History Main / ChildrenAreAWaste

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Countries that have industrialized and acquired high scientific standards, and therefore also have rising per capita incomes and standards in education, have also seen their fertility rates fall dramatically (in the cases of Japan and several European countries, below the population replacement rate of 2.1 children/female). Especially when the manual unskilled labour is done/automated by robots, and where the value of scientific education is of utmost importance to the point that [[SocialDarwinist being an unemployed idiot is considered most dishonorable]] (as in the prevalent failed entrance exam suicide rates in both South Korea and Japan). This is also the reason why First-world countries (especially places where everything is expensive, e.g. again, Japan) detest unplanned parenthood (e.g. rape and teen pregnancy) and abortion is legal for rape, maternal life, health, mental health, socioeconomic factors, and/or fetal defects; in these places, you and your family will ''literally be unable to buy anything and starve'' if you make babies with impunity.
* If there's an intellectual ChildHater, expect them to bring up Thomas Malthus. To summarize his philosophy, [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards human population is exponential and may surpass industrial production which is linear.]] To demonstrate this, try feeding a dozen children who keep multiplying exponentially on nothing more than minimum wage.
** It's worth noting that the Malthusian idea of linear growth of food production is provably false, and the current estimate for Earth's carrying capacity (about 16 billion) is about 10 times the carrying capacity Malthus believed in and based primarily on environmental factors, not production ones. This does nearly nothing to deter anyone citing him.
** There's also the problem that, at least as of 2019, [[https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth the human population of the world is no longer increasing exponentially]].
* On a more humorous slant, in economics the concept of "inferior goods" refers to goods whose demand rises when the income of those buying them falls -- usual examples include things such as spaghetti and meatballs in a can. So children are often jokingly called an inferior good considering the collapse of fertility in industrialized countries.
* ShockJock Tom Leykis refers to having children as an "ego-trip", by which women are "dream killers" who use children to trap men into 18 years of child payments. His favorite line is, "Just because you have a human Xerox machine, is no reason to push the print button."
* Anti-natalism. Although the argument is that it's bad for the child, rather than the adults. Look up the book ''Better Never to Have Been''. In fact, an Indian man sued his parents for giving birth to him.
* The [[http://www.vhemt.org/ Voluntary Human Extinction Movement]] takes the view that ''people'' are a waste and since having children is how we make more people, well... The founder of the movement has made statements declaring human lives to be worth less than ''any other animal''.
* In the UK, it used to be common for some shops to write, "No more than [x] schoolchildren at a time", the implication being that schoolchildren were crowding the shop or stealing from it.
* Some people simply don't want the responsibility of raising children and think kids impede the kind of life they want to live. Not all of these people are necessarily {{Child Hater}}s, though, and most of these people certainly don't criticize anybody else who has kids.
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* In a deleted scene of ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles'', Helen/Elastigirl has to deal with a condescending woman at a neighborhood barbecue. Helen then lays down a verbal smackdown, prompting the other woman to gape in amazement and ask what Helen did before she had her child.

* In a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1buybmnQ0nQ video commentary]], the TIME Magazine story "The Childfree Life" is observed by Creator/BishopBarron to focus exclusively on the private preferences of couples, as if choosing to have a child or not was like choosing to eat an apple or an orange. What the Bishop laments is not that couples aren't having kids, is that they aren't doing so because they value their freedom over the value of their community, their family, and the truth.
-->'''Bishop Barron:''' Your life is finally not about you, and that's what makes life really worth living.

* The [[http://www.vhemt.org/ Voluntary Human Extinction Movement]] takes the view that ''people'' are a waste and since having children is how we make more people, well... The site points out the resource disparity in raising children in a developed country versus a third-world country -- "stopping at two" in North America will consume resources equivalent to "stopping at 97" in Bangladesh, for example. At the least, not having any more of your own lessens the resource burden on everyone else.

