On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’
But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit! The beautiful couple could spend their days scrolling freely on their expensive phones, undisturbed by the excited shouts of infants. And no need to worry about a depressing return to a world full of kids, because as the fertility crisis has grown across the developed world, so, in its shadow, an entire industry of child-free activities has also begun to flourish. There are child-free restaurants, child-free gardens, child-free hotels, all advertising themselves with the same indefinably unpleasant air.
This isn’t a desire for peace. This is a dislike of children for being children, no matter how they behave
Perhaps, on the face of it, there doesn’t seem much wrong with wanting to be shot of kids. Children can be intolerable. My own son talks nonstop at a volume you might use to hail a distant ship, and vomited continuously throughout his last plane flight. But this isn’t just an understandable desire for peace. This is a dislike of children for being children, no matter how they behave. It’s not the crotchety old complaining, it’s youngish types, within sight of childhood themselves; the same young people we’re always desperately trying to persuade to reproduce.
Until very recently, the fashion was for announcing that not having kids was an ethical decision. Who with a clear conscience could bring a child into this doomed world, or birth another carbon-guzzling life-form? Couples declared themselves ‘child-free by choice’ in much the same superior way that they said they were dairy-free. But just as we’ve all grown used to this dismal trope, so the culture has taken a more sinister turn. Do you remember the scene in Chitty ChittyBang Bang when the child-hating Baroness reacts to children as if they are vermin, screaming and lifting her skirts? Well keep that in mind, that’s very much the vibe.
Online, if you look under the right virtual rocks, there’s any number of people discussing how to push children back out of public life. Child-free beaches would be nice, they think, and child-free housing, and what about entire child-free trains, and flights banned to the under-18s? ‘Why do babies travel for free anyway? They should pay even if they’re sitting on someone’s knee.’ Here’s one of the strangest comments: ‘Why do people have to travel everywhere with their children? Can’t they leave them behind?’ In storage maybe, or with the sort of timed feeding bowls you can get for cats.
It’s odd that in this hypersensitive age, when making gentle fun of gingers, or girls, or joking about anyone’s appearance in any way is taboo, children are so easily, mockingly referred to as subhuman. There’s a new slew of nicknames given to them by the child-phobics: ‘Crotch goblins’ or (forgive me) ‘cum trophies’, as if children are just the unpleasant by-products of sex. YouTubers – all of them, ironically, tucked and plumped up to mimic maximum fertility – make a deal of their child-phobia and rant about how revolting babies are. ‘Actually get them away,’ says one woman with the sort of gesture you might use to sweep away dead flies. An American man with a southern drawl says: ‘I don’t really like kids, coz they’re gross, they get on my nerves, they talk too much, they stink.’ Very camp. Very Mean Girls. An easy win, I guess for ‘pick-me’ nihilists looking to break Christian taboos and stick it to the old order of things.
Not one of the child-haters ever addresses the fact that they themselves were kids not so long ago. But then we long ago lost a sense of a self stretched across time, with a feeling for ancestors and a duty to future generations. It could be this is the logical endpoint of individualism: no past, no childhood, just me, right now.
Each video has to go a little further than the last, to be edgier, crueller. But though everyone everywhere online is trying to maximise engagement, this isn’t just an influencer phenomenon. When you look for it, there’s child-hatred seeping out of all sorts of crevices on the internet. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article recently complaining about dogs in restaurants. Here are some of the online comments: ‘I’d rather eat with a dog at the next table than a screaming child’; ‘Better than kids yelling and running around’; ‘I want a vaccine registry for children the way we have for dogs. Children carry myriad more communicable diseases than do humans and in this city, are worse behaved across the board’; ‘I’d rather have a well-behaved dog sitting next to me than a baby crying.’
We’re well into the era of dogs as substitute kids. In my north London neighbourhood it’s quite normal to see a young couple out for a stroll with a French bulldog or a cockapoo in what looks like a baby sling. The shops and cafés offer ‘puppuccinos’ and dog ice-cream more prominently than they do treats for kids. There are water bowls outside the cafés but no highchairs. Nothing like the sight of a baby to put the regulars off their shakshuka.
But the dogs could point to some sort of explanation. Urban pets these days are low-maintenance, mostly non-shedding; you can farm them off to a dog-walker with no fear of social services coming knocking. Maybe the root cause of paedophobia is a simple horror of the sheer effort that having and raising an actual child involves and the total disruption to a carefully balanced and curated life.
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