Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Sabrina Carpenter, Succession, Sister Act 2