* In ''LightNovel/FateApocrypha'', this is the origin story of [[spoiler:Assassin of Black, Jack the Ripper.]] They represent the spirits and grudges of 80,000 abandoned, unwanted, and aborted children left by their mothers to die in Victorian-era England. [[spoiler:This is why Jack is so obsessed with finding and eviscerating her mother, so she could return to the warmth of the womb one more time.]]

In RealLife and in fiction, the StrawFeminist and the [[ConfirmedBachelor Straw Bachelor]] are generally at each other's throats. However, it seems that there is one thing that [[EnemyMine both parties agree on]]: children are a waste. For the straw feminist, a child serves only to [[FamilyVersusCareer chain the woman at home when she could be aspiring to bigger and better things]]. To the straw bachelor, a child means [[CommitmentIssues being tied down to one woman]], and having to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions for maintenance and education, when that time and money could be invested into better use.

* In one of the ''Literature/DiaryOfAWimpyKid'' books, Greg vows to spend his money only on himself and not on a bunch of ungrateful kids. Needless to say, this is HypocriticalHumor.

In works of AntiIntellectualism, intellectuals and rich industrialists will usually be portrayed in this manner, as {{Social Darwinist}}s who consider children as inherently worthless "animals" who can be aborted, except when they're invested in an expensive education to make them rich, professional, intelligent and therefore honourable "humans". This may be due to the low fertility rate (and legal abortions for rape, teen pregnancy and such unplanned forms of parenthood) in industrialized science-oriented countries, and how many said intellectuals know about the ideas of Thomas Malthus.

* Baby 5 from ''Manga/OnePiece'' came from a poor family who openly bemoaned her birth as an unneeded strain on their resources. Her own mother abandoned her in the mountains when she was a small child, cruelly calling her useless as she did. This left Baby 5 with a tramatized need to prove her worth by acting incredibly servile and obedient to anyone she meets.

* Something like this seems to be the prevailing mindset in the movie version of ''Film/LogansRun''. Most people live carefree lives and don't bother with child rearing. Their "[[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans Utopia]]" has no family units, children are put in state homes by their "seed mother" and raised en masse. Francis notes that most men don't bother to hang out at the nursery to meet their children, and Logan [[PetTheDog (who is doing just that)]] declares that he's not so deviant that he's interested in meeting the mother. Is it any wonder a bunch of wild children went all ''Film/MadMax'' and took over an apartment tower? People recognize that kids are important to society as a whole, they just don't see any need to be personally involved in rearing them. In the book the movie was based on, people are killed upon reaching the age of 21, so the kid was going to be orphaned young anyway; the factory method makes a lot of sense. The movie raised it to 30, probably to avoid DawsonCasting or having wild orgies filled with kids 13 or younger.
* The 1972 sci-fi movie ''{{Film/ZPG}}'' (Zero Population Growth) has the human population striving to reach zero population growth. So, having a baby causes the parents and child to be put to death. Many people still want children, so vaguely lifelike dolls are sold to fill this need (they don't). Naturally, the protagonist does have a baby and must run from the authorities. Usually, it's mandatory for them to abort if they get pregnant (oddly, birth control was not mentioned). The state recognizes the psychological need most people have though, and provides them with life-like dolls instead. As you'd expect, this really doesn't cut it for everyone.

* In ''Literature/ABrothersPrice'', one male baby is born for every nine girls; they tend to spontaneously miscarry, abort, or die as small children. Boys, therefore, are [[GenderRarityValue economically valuable]]. A family -- several sisters married to one man -- usually tries to have one male child to swap for a boy who will marry their daughters, and others to sell for "[[TitleDrop brother's price]]". With those ratios it's rare for a family to have multiple sons, but some [[MassiveNumberedSiblings keep trying]], often becoming rather careless with their newborn daughters. Society views this as tremendously indulgent, and a family constantly producing children is seen as wasting its time and energy.

