older != wiser

[the_siobhan]

I just left my last childfree community.

I first heard the term way back on Usenet, when people talked about identifying as someone who has actively chosen not to have kids. I lurked on and off in alt.support.childfree. I dropped it when it just got too busy. I don't think I ever made it as far as the moderated version.

When I started looking at communities on LJ I checked out the main childfree one, but I didn't stick around after reading only a few posts. Too many "OMG biology is so GROOOOSSSSSS" posts and sad stories about horrible parents.

But I stumbled across this latest one and thought it might have some potential. It was specifically designed to eliminate both the teenagers and the parents who inexplicably want to come in and talk about their kids. The moderator accepts new members only with references or after checking out their profiles to make sure they are over 30.

Yeah, I know there are tons of clueless over-30's out there, and lots of people who are younger who don't necessarily think "acceptance" means "for me and nobody else". But I had hoped that the level of care in admitting people meant that the culture in general would be a more mature one. That it would be a place where people would actually talk about what it means to actively chose to not raise children. How that relates to our politics. To talk about cultural pressures and family reactions and what happens when a partner starts to hear their biological clock. Hell, just a place to share once in a while how nice it is to have disposable income (ha!) and the house to yourself once in a while.

But no, turns out it's just yet another place to bitch about how unfair it is to have to be forced to share a planet with children and how repulsive it is whenever one is forced to acknowledge their existance. A safe space where people can call women "moos" and "breeders".

And you can bet I got brushed off when I protested that one. It felt much like it would if somebody just made a casual racial slur in front of me, assuming they had my automatic approval just because I'm white.

Fuck 'em. I have friends both with and without kids and everybody is welcome in my house.

Or will be once we've covered up all the lethal bits.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I've learned some useful things from childfree groups, over the years. I'm one of those people who always, always loved children and expected to reproduce. Because of that, I know I've had blind spots about what it's like when you don't.

So it's been good for me to read things from the childfree perspective. That browsing is how I know better than to call what I'm doing right now "starting a family," as if people without kids don't have families. It's how I know that some people are made very uncomfortable by a toddler coming up and trying to interact with them. (I find it charming, but I wouldn't now assume that anyone wants to deal with the Li'l Critter who hasn't already expressed interest in doing so.) So I think reading childfree groups - selectively - has taught me things that will make me less of a jerk as a parent.

That said, there's a lot of absolute idiocy to wade through to get to the good points. The crackpot theories about parenting and child development, which everyone is an expert on regardless of the fact that they've had little or no experience with children because they don't like them. The misogynistic comments about how disgusting pregnant women's bodies are. (Okay, I'm a little sensitive about that one right now.) And of course, the abusive language - from people who would never tolerate that kind of vitriol being directed at people of another race or sexual orientation.

The community childfree is often unintentionally hilarious - there's a conversation going on there now in which a bunch of 20-year-olds are trying to figure out when it was that American parenting went so completely downhill that all the children born after that time are irredeemably worthless. "Well, *I* was born in 1986, and *I* knew how to behave, but these kids born in the early 90s..."

I guess that's what you were trying to avoid in the adult community, and I'm sorry that you didn't get it there.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I think my big WTF moment was a thread where all these teenagers were talking about what they would do if one of their (never-to-exist) daughters came home pregnant. "Force her to go through with the pregnancy and labour, no anaesthetic allowed, and then she's putting the child up for adoption."

The complete lack of of any kind of relationship with reality just boggled my brain.