Elementary teacher here. I, of course, love kids. I find them exasperatingly childish sometimes.
I had a great deal of difficulty in jr. high. I was such an outcast, had few friends, was picked on. Now, as an adult, I don’t really blame them. Not that I deserved that treatment. It’s just that it was tolerated by adults, and yes, even by my parents, who knew I was bullied and did nothing.
Kids are opportunists. They will live up to the kind of behavior that is expected of them or tolerated.
So, there you have it…one person who didn’t like kids in her age group but still loves them as adults.
That describes me vis a vis boys. I didn’t like them growing up, didn’t fit in, and I still don’t like most of them.
Now, I didn’t try to fit in with the girls so there was less rejection there. I still don’t relate to them as much as adults but I like them better than little boys.
I hate children, always have. Mine were both accidents, and I cried throughout both pregnancies. I also found it hard to warm up to them as babies. Now that they have become small people who talk and have personalities, everything is great and I love them. Would I want another? Hell no! I have become marginally more tolerant of other people’s children, but I don’t think they’re cute and I don’t willingly spend time in their presence.
I did have sufficient friends as a child, at least until seventh grade. But I had already made up my mind not to have children by then.
I will offer this: I never liked the silly parts of being a kid. Things that supposedly appeal to children, like bright clothing with animals printed on it, or oddly colored food, or goofy songs where you’re meant to clap along or dance in a circle…I hated that kind of crap. I always felt it was beneath my dignity. I suspected the grown-ups of perpetrating these idiotic things so they could laugh at all the children acting like morons.
Funny, but I was much the same way. I mean, I’d go out and play with the few friends I had and we’d make up our own fun things to do, but when it came to school activitities I couldn’t stand a one of them. I always felt like engaging in them would be making an embarassing spectacle of myself. They seemed so peurile and pointless and were really no fun at all whatever the teacher may have thought. I was usually the only kid that seemed to think or feel that way though as most of the rest of the kids would jump in with gusto, or at least with a sense of team spirit.
I am not sure if I was a social outcast…but I guess I was. I wasn’t ever really bullied but I was (and am) fat with bad hair, a tomboy and a nerd. I wasn’t ostracized so much as I didn’t want to be included.
Most of my happy childhood time was spent in the company of my family. And now, the only kids I can stand are the ones I’m related to. And only then in very small doses. I think I feel such a strong family bond that I can’t even think about hating them, so I don’t.
But other kids…they make me anxious and angry. And I do not want any of my own.
And I agree with **Harmonious Dischord’**s progression of why one might not like kids. I never gave a second thought to wether or not I liked kids. In fact in my very early 20’s I assumed I wanted them. But now at 27 I would rather die than spawn - and I think other people have driven me to it.
Chalk up another one. Complete outcast as a kid - too weird for the weird group, etc. Much prefer being a grown-up. And the thought of having my own kids gives me the screaming meemies. I like kids when they are appropriately controlled by others.
It almost seems like if I had my own, I’d have to partially regress, centre my life around the kid and kid’s stuff and take an interest in DishtowelFrank or whatever the current thing would be, to the expense of my adult life, and I’d just end up resenting it. Thanks, I’d rather hold off until it’s old enough to hold up its end of the conversation.
That pretty much describes me, except for the tomboy part.
I’ll be the exception to the rule though (at least according to the trend in this thread): I love kids, especially babies & toddlers.
Still, my worst experiences with kids were in middle school, so maybe I do have an aversion to the older ones. Then again, 6-8th graders are typically the worst behaved if you ask most teachers.
At any rate, I do think the OP has a good theory here.
I don’t fit your hypothesis. I had a decent social life as a kid – not tons of friends, but enough to suit me, and I was one of those kids who would talk at length with anybody. But I never liked kids who were more than a couple years younger than me. As I grew older, that came to encompass all children. I still don’t like kids.
I don’t fit the hypothesis, either. I could be classified as an outcast when I was a kid. My friends (when I had any) were generally older than me, and I prefered to hang out with adults.
In my late teens and early 20s I couldn’t stand being around kids. I was pretty sure I’d never have any of my own.