* Robin from ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'' is deeply opposed to getting married and having children. This eventually causes her and Ted, who wants to settle down and start a family, to break up -- they realize they can't ever sustain a long-term relationship if they want such different things in life. When Robin finds out she's infertile, she's still devastated, because she now has to live with the knowledge that even if she decided she did want to be a mother, she no longer has any choice and the door she never wanted to open is now closed forever. To cope, she tries to convince herself that her infertility is a good thing, but when she get home that night, she find out that Ted has made a Christmas light show to make her feel better, and she finally breaks down.

* In one of ''VideoGame/{{BioShock|1}}'''s loading screens, a scientist, Dr. Suchong, is quoted saying that children are a waste, because they mature slowly and consume resources while contributing nothing. He then remarks that "[[BodyHorror There must be something to be done to speed the process.]]" Ultimately, [[spoiler:he succeeded in discovering a way to rapidly mature a child to adulthood. His success? ''You.'']]

** Rosa shows some shades from this mostly because her boyfriend left her when she was pregnant and left her with a huge loan she co-signed with him. She sometimes [[AbusiveParents hits her daughter]] and has been commenting on having trouble getting married because of Maria. She also feels conflicted in that while she loves Maria, she is having problems liking her due to her interest in magic and her VerbalTic.
** Another, very dark example can be found with [[spoiler:Kyrie, who in Episode 7 is shown not to care one bit about her daughter Ange and only considering children to be something to tie a man down with. She is also willing to take the gold and leave her daughter behind while she flees out of the country]]. And while she is a piece controlled by Bernkastel it was established long before that a piece can only do what the real person would be able to do.

* This is what many characters in ''Webcomic/QuestionableContent'' seem to agree on implicitly. In several cases justified since they came from families where something went wrong, and most of them are in their 20s and nowhere near ready to consider having families. But apparently not even Marten Reed seems to think that the world needs another Marten Reed. The author has expressed the same opinion in the footnotes that accompanied one comic where this was expressed, so it's apparently an opinion he shares. Subverted with [[http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2354 Faye,]] whom later says she might consider having kids later in her life, indicating her views on the subject may have evolved.

* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'' we see a BadFuture where Doofenshmirtz is in charge. It turns out to be the MoralGuardians who really pushed the world into dystopia, though; they decided that all imagination was dangerous and irresponsible, and since children naturally were imaginative, so were they. For everyone's protection they locked them away in cryogenic sleep until they grew up. The real implication is that it was entirely Linda's doing since it was a reaction to one of the boys' projects and we've seen that she's pretty much the only adult in town that doesn't know about them. In contrast, the alternate-dimension Doof from the movie just instituted a curfew.

* Meta example: much of the ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' fandom absolutely detests dwarf children for this. And while it's easy to modify the settings to prevent a baby boom, most of them prefer [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential other treatments]]. ZigZagged InUniverse: since Dwarves will go to battle armed with the first thing they lay hands on, the Dwarven Baby Flail is a common fate of battle-born Dwarf children, but there are stories of the mothers who do this starving to death trying to find them back.

** It's worth noting that the Malthusian idea of linear growth of food production is provably false, and the current estimate for Earth's carrying capacity (about 16 billion) is about 10 times the carrying capacity Malthus believed in and based primarily on environmental factors, not production ones. This does nearly nothing to deter anyone citing him. (Citation needed. Most scientists estimate the Earth's carrying capacity to be approximately 2 billion if everyone lived like an American - https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support)

* [[Creator/BenCroshaw Yahtzee]] of ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' has repeatedly expressed his distaste for children in his reviews (possibly for comedic effect, it can be hard to tell sometimes), once comparing growing up and maturing to "overcoming [a] disability", and one of his ''ThreeWishes'' is for [[{{Squick}} "all childbearing wombs to escape from their owners and float off into the air like a cloud of greasy balloons"]].

