A (very partial) defense of the online anti-kid misanthropes

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

A (very partial) defense of the online anti-kid misanthropes

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Do you know about the online anti-kid misanthropes? The people who complain of having to encounter children in public, who feel entitled to dine exclusively among the post-teething crowd, who post about the experience of overhearing a distraught baby on a plane with all the fortitude of, well, a distraught baby on a plane?

A couple preliminary points about this crew:

First, I think writer Stephanie Murray is correct in her contention, at The Atlantic and elsewhere, that merciless whining about children existing in public is emblematic of a significantly child-unfriendly society.

But second, in my experience, this kind of outright misanthropy is a minority view disproportionately well-represented on the internet. There’s plenty of subtler, more structural discomfort around taking small kids out in public (restaurants with no high chairs, road and vehicle design hostile to pedestrians, etc.). But at the individual level, in the offline world, I’ve never encountered the anti-kid vitriol you’ll see online.

No one has felt emboldened to speak to me or my children this way. Maybe they thought it, but they didn’t say it. Yet I’m not even sure they thought it because, as I wrote at The Week in 2019, the people who do engage with me about my kids in public are not just tolerant but pointedly kind, and that pattern has held with complete consistency for five years.¹

Still, anti-kids misanthropy does exist, certainly online and probably off, and as you may be able to tell, I don’t have a lot of patience for it. Yet, having just returned from a vacation in which I was afforded numerous opportunities to watch how people parent in public, I want to venture for the misanthropes a (very partial) defense.