Why Don't Other Young People Love Kids?

This story starts, as many articles do now, with a tweet:

This tweet is from my friend and the feeling behind it is really common: lots of people get irritated when there are loud children on their planes. But what struck me was the sentiment that children, babies and, by extension, their caretakers shouldn’t be allowed on flights. This enraged me when I realised that some of our mutual friends had also liked the tweet. Maybe the opinion isn’t so uncommon amongst my peers. I started seeing things like this:

It’s been well documented and reported that Millenials are having less kids. There’s a lot of speculation as to why, including the large economic difference between Millenials and their parents. Millennials simply have less money with which to raise kids, and housing and education have gotten more expensive to boot. But what economists and journalists haven’t explained yet, is why Millenials and Gen Z don’t like, and sometimes hate, kids. Maybe there just isn’t a metric for this and young people have always disliked kids; our generation just has Twitter to yell about it. Maybe our generation feels less pressure to procreate and continue the human species than ever before. Maybe, like me, they haven’t been around younger generations enough. 

I say “like me” because I used to dislike kids. As a teenager, I felt about kids the same way I felt about dogs: best in Youtube videos. But then my cousin had a baby and for the first time in my life I was spending day and night with someone decades younger than me. I had originally volunteered to do my familial duty of helping the new parents, but when I left, I only wanted to stay. Something about holding my baby cousin every day, napping with him, watching him learn to lift his head and laugh, had changed me. Watching him grow up has been one of the greatest joys of my young adult life. Everytime I see him, I want to see what he has learned since last week, and make him laugh. 

The other thing that I’ve learned through helping take care of my baby cousin and his cousins, is how hard it is. From breastfeeding to strollers, the world is not set up for parents. I never appreciated the Americans with Disabilities Act more than when I had to take a stroller on the subway. And even when you do all the right things for your kid, sometimes they still throw tantrums. There are lots of things that can make children upset, unpredictable hunger or tiredness, boredom, or just not getting what they want. When my friend wants kids to be banned from flights because of screaming, it makes me think- he’s never had to take care of a baby or child in his life. 

This issue is also inherently gendered. As a cis-woman, I have been pressured to love children and childcare since birth. This is true for women throughout time and place. In a world controlled by the patriarchy, it makes sense that the needs and wants of mothers and their children have been unthought of or purposely ignored. 

Children are the future, whether you love them or hate them. When thinking about bettering the world, especially when it comes to long term issues like climate change, I think about the baby cousins I am helping to raise. I can no longer just imagine the future for myself or even my younger sister. I want a world with less racism, less homophobia, less sexism, and less climate change causing natural disasters for myself, but also for all the children younger than me.