Then I ended up helping in my kids’ classes, teaching 4-H, running games for teenagers in my bookstore, and writing kids’ books for a living. I get along well with kids, and enjoy spending time with my own kids.
I was detested as a kid by the other kids, and very much adult-identified, but far from not liking kids I tend to enjoy their company more than that of adults. Generalizing of course.
First off, I’m not subject to the expectations and judgments that kids impose on each other because I’m not a peer. Similarly, as a kid, although I was often subject to various jusgments and expectations that adults impose on kids, a lot of that could be summarized as “ageism”*, and from those less inclined to exhibit it I was not subject to the type of expectations and judgments that adults impose on each other because once again we were not peers.
Secondly, as far as the ageism thing, I tended to agree with a lot of adults’ uncomplimentary assessment of chidlren, I just felt they weren’t giving me a chance to demonstrate that I was any different. (So, like a hypothetical female hating condescending or hostile attitudes towards her just because she’s a woman but at the same time resenting other women in a wholesale sort of way for not being just like men in every way except for the possession of biological femaleness, I was not exactly a full-blown children’s libber or anything).
As I got older, my confidence that the world was being run by mature kind benevolent wise people was first shaken then shattered, and instead of seeing the child-world as a horrid social environment different from the adult-world because belligerent kids coerced and intimidated, I began to see the adult-world as the primary repository of all that and noted that the kids most inclined to behave that way were the ones treated that way most severely by adults. Not that kids are angels or anything, but I quit seeing them as nasty brutish devils.
I don’t like all kids (or vice versa) but they can be really good company.
This is a statement that always elicts a certain curiosity in me, when I hear about people who have children, yet don’t like children outside of their own. If you don’t mind me asking, if you dislike babies/toddlers so much, why do you want to have one?
The OP describes me to a T. Now that I’ve dated a couple of women who really want kids, I’ve opened my eyes to it a little and realized that the reason I don’t like kids is because they exemplify a less extreme version of the lack of social skills that I had in spades as a child, and because when I was a kid I felt like I was just waiting out an 18-year sentence. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy my childhood, and I don’t have much in common with people who are presently enjoying their childhood. I’m working on it, though.
This sounds similar to my childhood. I was a tomboy, but a nerdy tomboy (I liked stereotypical “boy” things but wasn’t into sports or running around). I wasn’t fat but I thought I was ugly (looking back I wasn’t–just an average-looking kid who wasn’t even close to being in style hair- or clothes-wise). I was an only child and my mom was quite out of touch with current styles which meant that she was always trying to get me to wear clothes that would have been cool when she was a child/teen (like saddle shoes). I was also a brain, but oddly I never took any flack because of that–I was proud of being smart and nobody hassled me about it. I got picked on some but not excessively, had a couple of close friends (didn’t really want more than that) and my childhood was, for the most part, pretty good.
I don’t have kids, never wanted them from the time I was a small child myself, and don’t particularly like them until they get to be over about 11 or 12. I particularly dislike toddlers–I don’t find them cute at all, so they’re basically mobile little bringers of chaos, germs, and disorder.
I like kids. I’m patient with them, and they generally trust me, and they like my cookies.
I was somewhat of a social outcast as a child, but I believe that I would not have been anywhere near as easy a target if adults hadn’t broken my spirit very early on. As such, I don’t fret about a kid who’s acting up. I figure, the world is full of adults who would love to take a kid down a peg, so I leave it to them. If a child is being particularly rambunctious, I will try to find a way for them to channel their energy.
Example: Once, around 1990, I was on a plane, and a little girl was running up the aisle and down the aisle and up and down and up and down…Finally, I waved to her, and she stopped near me. I had dug out a cassette of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Put the headset on her, she sat down across the aisle, and within three minutes, she had nodded off. Her mom, who had of course seen the whole thing, was flabbergasted.
I don’t remember thinking this through, and I probably didn’t, but I must have surmised that at that time of the night, her body wanted to sleep, but her brain just wouldn’t let her. Pastoral Symphony slowed down the neurons, or however that works, resulting in instant zzzzz.
So basically, I don’t try to be a friend or an enemy; I just try to be a person. And that usually works.