* ''Literature/TheBible'': In [[Literature/TheFourGospels the gospel of Luke]], as Jesus is going to the cross and He meets a group of women weeping for Him, He tells them, "Do not weep for Me, but rather weep for yourselves, for a time will come when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed,'" implying that there will come a time when the people of Jerusalem will meet such death that bringing a child into the world during that time would only imperil them to the same suffering as everybody else.

** It's worth noting that the Malthusian idea of linear growth of food production is provably false, and the current estimate for Earth's carrying capacity (about 16 billion) is about 10 times the carrying capacity Malthus believed in and based primarily on environmental factors, not production ones. This does nearly nothing to deter anyone citing him.

* Some people simply don't want the responsibility of raising children and think kids impede the kind of life they want to live. Not all of these people are necessarily {{Child Hater}}s, though, and not all of these people certainly don't criticize anybody else who has kids.

* This is what many characters in ''Webcomic/QuestionableContent'' seem to agree on implicitly. In several cases justified since they came from families where something went wrong, and most of them are in their 20s and nowhere near ready to consider having families. But apparently not even Marten Reed seems to think that the world needs another Marten Reed. The author has expressed the same opinion in the footnotes that accompanied one comic where this was expressed, so it's apparently an opinion he shares. Later on averted where [[http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2354 Faye]] says she might consider having kids later in her life, indicating her view on the subject may have evolved.

* In one of the ''Literature/DiaryOfAWimpyKid'' books, Greg vows to spend his money on himself and not on a bunch of ungrateful kids. Needless to say, this is HypocriticalHumor.

* In one of the ''Literature/DiaryOfAWimpyKid'' books, Greg vows to spend his money on himself instead of a bunch of ungrateful kids. Needless to say, this is HypocriticalHumor.

* Baby 5 from ''Manga/OnePiece'' came from a poor family who openly bemoaned her birth as an unneeded strain on their resources. Her own mother abandoned her in the mountains when she small child, cruelly calling her useless as she did. This left Baby 5 with a tramatized need to prove her worth by acting incredibly servile and obedient to anyone she meets.

In works of AntiIntellectualism, intellectuals and rich industrialists will usually be portrayed in this manner, as {{Social Darwinist}}s who consider children as inherently worthless "animals" who can be aborted, except when they're invested in an expensive education to make them rich, professional, intelligent and therefore honourable "humans". This is may be due to the low fertility rate (and legal abortions for rape, teen pregnancy and such unplanned forms of parenthood) in industrialized science-oriented countries, and how many said intellectuals know about the ideas of Thomas Malthus.

* Some members of the Childfree Community, like Betty White and Dolly Parton, take this position, for one reason or another.

* On ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', there is a group of single people who were tired of dealing with other people's children and led a campaign for more restrictions on kids ("The children are our future: today belongs to ''me!''"). They succeeded, and Marge led a counter-campaign to get everything [[StatusQuoIsGod back to normal]].

* Some people simply don't want the responsibility of raising children, and think kids impede the kind of life they want to live. They are not necessarily {{Child Hater}}s, though, and certainly don't criticize anybody else who has kids.

* Some people simply don't want the responsibility of raising children, and think kids impede the kind of life they want to live. They are not necessarily ChildHaters, though, and certainly don't criticize anybody else who has kids.

** There's also the problem that, at least as of 2019, [[human population is no longer increasing exponentially https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth]].

* The LGBTQ community, particularly asexuals, tend to not want kids. Also, gay cis men cannot physically give birth.

** Keep in mind that childfree means NO children. EVER. Not even stepkids, adopted kids, or foster kids.

In RealLife and in fiction, the StrawFeminist and the [[ConfirmedBachelor Straw Bachelor]] are generally at each other's throats. However, it seems that there is one thing that [[EnemyMine both parties agree on]]: children are a waste. For the straw feminist, a child serves only to [[StayInTheKitchen chain the woman at home]] when she could be aspiring to bigger and better things. To the straw bachelor, a child means being tied down to one woman, and having to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions for maintenance and education, when that time and money could be invested into better use.