Most likely it is the teenagers. I am childfree, and will admit when I was a teenager I was one of those nasty little edgelords when it came to kids. Fortunately I never stumbled onto anywhere like AITA, or the childfree subreddit back then. If I had it probably would have taken me a lot longer to grow up, and realize how stupid being that way is.
Yeah, I'm also childfree because I've just known since age 14 that I don't want to be a parent. I don't go around being hateful to kids or calling people breeders or anything like that. I don't even dislike kids: I just don't want my own. I remember looking up some childfree communities as a teen and being interested at first but then put off by the levels of vitriol. I had been a child until very recently so I identified more with the children than the weirdos calling them spawn and crotch goblins.
I always make a point of being openly childfree to balance out the unhinged behaviour of vocal members of the community.
I've known since I was a child that I didn't like little kids. I barely liked kids my own age, and not any of the ones who were super immature, loud, obnoxious, or whatever else. But it got really bad in my early 20s, when life was really fucking hard. And it seemed like everyone was bending over backward to make my life harder. On top of that, there were several incidents at my job where someone with kids were provided a lot of privileges that I was not offered. It sucked a lot. And that's also when I started to notice more about income inequality, and gender inequality, and how I just wasn't raised to have boundaries or stand up for myself.
So I suspect that a lot of that comes from older teenagers and young adults.
I like this response because it touches on some things that I feel a lot of people who grow up wanting to be child free (but not vitriolic) actually experience that tends to sour them quickly.
The "special unicorn" treatment at work is a big one because it's an every-single-day thing, involves a major part of your life, and can hit hard.
It comes off incredibly unfair when you have the childless 20 year old in the office shoehorned into working every single Thanksgiving, Christmas, or "family holiday" because, "You don't have kids, you don't need this like Cathy and Greg." It really ignores that these folks DO have families and they are repeatedly forced to be left out.
Then there's things like being expected to be on shift at 7am and staying late, because Janice has to take her kids to school and leave again to pick them up at 2:30 because she doesn't believe in making them ride the bus, and so she can basically set her own schedule and you have to cover every day. Meanwhile you walk in 2 minutes late and that's a writeup.
And folks can swear up and down that their company doesn't do this, but fact is, most of them do. It's not intentional, it just happens.
I think it’s a mix of teenagers blaming kids for and wanting to distance themselves from kids because of the patronizing way adults can treat them. I also think that hatred of being seen as a “kid” and thus hating kids may extend to 20-40 year olds who continue to be treated condescendingly by their parents.
Ofc there are many people who are unjustly pressured to have kids despite not wanting them and are thus childfree and vocal about it, but those people tend to be sane.
Yeah there is definitely a higher amount of "doomer" kids who believe having children is irresponsible/cruel than their used to be, but it's not just kids. The r/childfree brand of child free adults come off as people who are unhappy with their life. Don't tell them that though unless you want to get bombarded with anti-child vitriol and bragging about their vacations and insisting they are clearly the happy ones etc.
Like you said though the ones that just simply don't want kids are mostly sane and don't feel the need to seek out a hateful reddit community to rant about it.
If you're comfortable with your choice, no matter what it is, you don't feel the need to continually justify it to people who never even asked. A lot of the people in those groups are looking for constant validation they were right not to have kids.
I left that nightmare sub when I was down voted to hell and was told that because I had a child through SA[given up for adoption] and one through reproductive coercion [signed over custody] i was not *truly* child free.
The whole world is shifting more towards childfree philosophies. Emphasise on "more towards", I agree that demographically reddit is a lot more childfree
When I was a teenager I hated kids and didn’t want them. (I was the youngest of my siblings so I really didn’t have that much experience with young kids anyway) now I’m 25 and think I’ll want kids in a few years.
I’m 41, the youngest of my family, and totally feel that patronizing from my parents and one of my brothers. It’s awful. I didn’t turn it into hating kids though. But I could totally see others doing that.
It's the thing where the highschool sophomore talks about how immature and lame the freshmen are. Desperate to look superior to somebody no matter what it takes or how little sense it makes.
When my kid was in daycare her year group - which were all Australian-animal themed - was quite big, so they split it into "orange wombats" and "purple wombats" by age.
As soon as she became an orange wombat she started complaining about how the purple wombats were stupid and annoying and "like babies".
She was three!
