In the book Hannah’s Children, author Catherine Pakaluk discusses the ways widespread birth control use have made having children “something you plan around, not something you plan for.” And while the hope of many who called for this revolution was that it would make the children who are planned into existence more welcome, the reality has been the emergence of a society that believes few if any children should be born, planned or not.

Recently, singer Chappell Roan said on the Call Her Daddy Podcast that everyone she knows with kids is “in hell.” Instead of supporting her friends, who likely confided to her something deeply personal about the difficulty of the work of raising children, she scoffed at them in public. Many parents rightly took offense at her comments and deemed them belittling of their vocation and their children. 

Nevertheless, Roan, a drag queen-imitating lesbian, feels empowered to describe raising children as “hell” with abandon because she views childbearing and rearing as a ridiculous and avoidable mistake. Hers is a sadly unsympathetic way of responding to parents in hard seasons of life, and it is born of a culture that views children as commodities to be discarded or welcomed based on convenience. 

It’s not that people hate the dimpled cheeks of a cooing baby. What they hate is anything that poses a nuisance to their current enjoyment of pleasures to which they feel entitled, particularly when they feel that nuisance could have, and should have, been avoided. 

Few talk about what this sort of mentality does to the children who hear themselves described in this way. I’ll never forget an older lady I encountered in the restaurant bathroom while I was extremely pregnant with my son, who told her curious 5-year-old granddaughter that “that lady’s baby’s gonna grow up to annoy her” and sarcastically told me “good luck” as she left. What was that little girl supposed to believe about her own worth as a child, my worth as a woman who chose to have a child, and, when she becomes an adult, her own worth should she choose to have children? 

Anyone with children will attest: Kids are noisy, messy, and do not come out of the womb with a mastery of social graces. Your baby could start giggling at your necklace in the middle of a funeral. Even the best-behaved toddlers will likely have at least one meltdown on the grocery aisle floor. Any one of these incidents and a thousand others like them would be hard in itself, but every one of them is made harder by the reproachful glances of strangers who think you should have stayed home or, worse, stayed on birth control. 

The lack of visible children in public spaces is both a symptom and a reinforcement of our society’s anti-child sentiment. While there are certainly times and places that ought to remain adult-only environments, children do have to fly on planes and other forms of public transportation, and attend church with their parents. These spaces are technically open to children, but it seems like they are not when those children start acting like … well, children. When did we collectively decide these are adult-only spaces? And when did other adults decide that the appropriate response to children giving their parents a difficult time is to scold them rather than to assist them?

We must return to a society in which the unabashed presence of children is seen as a matter of course. More than that, it should be seen as a blessing. 

Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a society that won’t accommodate children or parents because it no longer sees children as intrinsically beneficial.

On vacation a few weeks ago, I left dinner to change my baby’s diaper in a bathroom stall right outside the dining room. There was no changing station at that or any of the nearby bathrooms. It’s not that facilities can’t provide amenities specifically aimed to assist parents and babies, it’s that they often don’t want to. No changing stations were available, yet every bathroom I tried proudly announced it was wheelchair accessible. In the end, I was forced to change him on a clean pad in the corner of a stair landing that seemed to have relatively low traffic. A passer-by gave us a surprised and slightly disgusted look. I almost couldn’t blame him—who wants to see or smell a dirty diaper on his way to dinner? But what he didn’t know is his lack of compassion for babies and the parents trying to raise them is what helped create a society that hates them. And this was precisely why I had to change my baby there in the first place.