That’s what one commenter suggested on a recent online debate about whether kids should be allowed in church. Here’s what she said:
I think our society hates kids. There, I’ve said it. We don’t want them at the grocery store, the shopping mall, or the sanctuary. We also hate the elderly.
Obviously, this commenter was being dramatic, as I am prone to be. But still, I’ve been thinking about this ever since. Is it true? Do we generally dislike children?
I ask this question as one of the guiltiest. I am terrible with kids. This may surprise you, given everything I’ve shared about how I want to get pregnant, but in all honestly I’m generally not very accepting of children.
I have called kids “stuff-wreckers” and “fun-ruiners.” I have given parents the stink-eye when their kids are “disruptive” in church and roll my eyes when I hear them screaming at the grocery store. I get annoyed when my friends who are parents take their kids along to adult social events. I resent all my rowdy little cousins for making gatherings suck. I have never tried to build relationships with anybody’s kids, and I refuse to help out with Sunday school or vacation Bible school in the summer because “kids are not my thing.”
So I’m not pointing fingers at all the “other” mean people who hate kids. I’m talking about myself here.
Some Observations
When I look around at the way society is structured, I sometimes get the feeling that we don’t like or value children very much.
For starters, we have so many things in place to prevent their coming into being. Between contraceptives and abortion there is an enormous industry for child prevention.
We resent the fact that pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex. We think that’s wrong and unfair. We feel we should be able to have sex as much as we want without it resulting in the creation of children, so we’ve developed technologies to separate the act of sex from reproduction.
We think of children as a financial burden and a gross impediment to our freedom. They destroy our careers. They ruin our figures. They require us to do unsavory things like trade in our sports cars for minivans and tote around unfashionable diaper bags. So we put this stuff off for as long as possible. We only want to have kids on our own terms, when we’re “ready,” when they will be the least inconvenience to us.
As for the children who do exist, we sure work hard to pretend that they don’t.
We don’t want them in church because they’re a nuisance, so we’ve developed a completely separate space for them to worship.
We don’t want to have to educate them ourselves, so we’ve developed a whole school system that corrals them together in an external building where a few highly-trained adults can deal with them. This incarceration also keep kids out of the parks, banks, theatres and grocery stores during the day so we don’t have to be bothered by them when we’re out doing our grown-up stuff.
The Fear of Babies
Of course, most of us don’t actually hate kids. Who actively dislikes babies and toddlers? Most of us who don’t have kids plan to have them eventually, and those who already have children almost universally love them (at least on some level). But, as Elizabeth from That Married Couple suggests, we seem to be quite afraid of them.
We’re afraid of having kids outside of our explicit plans. The thought of an unplanned pregnancy scares the bejesus out of almost everyone, and we demand the right to get rid of them if they’re conceived outside of our plans.
We’re afraid of babies ruining our dreams. We’re afraid they’ll bring poverty upon our heads. We’re afraid of them consuming so much that we won’t have enough for ourselves.
We’re also frightened by the enormous responsibility of molding little people into decent human beings — we’re afraid we’ll mangle their souls so badly that even after we die they’ll continue to haunt us. We’re afraid we’ll be too selfish to raise children. We’re afraid of inadvertently creating monsters.
As a society we’re scared of too many kids because we’re afraid there will eventually be too many people on the planet. We’re scared that there won’t be enough resources to go around. We don’t trust that future generations will be innovative or selfless enough to keep everyone fed.
At least I’m scared of most of these things. I’m scared that children will ruin my chances for success and renown. I’m scared that they will suck all the life out of me. I’m scared that they’ll make me poor.
But I’m concerned that in the meantime we’ve created a hostile environment for those people who are most vulnerable, and for those who have just as much potential to save the world from its current state as destroy it: our youngsters.
Note: of course I am oversimplifying the issue here. And I’m not saying, by any means, that parents who send their children to school are doing so out of a dislike for their children. I’m just saying that if you look at things from an outsider’s perspective, you might get the impression that we hate kids. Think about it. If an alien or a time-traveller from an earlier millennium were to visit 21st-century North America, would they get the impression that we hate and fear children? Does it seem like we’re trying to keep kids out of our daily lives? Are we really afraid of babies?
Please share your thoughts.
Image courtesy of akhater.
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Wow, Kathleen. You’ve said a lot. I think you’re being very honest, and saying what most people won’t say. Of course, it’s always other people we would point the fingers at, but we have all become guilty in treating children as a necessary inconvenience.
Kimberly and I like to bring our children into the church service, but find that it’s hard when yours is the only child making noises (like children do). But I agree that this partitioning of society into grown-ups and kids leads to a real disconnect between generations.
As a family, we try to involve our children in almost everything, but it is a conscious effort and I find I have to fight every day against my desires to do things along, as it’s more efficient. I so often find that I’d rather give my children “stuff” than “time”. Heaven knows don’t need more stuff.