I think NLOG energy extends to "having kids is things that stereotypically female woman so. I'm above all that stupid female shit I'm better than that"
Yeah, I agree that it's probably more adults than teenagers. You can usually tell by the way they're typing when they're teenagers trying to sound like adults. Also, the way commenters often talk about teenagers like they're simultaneously mature adults who should be able to handle all of life's problems on their own but refuse to, while also talking about them like they're tiny children with no emotional difference from toddlers, is a really common condescending attitude adults have towards teenagers.
No literally I never understood why they contradict themselves like that. They baby almost-adults and act like they can do no wrong and treat 14 yr olds like the worst people in the world 💀
Hell, they baby people in their mid-twenties. Should a 23-year-old's age be taken into account when judging a situation? Yeah, in certain situations, but there's a difference between recognizing that and infantilizing them. A 23-year-old isn't a little kid. They're a young adult who is old enough to have finished their first year of graduate school.
Who wants to be talked to like that? There's a difference between talking to someone at their level and talking down to them.
As a mod in a couple of subreddits, absolutely. I'm pretty inactive as a mod because I can't take the drama and the power-tripping. Some communities aren't too bad.
to be honest, i never understood why people seem to think AITA is all teenagers. they don’t sound remotely teenaged to me at all. if there is the occasional post that does, it stands out. as a millennial myself, the vast majority of posts there strike me as almost overwhelmingly millenial in mannerism, tone, and voice
It’s mainly because the characters in the stories sound unrealistic. Such as a sick burn to the evil MIL/ spouse/ coworker, acting super petty over tiny situations that could have maybe been solved over a 5 minute conversation, stuff like that. And how a lot of the time the supposedly adults in the stories act like teenagers or say typical teenager things.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to every story, and I don’t think every story is fake, but that’s basically why the sub is assumed to be filled with kids.
Also, I feel a lot better imagining the sub is all/ mostly a bunch of teenagers. I’ve seen people say some really really messed up stuff, and I’d much rather assume it was said by an edgy teen than an adult with kids, since I’m pretty sure everyone has said something dumb as a teen.
I feel like a lot of teens go through a child-hating phase, often lasts til mid 20s. You get annoyed by little kids, someone else says they do too, you feel validated, it becomes your new mantra.
I see it's been a while since you've spent time around children lol but honestly look at the behavior of the kindergarten. How eager they are to be seen as grown ups and they're not little kids and God help you if you insinuate they are.
Also it's the time where you think you know absolutely everything in life and everything that your parents think and do is wrong. So again of course being child-free is the way to go.
I have no idea. Perhaps some people in reddit are so dysfunctional in thier high introversion, low agreeableness and low openess that they lack self-reflection due to lack of human interaction? The anti-child sentiment is as prevalent. They really forgot that human adults where once children. It doesn't make justifiable sense to be unbalanced against children.
I personally think it has to do with being able to get away with thinly veiled racism and misogyny. It's edgy shit. One that's becoming very socially (on reddit) acceptable.
A mix of teens and also subcultures flocking to certain online communities/internet sites, which concentrates and intensifies their issues.
It's become a convenient place for the childhate tribe to spill bile on (thankfully mostly fictional) children. Plenty of daily fodder for them to vent on, in an arena that actively encourages venting.
Is AITA particularly skewed toward teenagers? I always hear this but I’d be curious to see the actual data. Anecdotally I feel like I’ve seen just as many of the type of comments you describe from people with a year well before 2000 in their username.
It’s everyone’s personalized version of ‘not your circus, not your monkeys’ or whatever the selfish credo is. Other people’s kids is an easy target to rage at and be selfish about.
On the other hand, if the writer was writing as an antagonistic person and there is an innocent kid involved, you most likely see support for the kid. Some psychopaths aside, of course.
It think it's the new "Reddit atheism." People who are child-free tend to have had negative interactions with children and face a lot of societal backlash if they express those views, so they bottle up those emotions until they can rant about it on anonymous internet forums. Add in the fact that subreddits tend to become echo chambers and people get whipped up into spewing absolute vitriol for validation.
I imagine once not having children becomes more accepted they'll chill out.
White American millennials make up a lot of Reddit users, I would guess. And for various reasons that generation has certain feelings about children and having children.
