Kids: More Than Whiny Pooping Machines

I have been known to not be the biggest fan of kids. I may or may not in the past have referred to the little monsters as snot-rockets, parasites, liabilities, accidents, demons, and scary aliens. This is not to say I hate all kids, out of the thousands I have met – I have really enjoyed five or six of them.

I bring this up because it has recently come to my attention that maybe kids aren’t the problem at all. Perhaps I have been side-eyeing them in restaurants and sticking my tongue out at them on buses for all the wrong reasons. See, children are just tiny little humans who don’t really know how the world works. Sometimes when I’m really hungry I feel like screaming and kicking strangers too – it’s just that I’ve learned not to do that any more (unless I’ve had a few drinks). Hence I am proposing that maybe kids aren’t the closest thing we have to the Antichrist, perhaps irresponsible parents are.

I was walking up the steps from the subway station last week when I hit a bunch of traffic – just a ton of people clogging up the stairwell. I was hot and tired, so I manoeuvred my way through the crowd to find a pint-sized toddler making her way up the steps, one step at a time. My first instinct was to punt the little loser to Kingdom Come, but then I realised that this puny kid was just busting her little butt trying to get back to the Earth’s surface – the person I should be drop-kicking was her dad. This guy was just standing next to her taking his sweet time marvelling at his fastest sperm putting one foot in front of the other on an incline.

I had an earth-shattering revelation that maybe I’ve been taking my anger out on the wrong people all along. Maybe kids aren’t the cause for everything bad in the world: global warming, genocide, over-priced chocolate, Jack Nicholson’s smile, maybe, just maybe, their parents are.

So I encourage all of you fellow kid-haters to take a step back and really examine the world around you. Are kids flesh-covered demons that need to be kept indoors at all times – or are they just small naive humans following the lead of their flesh-covered demon parents? I have come to the conclusion that kids really aren’t the downfall of society – their parents are. And I feel bad for some of them, particularly the exhausted little girl who had to climb forty steps without help while sixty people plotted her inevitable death from ten feet away.

Kat Stubing