The War Against Children

[kimberlysteele]

Our civilization has a love/hate relationship with children that is currently listing heavily towards hate.  Children and their parents take a bad rap for being selfish in an age of overpopulation.  Long ago, in a time before the woke revolution, gay men came up with the term "breeder" to label people (typically straight ones) who wanted to conceive and/or successfully bore children.  As someone who has never wanted children of my own, I was regularly mystified by people who pitied me for not having children or who asked when I was going to have children of my own. At the tender age of 18 I already felt a great deal of pressure to have children.  The pressure did not truly subside until I reached the age of 45 (I was a very young looking 40) and it became patently obvious my husband and I had no designs on creating a child together.

My go-to line was and is "Raising a child is one of the toughest jobs in the world, and I skipped it because I didn't want to do it half-assed".  I only say this to parents who I believe are doing an excellent job raising their children.  Many people who become parents belatedly discover they don't want to be parents.  There are message boards for parents who confess that having one or more children ruined their bond with their spouse or mate.  They regale anonymous viewers with horror stories about the aftermath of childbirth-ruined bodies, isolation, depression, and regret.  Many wish they could go back in time and make a different decision.  Many feel tricked and hoodwinked.  Parenthood was glorified and its truths downplayed.  Many feel eaten alive by toxic mommy culture and to a lesser but still significant extent, toxic daddy culture.  Many suck it up and never let anyone know about their negative feelings, burying the wound deep inside where it festers and burns.  

It's a fact that many people have children merely because they are expected to have them.  Many more have them by sheer accident.  I was an accident; that's why I was adopted at the age of ten days.  When parents do regret having children, they are not allowed to say it aloud.  They are never allowed to mourn what they have lost in terms of freedom, youthfulness, autonomy, and potential.  They are handed a set of unrealistic expectations.  Nobody can have it all, yet we are told this all the time with the hackneyed term "limitless possibilities".  We are also told we should desire to have it all while being all things to all people.  There are many idealized images where one can have kids, career, a perfect house, a killer Instagram, and of course lots of money.  

Spoiled Rotten: Is There a Subconscious Backlash Against Children?

Childhood is fetishized.  Suburban childhoods like the one I experienced in the late 70s and early 80s became a trend on big and small screens when the TV show Stranger Things resurrected the packs of kids on bikes trope from Stephen Spielberg's ET.  Today's über-precious, molly coddled Gen Z child does not know what it is like to be sent outside to play and forgotten about until dinner, or the brief phone call from a friend's house to get permission to eat dinner over there.  As generations of children have become more and more materialistic, they have become more feral, either shrinking away in horror from just about everything or boldly bratting it up while posing for a mom-assisted selfie in front of a mountain of unearned toys.  As a teen, a healthy amount of my self-hatred came from remembering what an insufferable brat I had been just a few years earlier.  Maybe I'm not the only one who hates how spoiled I was.  

Instead of raising kids sensibly to do without en masse, I hypothesize that hatred bubbles up as severe and awful post-hoc punishments for children, for instance making them the subjects of mass medical experiments with various vaccines and allowing woke teachers to use them for sexual grooming purposes.  In other unsurprising news, the most draconian elements of child punishment have been originated by the most child-hating and overpopulated nation on the planet, China.  

It is the worst time in history to be a child.  The second you pop out of mom's body, you are pricked and poked with vaccines that cause learning disabilities and auto-immune dysfunction ranging from mild to severe.  If you survive, you may end up being told you are insane by the tender age of ten for maintaining an active connection to the spirit world.  If you are not a natural conformist, you will be mercilessly bullied, often by your own parents.  If your parents have any money, it is highly unlikely you will know what it is to play outside without being in constant danger of being run over by a car, if you are allowed unsupervised play at all.  Every parent I knew as a youngster dealt with depression.  Psychiatry as a profession only exists because of moms and dads who hate their lives.  This begs the question of "What's the use of a gorgeous, comfortable lifestyle if you're depressed as hell all the time?"  It's the same sort of conundrum of the very rich and very sick.  What good is the $400 bottle of wine when you cannot drink it even with the help of a nurse holding a straw to your lips?  

The MRNA vaccines were first billed as a way of keeping grandma safe from her grandchildren.  Once the optics fail of children suffering on behalf of their grandparents was perceived for the failure it was, the myth machine churned out propaganda about the vaccines being safe for the youngest of the young.  It was always clear they were not safe for anyone paying attention.  I'm not sure why it took so many ten year olds keeling over with heart attacks though.  My suspicions are that many people who claim to love children actually don't love them at all.

Misanthropy as a Function of Overpopulation

The Plandemic turned regular people into original sinners who could only get clean one way: by getting repeatedly inseminated with a DNA-modding set of machines in injection form.  The baptism rite in question was demanded by the anti-theist powers of Progress.  The children were offered up as the ultimate sacrifice on the altar, which is to say children are still the disposable cannon fodder they were in World War I.  Though some may claim they believe the children are our future, nobody has any problem with child labor as long as it is done by little Pakistani girls in sweatshops and little boys in the Congo mining cobalt for electric cars.  Children were always on the front lines and precious little has actually changed except the flavor of lies we are expected to swallow hook, line, and sinker about how much they are loved and valued.