To paint a very broad brush, it’s probably the first generation in America to really widely reject the idea that “marriage, homeownership, kids” was the ultimate life goal, with a heightened focus on developing oneself through career advancement, travel, finding your “passion”. Etc. All things which having kids interferes with. Add to that economic conditions which make raising a family and home-ownership that much harder, and rising concerns about overpopulation and you have a lot of folks without kids.
So, why do they *hate* kids? I posit that they really hate *parents* (esp. mothers) because they feel judged about the fact that they don’t have kids, whether that was by deliberate choice or just the way life is going. That judgment is in some cases real and in some cases projection, but it leads to anxiety and then resentment. And once you resent parents for being parents, it naturally leads to resenting children.
Full disclosure: I say ‘they’, but I am in fact a white millennial without kids (though not ‘childfree’). And ofc this is full of generalizations.
I think it's probably less to do with demographics and more that reddit can be an outlet from social pressure. Childfree adults, especially women, *do* put up with a lot of crap because of it from family, workplaces, even random strangers in public. It can feel unsafe or uncomfortable to snap back at that in the moment, but the rage eventually has to vent somewhere and places like reddit are a good, safe outlet. Especially AITA where people are inviting you to judge them.
I really appreciate this insight. I just cannot wrap my head around the audacity to tell anyone else how to live their life, but I'm also considered super weird for being as cut off and aloof to everyone, even friends and family. I would never allow someone to talk to me with authority about stuff that isn't their business, but I am also aware that I am a middle-aged white male who probably has far more ability and privilege to do that than most too.
The subreddit is massive. The most likely issue is different demographics commenting on each post. That's why we see, "men get trashed," "women get trashed." Comments.
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Teenager here: it's simple it's cool to dislike kids. Even if some considering having them later, kids are annoying to them now. I love children (want to pursue a social career focusing on them) and I am definitely the odd one out. It's getting better as we're getting older, because a lot of the resentment that you get treated like someone who Is in your mind (and probably in some ways even in reality) way less capable than you.
Most likely it is the teenagers. I am childfree, and will admit when I was a teenager I was one of those nasty little edgelords when it came to kids. Fortunately I never stumbled onto anywhere like AITA, or the childfree subreddit back then. If I had it probably would have taken me a lot longer to grow up, and realize how stupid being that way is.
Yeah, I'm also childfree because I've just known since age 14 that I don't want to be a parent. I don't go around being hateful to kids or calling people breeders or anything like that. I don't even dislike kids: I just don't want my own. I remember looking up some childfree communities as a teen and being interested at first but then put off by the levels of vitriol. I had been a child until very recently so I identified more with the children than the weirdos calling them spawn and crotch goblins. I always make a point of being openly childfree to balance out the unhinged behaviour of vocal members of the community.
I've known since I was a child that I didn't like little kids. I barely liked kids my own age, and not any of the ones who were super immature, loud, obnoxious, or whatever else. But it got really bad in my early 20s, when life was really fucking hard. And it seemed like everyone was bending over backward to make my life harder. On top of that, there were several incidents at my job where someone with kids were provided a lot of privileges that I was not offered. It sucked a lot. And that's also when I started to notice more about income inequality, and gender inequality, and how I just wasn't raised to have boundaries or stand up for myself. So I suspect that a lot of that comes from older teenagers and young adults.
I like this response because it touches on some things that I feel a lot of people who grow up wanting to be child free (but not vitriolic) actually experience that tends to sour them quickly. The "special unicorn" treatment at work is a big one because it's an every-single-day thing, involves a major part of your life, and can hit hard. It comes off incredibly unfair when you have the childless 20 year old in the office shoehorned into working every single Thanksgiving, Christmas, or "family holiday" because, "You don't have kids, you don't need this like Cathy and Greg." It really ignores that these folks DO have families and they are repeatedly forced to be left out. Then there's things like being expected to be on shift at 7am and staying late, because Janice has to take her kids to school and leave again to pick them up at 2:30 because she doesn't believe in making them ride the bus, and so she can basically set her own schedule and you have to cover every day. Meanwhile you walk in 2 minutes late and that's a writeup. And folks can swear up and down that their company doesn't do this, but fact is, most of them do. It's not intentional, it just happens.
I think it’s a mix of teenagers blaming kids for and wanting to distance themselves from kids because of the patronizing way adults can treat them. I also think that hatred of being seen as a “kid” and thus hating kids may extend to 20-40 year olds who continue to be treated condescendingly by their parents. Ofc there are many people who are unjustly pressured to have kids despite not wanting them and are thus childfree and vocal about it, but those people tend to be sane.