One other contributing factor to the “hating” of our children is that the family is no longer dependent on one another. In ancient civilizations, and to a great extent in the non-westernized world, families actually “need” each other. Three or four generations often live under the same roof, and take care of each others needs. Learning, eating, laughing, singing, praying, playing and working took place primarily in the home. Today, we try as hard as we can to outsource almost every one of those functions. We delegate learning to government institutions, eating to restaurants, laughing to entertainment venues, singing to church or concerts (do people still sing at home??), praying to church leaders, playing to extracurricular sports activities, and working … well, children don’t seem to work anymore. As a western society, it’s safe to say that we think we’ve loved our children best when we’ve provided every comfort for them and protected them from any failure.
Great post! I’m so glad you ventured into this aspect of “marriage”. Perhaps as someone who isn’t a mother yet, you have the privilege of seeing this trend from a better perspective than those who already have their own children.
Terry — you’re putting into words a lot of the things I’ve been thinking lately. Especially everything you’ve said about delegating all of our needs to outside sources. Thanks for saying things better than I can.
Such a great post and so true. I think if children were out and about more and part of everyday life that people would naturally start thinking differently — as would children. Perhaps it would soften more people and make them more patient and it would help the children to strive for more than they think themselves able.
So I think there is a balance of course. But definitely, these days children and elderly need more than what they are getting — just more interaction, understanding, respect, love, and access to real living interactions and whole environment.
Sometimes I do think it is ok that for instance there is separate Sunday school just because I feel the kids get learning more directly for them but at the same time I do like to pull them out and have them hear perhaps ‘more’ by being exposed to life in the adult world. Then I also think adults get ‘more’ when they are exposed to life in the child world – the life they’ve grown out of and almost forgot. All ages and kinds of people if we would just live together instead of grouping each other out would I think have more compassion towards each other and perhaps also get more sick of each other at the same time!
– hope some of that makes a bit of sense, 2am is not a good time to write but I just had to put something! Great post, makes me think
Good post, and I especially appreciate it since you admit to being guilty of this mindset. I don’t know that I have anything to add really, because somehow this fear is still a bit of a foreign concept to me – I’ve always been a child lover. Does that mean my parents did something right, or I’ve just always had baby fever? Who knows
That is one way to look at it, but on the flip side if I were an alien I might also notice the number of McDonalds, Chuck E Cheese, and Toys R Us type places that are on every street corner in every city in America. One of the reasons that children “make us poor” is because we spend so much money on them. We buy them designer clothes and 10 pairs of shoes and toys upon toys upon toys. Even the parents (like myself) who don’t buy a lot of designer stuff for their children spend money on things like play dates and learning toys and extra things simply because we love our kids.
I did not read the online debate that started this post, but I think it is healthy for children to be in a separate service, for their sake, not the adults. While children may learn how to behave in church with their parents, they won’t learn very much about God or their beliefs or worship from an adult service. I don’t think children should be banned from adult services, and older children can learn some things from adult worship. But a five year old will spend most of their time coloring or wiggling, and they won’t learn a thing.
There has been a huge focus on Children’s Church in the past two decades and churches that put a focus on their children’s ministry (building it, training leaders, and growing it) find that their church as a whole starts to grow very quickly. The church we attend has a wonderful children’s ministry, and every week my 2 year old get so excited about seeing “Teacho Stepany” and all of his friends. He learns bible verses (4-5 words long) and remembers the point of the lesson. He brings home crafts and take-home sheets. I don’t think we would ever go to a church that didn’t have a good children’s ministry.
I don’t know anything about your church, but I would encourage you to take some time and get to know your children’s ministry. You might be surprised at how cool and needed it is. In most cases, it is not just babysitting. People without kids don’t know or value what goes on in children’s church and may just be happy no kids are in adult service. But parents, teachers, and kids know what’s really going on, and they know it is so much better than being tolerated in adult service.
As for the public stink-eye and other things people who “hate” children do, parents are used to it. For the most part, we don’t care. You can think all the bad things you want about us. We know something you don’t know, that this is all totally worth it.
On a side note, we may spend a lot of money and time on pregnancy prevention, but we also spend a lot of money on getting pregnant (such as invetro, surrogacy, artificial inseminations, IF treatments, the list go on). To me, that points more to wanting to “control birth” to fit our schedules, not to “hating” kids.
Dolli-Mama — you make a lot of excellent points here. I was especially struck by your point that North Americans spent an enormous amount of money on achieving pregnancy as well as preventing it. I also recognize the value of children’s ministries, although it would probably do me good to find out what exactly goes on on the other side of the church on Sunday mornings. Thanks for giving me some more things to think about.
I really like your blog, and I like that you never get upset when someone else has a different point of view. I don’t always comment, but I do read a lot of your posts and the comments, and you never get upset when someone disagrees with you. You are always respectful and I think that is awesome! Keep up the good work.
