Do people hate kids?
Parenting in 2026 seems like a real drag.
On the patio of a pan-Mediterranean counter-serve hotspot in a college town, I watch as my two high school friends wrangle their three children. The mother guides them, often wordlessly, a gentle hand when needed, a soft-but-stern instruction when things get dangerous (jumping off ledges a bit higher than the ones prior). She doesn’t coddle or placate, her dulcet tone still sounds like the voice I’ve known for two decades. Then, a 50-something woman walks by the patio, huffs audibly, shakes her head, and leaves with an eye roll.
“Yeah,” my friend’s smile falls flat. “People hate kids.”
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever hated kids, per se, but in my twenties I didn’t want any of my own. I’d roll my eyes at babies on planes, I’d huff at the inconvenience of a stroller on a sidewalk. (I shudder, I repent: forgive me, forgive me.)
The first time I heard Evan Rachel Wood say the following in Across The Universe, I thought yes! Exactly!
I’m never having children. ... Think about it, it’s pure narcissism. I mean, people putting out little carbon copies of themselves, going: “Oh, doesn’t he have his father’s eyes? Doesn’t he have his mother’s lips?” It’s... It’s disgusting.
I credit my shift in acceptance to the de-centering of the self that comes with growing up; the world isn’t made for my needs alone, and kids are not evil.
If it isn’t already evident: whether or not you choose to become a parent is a personal choice. Neither choice is right, neither is wrong, and minds can change in any direction. This isn’t a value judgment on choosing to parent or not.
Instead, I'm trying to figure out if People Who Hate Kids have considered what it means to be a parent and what it means to be a child and, after all of that, are still able to come to the conclusion that kids are annoying and they all suck.
(Dare I remind us: we were all children once and nobody asked to be born!)
Another caveat, if it isn’t evident: I don’t have kids and I’m not currently attempting to have kids. I just try to think things through from as many angles as I can conceive (hah, pun) of, hence my history of extreme rejection of parenthood to my current obsession with my friends’ babies.
In our old apartment, we introduced our puppy, Buckets, to our neighbor. He gushed: “Ugh, I want one, but I can barely take care of myself; I’m too selfish.” Seeing as he’s an artist with a proclivity for three a.m. DJ sets midweek, I understand his point.
I acknowledge that I live in a city situated on ambition; you don’t move to New York for an easy life (you move here to turn your Bushwick loft into an art exhibit). And I respect the rejection of parenthood as the inevitable—no need for the house in the suburbs, the two-car garage—but there is a way to reject the norm without rejecting everyone who’s chosen to lead a more conventional life.
I think the admission—both of selfishness and the inability to care for oneself— saddens me. Taking care of oneself feels so good. Aging is a gift, as is maturing. Shedding selfishness is right up there with ego death and enlightenment.
Yes, this neighbor was quite young. (Sidebar: after returning from a trip, we received a very long apology note from him about his “behavior” which, I’m assuming, refers to a series of all-hours partying that occurred in our absence. He was very hard on himself and I reassured him everything is fine and nobody is mad at him.)
I’d like to think that he wants to move beyond selfishness, if not now then at least in the future.
Kids have the right to exist in public spaces. Childfree spaces should exist as well; children do not belong everywhere (and, um, probably do not want to be everywhere). (I also feel this way about dogs, but that is an entirely different subject, but do not for a second assume that I think that dogs should be off-leash with abandon and, what’s more, I think a refusal to pick up a dog’s business is the most egregious offense I’ve written about thus far.)
That being said: kids will act out in public. They will be loud and reckless and annoying. And some parents are more engaged than others and some are just tired and we should give everyone the benefit of the doubt more often than not. “If you can’t control your kids, don’t have them?” Brother, you know it’s not that simple.
After an extended length of time hanging out with my mostly baby-crazed, freshly-married friends, pregnant or parenting or pregnant-and-parenting, I found myself startled while talking to someone who, point blank, did not want kids. People in my sphere had thrown tens of thousands of dollars into IVF, endured miscarriages, moved across the country to get support for their growing families. So I hadn’t considered a childfree perspective in a long time.
And then I asked her something that I regret: “Why not?”
What an annoying question. In that moment, I felt my own judgment seep out, my insecurity oozing. She looked at me equally confused, gave an “uhhh,” gestured to her girlfriend, and shook it off as something they were just not interested in.