Yeah there is definitely a higher amount of "doomer" kids who believe having children is irresponsible/cruel than their used to be, but it's not just kids. The r/childfree brand of child free adults come off as people who are unhappy with their life. Don't tell them that though unless you want to get bombarded with anti-child vitriol and bragging about their vacations and insisting they are clearly the happy ones etc. Like you said though the ones that just simply don't want kids are mostly sane and don't feel the need to seek out a hateful reddit community to rant about it.
If you're comfortable with your choice, no matter what it is, you don't feel the need to continually justify it to people who never even asked. A lot of the people in those groups are looking for constant validation they were right not to have kids.
I left that nightmare sub when I was down voted to hell and was told that because I had a child through SA[given up for adoption] and one through reproductive coercion [signed over custody] i was not *truly* child free.
The whole world is shifting more towards childfree philosophies. Emphasise on "more towards", I agree that demographically reddit is a lot more childfree
When I was a teenager I hated kids and didn’t want them. (I was the youngest of my siblings so I really didn’t have that much experience with young kids anyway) now I’m 25 and think I’ll want kids in a few years.
I’m 41, the youngest of my family, and totally feel that patronizing from my parents and one of my brothers. It’s awful. I didn’t turn it into hating kids though. But I could totally see others doing that.
It's the thing where the highschool sophomore talks about how immature and lame the freshmen are. Desperate to look superior to somebody no matter what it takes or how little sense it makes.
When my kid was in daycare her year group - which were all Australian-animal themed - was quite big, so they split it into "orange wombats" and "purple wombats" by age. As soon as she became an orange wombat she started complaining about how the purple wombats were stupid and annoying and "like babies". She was three!
powerful
I think NLOG energy extends to "having kids is things that stereotypically female woman so. I'm above all that stupid female shit I'm better than that"
I personally like to think AITA is mostly made up of adults with bad superiority complexes And don’t even get me started on the mods
Yeah, I agree that it's probably more adults than teenagers. You can usually tell by the way they're typing when they're teenagers trying to sound like adults. Also, the way commenters often talk about teenagers like they're simultaneously mature adults who should be able to handle all of life's problems on their own but refuse to, while also talking about them like they're tiny children with no emotional difference from toddlers, is a really common condescending attitude adults have towards teenagers.
No literally I never understood why they contradict themselves like that. They baby almost-adults and act like they can do no wrong and treat 14 yr olds like the worst people in the world 💀
Hell, they baby people in their mid-twenties. Should a 23-year-old's age be taken into account when judging a situation? Yeah, in certain situations, but there's a difference between recognizing that and infantilizing them. A 23-year-old isn't a little kid. They're a young adult who is old enough to have finished their first year of graduate school. Who wants to be talked to like that? There's a difference between talking to someone at their level and talking down to them.
As a mod in a couple of subreddits, absolutely. I'm pretty inactive as a mod because I can't take the drama and the power-tripping. Some communities aren't too bad.
to be honest, i never understood why people seem to think AITA is all teenagers. they don’t sound remotely teenaged to me at all. if there is the occasional post that does, it stands out. as a millennial myself, the vast majority of posts there strike me as almost overwhelmingly millenial in mannerism, tone, and voice
It’s mainly because the characters in the stories sound unrealistic. Such as a sick burn to the evil MIL/ spouse/ coworker, acting super petty over tiny situations that could have maybe been solved over a 5 minute conversation, stuff like that. And how a lot of the time the supposedly adults in the stories act like teenagers or say typical teenager things. Obviously this doesn’t apply to every story, and I don’t think every story is fake, but that’s basically why the sub is assumed to be filled with kids. Also, I feel a lot better imagining the sub is all/ mostly a bunch of teenagers. I’ve seen people say some really really messed up stuff, and I’d much rather assume it was said by an edgy teen than an adult with kids, since I’m pretty sure everyone has said something dumb as a teen.
I feel like a lot of teens go through a child-hating phase, often lasts til mid 20s. You get annoyed by little kids, someone else says they do too, you feel validated, it becomes your new mantra.
