Why I used to “hate” kids.

And what those feelings actually meant.

Image by Bart Kerswell courtesy of Unsplash.

It is child liberation month here on my blog, where we’ve been talking a lot about abolishing the family as a system that owns children, abolishing age as a determinant of who gets to have rights, and the need for us all to take on the collective responsibility of looking after children. We’ve also been exploring some of the common barriers that keep people from taking child liberation seriously.

I wanted to talk a little bit about one factor that kept me from exploring child liberation for many years:

I used to hate kids. A lot.

Of course, I didn’t really hate children. How could I? I hadn’t met the majority of them. Hating an entire demographic of human beings is either a projection of your actual feelings about something else, or it’s overt bigotry that’s indistinguishable from eugenics.

A person cannot really hate all old people, for instance — but they can be bitter about the fact that a small subset of predominately white, middle-class Boomers from the imperial core reaped the benefits of capitalism and lived comfortably without much effort while they personally did not, and have that bitterness warped into a misguided belief that the only act of justice needed is for all of the Boomers to die.