The reason companies are rushing to get vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule is because it lifts the onerous burdens of liability in case they kill or maim children as they are already doing.  Autism is up to 1 in every 30 births.  Compare to 1 in every 2500 being diagnosed with autism in 1960.  Something is amiss, for sure, but there is no rush to get to the bottom of it.  To add insult to injury, autistic people are thrown away by the time they hit their teens. To exact revenge, many of them have become memelords on 4chan.  

Commodifying Innocence and Manufacturing Consent

In the Jim Henson fantasy film The Dark Crystal, the evil villains are a race of decrepit bird-creatures called Skeksis who spend their time and resources hunting down the last of a race of mini-people called Gelflings.  When they find a Gelfling, they hang him or her in the air and extract his or her life essence until the creature dies.  They drink the substance as an elixir and gain an addictive rush along with a temporary stay from aging.  Basically Jim Henson had his Skeksis drinking adrenochrome long before it was cool.  Right around the same era, Brooke Shields made several soft porn movies and starred in extremely mature photo shoots, many while she was still a pre-teen.  80s kids were pushed into sexuality at age 12.  Now that sexy 12 year olds are yesterday's news, mainstream media has moved on to five year olds and toddlers.

There are some teachers of the type displayed on Libs of TikTok who have the sick idea that little kids should be initiated into adult domains to "help" them figure out what they will be in terms of future sexuality.  My husband pointed out that anyone with a sexual agenda to "help" a little kid is a pedophile no matter what they believe they are doing.  Most kids are unaware of themselves as having sexual feelings until at least a few years before puberty.  Most of those feelings can easily be shelved until they grow into semi-adulthood and begin the cycle of puberty.  Sexualizing a child, ogling a child as Brooke Shields was ogled, or attempting to influence a gender decision upon a child who has not completed full puberty is sexual abuse and a breach of their human right to privacy and autonomy.  If I was Queen of the World, I would enact no punishments for thought crimes.  However, those who acted on their pedophilic urges would be put on trial and quickly executed as a matter of course, and that includes teachers who "come out" to their kindergarten classrooms.  Communists believe that turning all sex into a robotic, debased free for all is better than the opposite traditional religious obsession with sexual shame and humiliation.  Evangelists want an eternal re-run of the opening scenes of The Handmaid's Tale, with any woman who dares have a child outside the confines of marriage literally branded (preferably by cutting off a hand or putting out her eye) for life and her child taken away to be gifted to the deserving and heterosexual faithful.  Commies prefer an abyss of perversion and Evangelists delight in a morass of repression and punishment.  Either way, kids get thrown under the bus.

In Which I Propose a Ternary

I believe there is a happy medium that neither involves five year olds receiving cartoon masturbation manuals nor a pamphlet of lies about storks and mommy's tummy.  De-stigmatizing unmarried teen pregnancy would help countless generations of children from a couple of key angles.  Allowing younger people to have children outside of marriage with the expectation of being completely supported and accepted would result in healthier generations of children.  The later one waits to have children, the worse one's prospects are for having a healthy, intelligent child.  One of the reasons for the high number of autistic births is because of the general age of today's parents, not just the amount of unnecessary and toxic chemicals being shoved into baby's shoulder.  A hundred short years ago, teenagers had children on the regular and nobody batted an eye.  Women wrapped up childbearing at age 35 if they were not dead from doing it, unlike now when women don't think about having a child until they're having sporadic hot flashes.  Healthier attitudes towards unmarried teen pregnancy would mean more children and fewer abortions of the legal or illegal variety.  Considering the vaccinated are very likely to face fertility problems in the near to far future, there is haste to be made in accepting parenthood in in forms that were previously considered declassé or embarassing.

Though I am encouraged to see alternative schools springing up in my area in response to the exposé of public schools in 2020-2022, I am dismayed by the surging tide of Christian schools which seek to replace once kind of indoctrination with its equally bad opposite.  I believe children should learn that being gay is OK, just not in any graphic detail.  

 

 

 

Comments

Boomer mom

[(Anonymous)]

Kimberly,

My mom was a working class Baby Boomer who got married shortly after high school. While many of her peers were out having all kinds of fun, she was stuck home with an abusive husband and screaming children. She always seemed angry and stressed, so strict. She had good reasons for it. Looking back I think she wanted us to grow up in a hurry so she could move to work she enjoyed more. She loved us, she was just better at providing than mothering. She eventually earned college degrees and a successful career. My relationship with her improved greatly when I grew up and moved out.

When I became an adult I chose freedom and flexibility instead of marriage, children, or career. It may look selfish to some people but I probably would have been a bad wife and mother. Way too much unhealed baggage. It would be nice if the stigma for not having kids went away too. Some people really aren't meant to be parents. Parenting well takes a lot of skill and strength...what would happen if people were more honest about that?

Thank you for your thought provoking post. It's such an important topic...as a society, we are doing awful things to our kids. We're not so good at supporting parents, either.