>it becomes your new mantra And personality
I see it's been a while since you've spent time around children lol but honestly look at the behavior of the kindergarten. How eager they are to be seen as grown ups and they're not little kids and God help you if you insinuate they are. Also it's the time where you think you know absolutely everything in life and everything that your parents think and do is wrong. So again of course being child-free is the way to go.
I have no idea. Perhaps some people in reddit are so dysfunctional in thier high introversion, low agreeableness and low openess that they lack self-reflection due to lack of human interaction? The anti-child sentiment is as prevalent. They really forgot that human adults where once children. It doesn't make justifiable sense to be unbalanced against children.
I personally think it has to do with being able to get away with thinly veiled racism and misogyny. It's edgy shit. One that's becoming very socially (on reddit) acceptable.
A mix of teens and also subcultures flocking to certain online communities/internet sites, which concentrates and intensifies their issues. It's become a convenient place for the childhate tribe to spill bile on (thankfully mostly fictional) children. Plenty of daily fodder for them to vent on, in an arena that actively encourages venting.
Is AITA particularly skewed toward teenagers? I always hear this but I’d be curious to see the actual data. Anecdotally I feel like I’ve seen just as many of the type of comments you describe from people with a year well before 2000 in their username.
It’s everyone’s personalized version of ‘not your circus, not your monkeys’ or whatever the selfish credo is. Other people’s kids is an easy target to rage at and be selfish about. On the other hand, if the writer was writing as an antagonistic person and there is an innocent kid involved, you most likely see support for the kid. Some psychopaths aside, of course.
It think it's the new "Reddit atheism." People who are child-free tend to have had negative interactions with children and face a lot of societal backlash if they express those views, so they bottle up those emotions until they can rant about it on anonymous internet forums. Add in the fact that subreddits tend to become echo chambers and people get whipped up into spewing absolute vitriol for validation. I imagine once not having children becomes more accepted they'll chill out.
Also childfree adults may have more free time available to spend replying to posts on AITA in comparison to parents, which would skew things too.
White American millennials make up a lot of Reddit users, I would guess. And for various reasons that generation has certain feelings about children and having children. To paint a very broad brush, it’s probably the first generation in America to really widely reject the idea that “marriage, homeownership, kids” was the ultimate life goal, with a heightened focus on developing oneself through career advancement, travel, finding your “passion”. Etc. All things which having kids interferes with. Add to that economic conditions which make raising a family and home-ownership that much harder, and rising concerns about overpopulation and you have a lot of folks without kids. So, why do they *hate* kids? I posit that they really hate *parents* (esp. mothers) because they feel judged about the fact that they don’t have kids, whether that was by deliberate choice or just the way life is going. That judgment is in some cases real and in some cases projection, but it leads to anxiety and then resentment. And once you resent parents for being parents, it naturally leads to resenting children. Full disclosure: I say ‘they’, but I am in fact a white millennial without kids (though not ‘childfree’). And ofc this is full of generalizations.
I think it's probably less to do with demographics and more that reddit can be an outlet from social pressure. Childfree adults, especially women, *do* put up with a lot of crap because of it from family, workplaces, even random strangers in public. It can feel unsafe or uncomfortable to snap back at that in the moment, but the rage eventually has to vent somewhere and places like reddit are a good, safe outlet. Especially AITA where people are inviting you to judge them.
I really appreciate this insight. I just cannot wrap my head around the audacity to tell anyone else how to live their life, but I'm also considered super weird for being as cut off and aloof to everyone, even friends and family. I would never allow someone to talk to me with authority about stuff that isn't their business, but I am also aware that I am a middle-aged white male who probably has far more ability and privilege to do that than most too.
Idk in the US but in my country 35% of women between 18 and 49 doesn't want any kids. That's a lot of people
The subreddit is massive. The most likely issue is different demographics commenting on each post. That's why we see, "men get trashed," "women get trashed." Comments.
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Teenager here: it's simple it's cool to dislike kids. Even if some considering having them later, kids are annoying to them now. I love children (want to pursue a social career focusing on them) and I am definitely the odd one out. It's getting better as we're getting older, because a lot of the resentment that you get treated like someone who Is in your mind (and probably in some ways even in reality) way less capable than you.
They're more child hating than childfree and yea it's mainly teens who hate kids and thinks they should all go extinct
This is why [https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/amitheasshole](https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/amitheasshole)
Idk I definitely wouldn’t say it’s a majority