I, for one, ADORE children… I’d have a whole passel if God gave them to me. That said, I definitely see what you are talking about here… I think that as we age and become more distant from being a child and child-rearing, we forget the joys children bring, that they are the promise of a future. We think we are entitled to a quiet, restful old age… but we forget that seeing life through the eyes of a child keeps us young. I see this with our older friends who have children out of the house, while we still have young ones… our annual summer house vacation has turned into a source of stress for me because of this.
I can’t speak for the younger generation, because I’ve never seen children as a bad or unwanted thing… but I do think there is a lot of fear and the fact that we live in an “I” pleasing society… there is nothing about parenting that lines up with self-pleasure.
Oh, one more thought.
On the whole children in church question…
I fully believe that children belong in church with their parents. They may not learn as much as they do in a child-specific service, but what they do learn is of far greater import-
Togetherness and being a part of the bigger picture
Respect
Appropriate behavior
That the parent is a child’s first and best teacher (which comes from the Bible).
The ability to discuss as a family what was said during the service. Children do get a lot of of church, even when we think they are too busy fidgeting… ask them questions, you’ll be surprised what they’ve learned.
Another way to look at it is… how will children learn to behave and pay active attention in a church service if we don’t train them? If we send them off with other children until age 12 or 13 and then toss them back in with a group of grown ups, is it any wonder that they don’t know how to behave appropriately? I believe youth programs which run concurrently with service can be detrimental to a child’s religious and social education.
As a Catholic Christian, we don’t separate children from adults. There are children’s programs after mass to continue and deepen their religious education for those who don’t go to Catholic school. We also generally have a nursery for those younger than school age because at that age there is a lot of energy to try to contain in a pew… and we have “family” rooms where parents can take children needing more hands on parental supervision and still hear the Mass. That said, we also expect and welcome children’s noise in Mass… it’s a sign that we are growing and that’s God’s plan.
Jamie — I so appreciate all of your thoughts! I definitely agree with you that our me-centered society is not very conducive to parenting, which is all about sacrifice. Good point. I also really appreciate your thoughts on church and I agree with them heartily (although I also understand the side that thinks kids get very valuable stuff out of Sunday school. That’s probably true, too). I think both positions are valid; and yet, like you, I think a certain amount of harm is done when kids and adults are made to worship separately all their lives. Thanks for your in-depth comments!
Why is it so uncomfortable for so many adults to be around children?:
1. The boundary between the internal and external world is more fluid with kids. So, they are blending their imaginative world with the material world. Feelings are more pure/experiential- not reduced to the abstraction of words.
2. Cause and effect tend to be more concrete for kids with an awareness of the immediate circumstances and without seeing the bigger picture.
3. Intuitively we as adults tune into the developmental level of the child in our communication. This depends on our ability to accurately sense what the child is capable of understanding.
4. Adults expect to be in control of the situation when talking with kids. As a general rule this is not conducive to authentic communication. It often results in a stylized type of conversation that is predictable.
5. Talking in a real way with children inadvertently brings us into contact with our own childhood, whether we are aware of it or not. That can be unsettling. It can touch our childhood vulnerability and confusion.
6. It is paradoxical to be both in the child world and the adult world simultaneously. How do you do that? Is that really what it takes? It is hard for adults to achieve that kind of “cross-cultural” stance.
7. Children’s emotions are right at the surface. That intimidates many adults. You just don’t know what to expect, so you have to be facile in relating to both the emotional realities of the child and the cognitive level of development of the child. Interacting in a thoughtful and emotionally connected way becomes a real challenge.
8. Kids are very physical. They move around a lot. Though they are smaller than most adults, their unpredictable physicality can put many adults on edge. You have to be able to act and not react, be in control without being controlling (most of the time).
Robert – I think these are all true. I was especially struck by #7 — “Talking with children inadvertently brings us into contact with our own childhood.” I think that’s why i have so much trouble with teenagers: it brings me face-to-face with a very uncomfortable time in my own life.
I kind of agree, I mean children aren’t as useful as they used to be (helping out at home, at the farm, as an apprentice, etc.) and it now takes longer for a child to grow up (35 year old children exist as well…) so it’s no wonder we have no patience for them.
For me it’s really an issue of control. It’s one thing that you can’t control other people in your life, or your spouse, but to not be able to control the little half-persons in your household? The ones you had in your womb for 9 months and who now totally owe you? Ludicrous! Of course they should obey you!
…And I think this despite the fact that I prefer thinking of children as little adults. This is because I need control in my life and I’m dead afraid of children because you never know what type you’ll get, what personalities they’ll have, and how much of a wild card they are. I don’t need wildcards in my life, I have quite enough as it is thank you.
So yes, children are frightful little beings that I expect to have in the next year or so but I also expect lots of help in raising a child (from my mother) because I don’t know if I have the kind of motherly instinct required of me.