An Introduction To The Child Free Community
I’ve wanted to bring attention to the existence of this online group with the workings of a cult, which I’ve heard surprisingly few people talk about. They are the ‘child free community’ — because in the modern day, it’s not enough to make a choice, but you must be part of the same-chooser club as well. I want to note that this particular band online are not usually made up of people who are unable or unwilling to have kids because of bad finances or health problems. For most of these participating people, it is a personal choice they hold dearly, and will defend to the death.
I’ve been aware of that community for a long time, as I was once a member. When I was fifteen, I thought I’d never want children because I was frustrated with my heavy familial duty. It was a brief period now eight years ago, and I’ve changed a lot since then, but in the same time it looks like the community didn’t change, for better nor worse. Their numbers have perhaps grown though; I saw their ilk represented in the media in the last year under the friendly acronym DINK: ‘dual income, no kids’, but I’ve also heard that specific phrase ‘child free’ too. Like ‘involuntary celibate’, you can’t take such a specific phrase at mere face value.
Their hub is reddit.com/r/childfree. Here are a few rules I want to note.
- Keep it civil and respectful. After reading so much discussion, I have found this rule is really just about discussion with other reddit users. Respectful in the more general sense is in fact, discouraged, as we’ll come to see. More aptly, this rule means to not disagree with consensus.
- No making fun of harm made to kids. We’ll come back to this.
- No crossposting to or from r/childfree. Nothing is allowed to leave this community.
Beliefs Of The Child-Free Community
Strange as it is that such a choice should form the basis of a community. The set of beliefs carried by this community cannot be observed except by reading many posts and finding the common thread, but most of these I enumerate would probably be denied by any user. They are present nonetheless. I’ve not attempted to be exhaustive, but to note the more common and general beliefs.
- The core principle is that one should have freedom from persecution for choosing not to have children. This is a sensible position, and really should be the only belief of this community.
- One should not have to deal with children in public spaces. This one is important because it’s extremely common and forms most of the community discussion. They are entitled to a belief that public space should conform to their personal desires.
- One should be free from responsibility in general. Often comes up in one way or another, child free people have a general distaste for duty. We will see later a story of a woman who refused to be the godmother of a relative’s child, and was applauded for her decision, showcasing the apotheosis of this belief; that an adult’s personal comfort is more important than the wellbeing of a child relative. A willingness to sacrifice in varying degrees is a noble and important quality in a human, that seems less appreciated by these users who are mostly from the first-world.
- Parents are often secretly miserable. This delightful theory posits that parents never wanted to have their children, they hate them, and are envious of child free people because they have more fun and freedom. It’s never clarified what this ‘freedom’ and ‘fun’ is used for.
- The most depressing is an underlying belief, mostly fueled by this echo-chamber, that children are less human than adults. This community has a creative arsenal of slurs for children, such as: crotch goblin, spawn, demon spawn, matter, and others. All of them are intentionally dehumanizing by transforming the child into a fantastical creature, relating them to ‘disposable’ frogspawn, or plainly refusing to acknowledge they are living beings.
Sample Of Child-Free Discourse
About seven months ago when I was drafting this article, I performed a fair experiment that one can easily replicate. Just take a few of the first top posts you see, and a couple new posts maybe, and you will get a good idea of what discourse is like. The examples I give were not cherry-picked, each I picked off the top were kept here. I invite you reader to visit the subreddit yourself, and there’s good chance you will find worse things than what I have.
My brother just asked me to be the godmother in front of my entire family and I said no...
A middle-aged woman was asked to be the godmother of her brother’s children. She said no and made a big deal about how terrible it was for her. The implication of this is she thinks her own “freedom” is more important than taking care of her niece if she were to become an orphan. I wonder what this freedom would be used for that is so important? A reasonable person would consider this extraordinarily selfish behavior, but for the child-free it is expected.
In the comments, you won’t find a trace of a nuanced idea in these people. They unanimously praise her actions, saying she did the right thing “standing up” to her family. Many even told her that her family intentionally orchestrated this to pressure her into saying yes, AKA her family is part of some conspiracy!
Parents seem to lose all sense of former identity
I see so many people who wipe all sense of former personal identity to become almost grossly infatuated with kids and parenthood.
Can’t you be a person without shrouding your identity as a procreating parent?
Child free people believe that family is not an important thing, which explains a lot of their behavior in general, and are projecting this belief as some sort of universal truth. They cannot understand people who find their family very important to themselves.
I think most of them are severely depressed and thinking about how free and fun they used to be is soul crushing.
The aforementioned fourth belief in open view. This is an obvious example, but you will see this belief expressed in various ways.
I lost a lot of my childhood.
a lot of going out plans were ruined because, my mother had to babysit for them.
I didn’t get to go to school dances, or be a child a lot because my mother had to babysit.
By the time we were all older, I didn’t even get to go out to like Chuck-e-cheese, and stuff like that…
Now I’m older, they have more children & want me to babysit…I can’t say no because then apparently I’m being an “angry” person. Like I’m not angry, I’m just trying to live my life even more now!!Trying to make up for the times you took away from me!!!
It’s difficult to ignore the entitlement and immature behavior, but of course this person will not be confronted by that idea. They come to Reddit for support instead of resolving the issue at hand, however that should go, and the support is astonishing in how resolute it is.
