If You're Anti-Kids, You're Anti-Community
But the way my generation (and those younger than us) think about community is a problem too, which came to mind watching the season five episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", "Children of Time".
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future in terms of what we owe each other and those we leave behind. Sometimes — actually quite often lately — when I’m walking around the city I’ll stop and look at a playground, overrun with the rambunctious force of children, with a wistful ache. I worry about the kids swinging along monkey bars or sliding down some garish colored plastic and think of what they will be forced to navigate ecologically, economically, emotionally. The mood of the time is already apocalyptic. I am not consigning them or anyone else to a life defined only by collapse and the suffering that ferments in its wake. I’m too much of a romantic for that. I still carry hope for the human species, as dim as that hope flickers sometimes.
Let me preface the body of this rant by saying this is written from the perspective of a woman in her mid-thirties with no desire for children. I’ve never wanted them and I never will1. am neutral to kids on a broad level, mostly wishing them a better future and making small efforts so that comes to fruition. I love my niece. I genuinely believe that my ability to thrive as a single woman without kids, with no interest in the playbooks life has casually reprinted for women to follow, is a privilege. Actually, the ability to choose to not be married and have kids as a woman while still thriving isn’t a privilege. It’s a right, restored.
Over the last few years I have noticed increasing hostility toward children and parents that manifests with a veneer of joking irreverence. Calling parents “breeders”. Memes and an overflow of comments spreading across the internet about how dogs are preferable to children in public spaces. There is a variegated division between friends with kids and those without. What do friends who’ve recently had kids owe their friends who don’t? How should a child-free person meet their haggard friends navigating parenthood in the middle? I’m concerned that people don’t know how to relate to each other anymore, or don’t want to give grace to the fact that we’re all suffering together2 in this landscape. The ragged loneliness so many feel, that’s held like a stone in their chests, is so painful they’ve come to believe a good relationship is defined purely by ease and a lack of conflict. But what healthy, loving, open-hearted relationship has no conflict? Conflict is both natural and necessary to the growth of a relationship. The price of opening yourself up to the world — especially with regards to having a sense of community to rely on — is that sometimes you will be uncomfortable, even annoyed.
For a generation that talks so much about ancestors and the immediate failures of the child-rearing care of our parents, it’s odd we aren’t thinking more about our own legacy. Even if you don’t have kids, you still have skin in the game when it comes to the generations coming up behind you. How can we find community if we scorn children and parents? How can we create bonds that will withstand the horrors on the horizon and those already here? How are we supposed to break generational curses if we can’t recognize the way we perpetuate them ourselves?