In the moment, I wanted to push my own agenda, tell her she’d be such a cool mom and would raise such a cool kid. Now I was being selfish—I wanted another friend on my “team.” In the same way that our politics aligned, I wanted our personal decisions to align, too.
And I kind of want to send a voice memo to her right now and apologize for this, mostly hoping she doesn’t remember it at all, but also telling her that it’s actually super cool that she doesn’t want kids and doesn’t even need a reason why, for herself or for anyone else.
(I do worry that too many uncool people are gonna raise uncool babies, but that’s getting a little too populate-the-world-with-Our-Kind of me.)
My friends with kids are wonderfully candid with me, perhaps because I force my way into the muck of their lives, asking to help until they cave (as they remind me You Don’t Have To Do This, to which I reply I Wouldn’t Offer If I Didn’t Mean It).
In heart-to-hearts, I’ve heard multiple happy, capable parents admit that it’s a lot, that they love their kid(s), of course, but they wish they’d waited a bit longer to have them. Friends have shared that friends of theirs have admitted to resenting (the exact word used was “hate,” which makes me sick) their dogs post-kids, and a non-parent friend added that her boss gave away his dogs, deeming them too annoying to deal with now that babies were in the house (this has been haunting me).
There is also a whole subreddit dedicated to parents who regret having kids, sharing that if they could do things differently, they would have. That they love their kids, but miss their old lives.
All this is to say: the division between parents and aspiring parents and never-parents is not so distinct. There is nuance that is ignored out of fear of the other, out of one’s own choices being “wrong.”
Enter bff Annaliese Godderz, forever willing to unite all sides:
Choosing to be a parent is the most important decision one can make, because it is the most permanent decision possible, one that the parent makes for another person: the child. So whereas there might be fear and doubt and, yes, even resentment down the line, someone who does not want kids should not have them, and abstaining is a considerate—even selfless—choice.
Not to get overly it-takes-a-village about everything, but it’s a pretty commonly held belief (at the very least, in north Brooklyn) that connection between all types of people enhances community, and community is the most valuable asset we have in our current political climate. Creating spaces to support kids and parents (2-K and 3-K, let’s go Mamdaniii) benefits everyone (if the kids are at school during the day, they are not climbing on your lap on the L-train, smudging the windows with their sticky fingers as the subway tiles whizz by).
The mother-of-three I mentioned at the top called me this week. She’s tried her hand at making mom friends and neighborhood friends over the past five or ten years but still feels isolated and disconnected. She’s tried building community—working freelance, taking her kids to cultural centers, trying different schools—but it’s not fulfilling her hopes for her family.
She doesn’t want to move back to her hometown where a circle already awaits her. Instead, she wants to move to New York.
“Is it crazy?” she asks. “What if we fail?”
I tell her there’s no such thing as failing. I tell her that if she doesn’t try moving her family of five to The Greatest City In The World, she’ll always wonder what if.
I tell her about the cool-as-hell city kids I know, how our mayor supports their parents, how community is everywhere, it’s literally inevitable—I know the name of my bartenders and coffee shop owners, the old punks at the park and their dogs; when a friend is out of town, they connect with an acquaintance and offer a free place to stay when their apartment floods; I see an old college friend on the A train to Rockaway who was heading to JFK—I was meeting a high school friend at the beach, a friend who lives down the block from me—but closer, still—across the street!—is a friend-of-a-friend who just happens to own a different bar I love and yet another dog who loves to play with my dog and I have no clue if she wants kids and it really doesn’t matter, does it?
I really enjoyed this. I was definitely one of those people who didn’t particularly like children before having my own 😂
Now, with two kids, I’ve learnt that children are allowed to exist in public spaces, and parents are allowed to have hard days. Kids can be loud and messy, and sometimes we’re all just trying to get through the day. A little more grace on both sides would go a long way.
And I completely agree that choosing not to have children is just as valid. We’re all living different lives, and there’s no need for everyone to make the same choices.
When my son was young, I would get dirty looks and exasperated noises from others almost everywhere I went with him. It felt as though people expected parents of young children to lock themselves at home indefinitely so that no one else would have to be bothered with the inconvenient reality of what we all were before we became adults. My employer chastised me when I had to work 7-3 instead of 9-5 for parenting reasons, even though this had no impact on my workload, and as though his business should be more important to me than my own child. Anyway, thank you for writing this, and for addressing this topic at all. I love the idea that we should not judge others for their decisions about whether to become parents or for the fact that the vast majority of young children don't just sit there and "behave."