Re: Boomer mom

[kimberlysteele]

Fascinating. My boomer parents wanted children so badly they were willing to adopt. They would have done it twice but my younger brother came about the natural way. It's too bad your mom couldn't have ended up with a happy house husband who enjoyed being a Stay-at-Home-Dad while she went out and busted heavies at the office.

I agree, it would be VERY nice if people could stop putting all of their hangups on the childless and the childfree. I could have been a very good parent and that's exactly why I chose not to do it. I still think parenting should require a license, though there could never be any enforcement for a parenting license, it would only be a badge of honor.

Pro-abortion types do have legitimate points when they draw attention to the fact that pro-lifers don't care about babies or children once they are born. In a Childfree Vegans Facebook group I used to run, we called pro-lifers "fetus fetishists" because they were obsessed with protecting the unborn child at the mother's direct expense.

Re: Boomer mom

[methylethyl]

I think we should all very much appreciate those who've chosen not to have children! Historically, they've been some of the most productive, innovative people around-- people who could devote their entire lives, and nearly all their attention, to work. It's obviously not an ideal path for everyone-- some of us *like* having kids around-- but there's a clear societal benefit to it. And it's not just avoiding having a bunch of kids grow up in households where their parents didn't want them. They've also historically been valuable assets as members of extended kin networks: i.e. just because you don't have your own kids, doesn't mean you can't be a great member of a family that does. It's just that our ideas about what a "family" is in modern America are greatly impoverished. I lucked out growing up as part of an enormous network of local great-aunts and -uncles, first-cousins-once-removed, second-cousins... if you're not hung up on the whole "nuclear family" idea, then there's no reason you can't have a meaningful place in a large family, without having kids.

In historical accounts, you run across a lot of references to single-sex boarding houses-- places where old bachelors and spinsters could rent a room, not have to do their own housekeeping, and get a meal or two a day served at the house. They still exist but are much rarer and seedier these days. When I was a kid, and my dad worked in another city for a while, he lived in one such place, sort of a holdover. The proprieters had been in the business for a very long time, and still brought up a pitcher of wash-water each morning, to use with the basin on a stand in his room! That was the 80s.

Side note: a more retro understanding of family does a pretty good job of handling teenage pregnancy as well. It used to be fairly normal for an out-of-wedlock child of a teen mother to simply be adopted by its grandparents, and move seamlessly into the family. Knew of a trad catholic family who'd done this: after eight kids, adding a ninth was no big deal, he was doted on by all his sibling/aunts/uncles, and bio-mom successfully finished college. Win win. It'd work even better if there was no stigma attached, and nobody had to go through the farce of teenage daughter "going off to stay with relatives" for the duration ;) This used to be fairly common, and I even wonder idly if it happened in my own family-- my grandmother comes from a huge family, where everybody's about 3 years apart in age except the youngest-- 7-year gap there, and she was the only blonde one. Probably a surprise menopause baby, but what if...?

Re: Boomer mom

[(Anonymous)]

It used to be that a lot of people joined religious orders that required chastity. Many of those orders did wonderful things for their communities (scandals aside). My mother and grandmother had all kinds of fun stories about the nuns who ran their school. I agree, it kind of makes sense for some people to abstain from creating children, so that there are more adults available to help raise them. And as you said, those who don't have children can still have a vibrant family life.

Cute story about the blonde baby!

Re: Boomer mom

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t begrudge anyone choosing to not have children, especially at this point in history, but I do believe there’s a whole swathe of them who couldn’t bring themselves to match your description here even if you paid them to try. I’ve had too many run-ins with the type that imply, I don’t have kids and therefore I shouldn’t have to tolerate sitting near your grubs in a restaurant, or listening to their irritating squeals of joy from the playground in the public park… it’s beyond toxic, to say the least. And in no small way contributes to the depressing, overbearing experience that is modern parenting!

Re: Boomer mom

[kimberlysteele]

I know the exact type you are talking about, especially among childfree vegans.

Basically there are binaries that try to establish themselves: that all parents ("breeders") are indulgent morons who rampantly spoil their insufferable children and that the childfree/barren/childless are painted saints who suffer the indignant horror with a stiff upper lip.

The other binary is that all childfree/barren/childless are bitter scourges, warlocks, and witches who spend most of their free time wishing death on the breeders and their precious children for the mere crime of expressing their joy to be alive by shouting and being cantankerous.

Both of these binaries are false images that present themselves to be worshipped (idolatry) and fall far short of the big picture. The truth, as usual, is in the complicated middle.

Re: Boomer mom

[(Anonymous)]

Kimberly,

Thank you for your kind thoughts. My Mom did find something kind of like that in her third marriage. They both seemed happy with how it turned out.

Sometimes I wonder how it would be if potential parents had to pass a basic test before having kids. The equivalent of getting a drivers' license...easy for an ordinary person to pass but weeding out some of scariest contenders. People who were basically good but with a weak area (say, anger management) could take a class if needed.

Yes, there is something a creepy in being so focused on the fetus that the mother and her needs become invisible. Pro-choice and pro-life camps both have good points but taken to extremes...creepy.