You absolutely can say no. It won’t be easy and so what if they call you angry? They made the choice to pop out more spawn, not you. You get to choose to choose yourself now. That’s NOT being selfish, no matter what those entitled asses say.
Say no and stick to it. Let them call you angry. You are and you have every right to be.
My sister just had her 3rd kid
The post had nothing particular to mention, but one comment was particularly interesting. The one voice of disagreement that I saw in all these posts.
Kids always come first…. especially if the grandparents are involved in helping. Eventually when the kids get older, her time will free up again. She doesn’t love you any less, she just has priorities and you’re an adult. She SHOULD take time to schedule something with you and if that doesn’t work out…tell her you’ll be around when she misses you.
The fatal mistake is failure to praise the actions of the poster, and instead trying to promote a solution to the problem that is forgiving and constructive. It was ‘down voted’ by at least four users, though none explained what is wrong with this view. My guess is that it will simply not do for an r/childfree user to be amicable with their family. They must promote aggression and cutting people out.
Parents just let their kids do whatever they want these days.
So far the examples have served to demonstrate some point I have, or show how sad these people are, but this example is particularly disgusting and shows a truly ugly side of this community.
The original post talks about how they saw a child swinging on a rope, then accidentally fall and land head-first on the pavement. Here are some of the rated comments.
No greater physical comedy than people hurting themselves.
Is it bad that the mental image of the kid screaming has me laughing my ass off.
Happy ending!
Hey, at least you got to see an extra animal!
Recall that rule, no making fun of harm made to kids? This entire post is full of breaches, but seven months on it is all still up. Obviously, the actual culture of this community is that there is no problem with laughing at children being hurt. How delighted they are this child smacked their head, most likely receiving a concussion. What else would happen when children are so strongly dehumanized?
Cult Behavior
What are the aspects of a cult?
- Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving
- Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders
- Dishonoring the family unit
- Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
- No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
- No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
- Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies, and persecutions.
- There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
- Followers feel they can never be “good enough”.
- The group/leader is always right.
- The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
Here is my respective assessment of the criteria,
- Yes. People often encourage other members to cut off family for what are actually minor slights.
- N/A There are no particular leaders of the child free group, though there is a loyalty to certain ideas. As early church figures would accept the whole of a doctrine, these people are similar.
- Yes. It is fundamental to child free beliefs, fundamental part of child free beliefs.
- N/A as this applies more to a highly organized group; to analyze it in a less strict sense is still out of reach without being an active participant for some time myself.
- Yes. On the rare occasion you see someone who does not totally agree with another member, in a polite and level-headed fashion, they are generally disliked.
- N/A as there are no finances.
- Yes. There is a significant streak of conspiratorial thought and fear of persecution in regards to ones family. Experience that touches on them being without children is always framed negatively.
- Yes. Seeing as outsiders who are opposed to any of the child free beliefs are stigmatized, to leave the community for the ‘other side’ would be deeply offensive to most users. It’s hard to find an example, but it’s obvious this would be the case.
- No. There is at least no way in which members need to prove their worthiness to the cause.
- Yes. Covered in point 2.
- Yes. Family and friends are undermined by Internet strangers, who proclaim only they understand your true struggle. Because these particular beliefs are just uncommon as it is, the group is probably the only way these people can feel validated in their feelings.
Of 11 cult criteria, 8 were applicable to child free, due to it being an informal group rather than an organization. Of those 8, 7 criteria were true, while 1 was false, and in each case there was little doubt as to the verdict in my mind.
Final Thoughts
I’ve become an extremely open-minded person, especially in the last few months. Various prejudices, holdovers from some ‘right wing’ beliefs, have been completely destroyed in my mind, and I’ve never been so intellectually free in my life. I can entertain extraordinarily unpopular ideas such as anti-natalism and the more extreme forms of veganism, without any instant reaction against them. Nevertheless, my stance on this child free collective has been constant since I broke from it, which is that, apart from the first I mentioned, they hold many immoral and damaging beliefs.
Cult is not the right word, to describe them, but the group type is at least the younger sibling of the cult. Whatever type that is, would be the one that includes groups such as the incel community and the disorganized bands of online political extremists. This particular kind of group has many of the same social mechanics as the cult, but are crucially differentiated by being disorganized and organic, as opposed to the organized and artificial cult. They are typically reliant on digital media and the Internet, mostly because it a decentralized medium that supports collectives without strict hierarchy. So I would not call the child free community a cult per se, but it is of a type of group which should be treated with the severity of a cult. Though lacking a few characteristics, the social mechanics are still as effective, and so is not necessarily less destructive to ones life than a regular cult is. If one should say that cults result in events like Jonestown, I say that the incel community has surely been a critical cause in many shootings, such as the Christchurch mosque attacks, but who knows how many school shootings in America this community has played a part in encouraging? At least the child free community is not so lethal, but it is definitely corrosive to the social life of members.
There is at least one thing I can agree with these people on, and it’s that they should be free to abstain from having children. The emotional immaturity of the members tell me they should not be trusted with the needs of another person, especially the kind of person they often dehumanize. Unfortunately, the social mechanisms being common with the cult, it would be just as difficult to extract a person indoctrinated in this, not for the sake of making them reproduce but for the sake of removing them from an echo-chamber that gives them an attitude to make their life unnecessarily miserable.