Source: Childfree People Act Annoying When You Demand an Explanation Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: December 31, 2025 | Archived: March 21, 2026

I can thank this comic for tricking rabid antinatalists into following me and then feeling betrayed when I had kids

But repeatedly, people do give a shit. People respond with things like, “Sorry you’ll never know the joy of your child saying ‘I love you!’” or “It’s SAD what people care about these days—what LOSERS” or “What a pathetic, immature degenerate you are, putting VACATIONS in front of your CHILD” as if these people have children who they’ve chosen to keep in cosmic suspended animation instead of bringing into the world. It’s giving, “not actually happy being a parent.” Surely, if someone who wouldn’t make a good parent—who you just admitted is too “selfish” to have kids—chooses not to be a parent, that’s a good thing, right?

Lately, the most recent person to come under fire for this decision is actress/writer Jameela Jamil, who, to her credit, is one of the only celebrities who actually writes on Substack on a semi-regular basis, and who I believe is definitely writing her articles herself. She’s also a decent writer, but reliably gets crap every time she posts here because she embodies a certain late-2010s voice that doesn’t resonate on Substack the way it might resonate on, say, Threads or Bluesky. Almost everything she says and writes would be a slam-dunk universally loved hot take in 2015. Just as an example, she responded to a recent critic on Substack by accusing her of being “embarrassingly white,” which would have killed on Tumblr ten years ago.

Either way, her recent article covered all the reasons she didn’t have kids—the kind of article that would have been a runaway viral success in a different era—and the backlash took an interesting turn. But ultimately, the most annoying parts of her article only had to be written because people refuse to accept “I don’t want children” as an explanation.

Some of her reasons for being voluntarily childfree made perfect sense to me, such as the fact that she just straight up doesn’t like kids or cleaning up poop (valid, actually) or the fact that she knows how much anxiety comes along with motherhood (CAN CONFIRM…not that I regret it, but she’s right about that one.) Other reasons struck me as a bit, uh, questionable, such as the fear of having a son who would grow up to be a sexual predator (not to be a “toxic boy mom” but of all the things I worry about regarding my son, this is not really one of them. I think it’s weird for any parent’s first fear about their child is that they will commit sex crimes, but then again, she’s not a parent, so who cares.)

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the article a little annoying. In particular, I did not love the insinuation that anyone who chooses to procreate in 2025—or 2026, for that matter—clearly hasn’t been paying attention to all the various impending catastrophes, including but not limited to the “war with Russia” between what I think she means to be the UK (Big if true!) among many other atrocities which apparently never happened before these unprecedented times. I also didn’t particularly like her assumption that if she were a mother, despite hating children, she would actually be so amazingly nurturing and attentive that everyone would suffer for it (“I would be too attentive as a mom” is like the childfree version of “I can’t wear white pants because my butt is too bubbly and perky”) Last but not least, she closes with the terrifying statistic about children going missing every two hours to support a worldview about pedophiles lurking behind every bush to kidnap children at random, which was nearly giving Qanon in its degree of paranoia. In reality, the “missing children” statistics are mostly about teenage runaways and parents “kidnapping” their own kids in custody battles—still bad, but not the same thing as the ever-present threat of roaming pedos grabbing kids from shopping carts.

On the other hand, some of her critics needed to—how do I say this in my mom voice—take some time to themselves for their big feelings. People got mad because she said she finds children loud and annoying, but I guess that just didn’t bother me. Children are kind of loud and annoying, and obviously I love my own (and enjoy volunteering with children) but if I didn’t have a desire to be a mother, I can easily see how I would have limited patience with kids in general. I say this as someone who really doesn’t like dogs. I know dogs aren’t children, but look, I can’t help not liking dogs. If I could force myself to like dogs, I would. Do you know how much of a liability it was to work at a “doggo friendly” office in the 2010s and hate the very dogs who were slobbering on my leg for eight hours a day while I went on Reddit and pretended to work? I don’t want to see dogs imperiled. I don’t want to kill or eat dogs. But I also find them annoying and gross most of the time. I would rather babysit a stranger’s child than a stranger’s dog. This should not offend dog owners; it’s really a “live and let live” thing. If Jamil went on to say that she hated children so much she wanted them barred from every establishment, that would obviously be another story, because unlike dogs, children are members of our society, but all she’s doing in response to this “dislike” is choosing not to procreate. Seems fine!

It’s also worth pointing out that her article is basically half comedy, which is a tricky note to hit when you’re saying really serious things about genocide and human trafficking and then also want to land a joke about poop. I walk this line constantly, so she has my sympathy. In fact, sometimes people have only read my serious stuff and find it ridiculous that I’m in the “humor” category (alternative explanation: I’m not that funny, even when I’m trying to be.) Sometimes I mix humor and earnesty, and then people can’t tell when I’m kidding. This is why I frequently drop absurd jokes about gooning just to make it clear. Insert gooning joke here.

But ultimately, Jamil’s article was doomed from the start because she didn’t owe anyone an explanation. When childfree people feel like they owe people an explanation, they come up with incredibly annoying Bluesky shit about the global rising tide of fascism and climate catatrophe, and how they’re not parents because actually they’d be way better parents—too good, actually—compared to all the shitstain parents of modern day, when the reality is that even if they lived in a utopia, they still wouldn’t have kids because they actually just don’t want them. Unfortunately, the aforementioned triggered parents (who may or may not be insecure about their own lives) demand an explanation beyond “I don’t want kids.” The truth is, there’s no explanation that would satisfy them, but childfree people probably feel a bit pressured to supply some conversation-ending reason that feels morally superior to a simple preference not to have children. Ergo, we get, “What if my son becomes a rapist?” so that if you criticize, you look like you’re pro-rapist-son or whatever. (Just as I thought we had settled the “gay son or thot daughter” debate, Rapist Son enters the picture.)

If we want childfree people to stop with the self-important rants about how actually, they don’t have kids because they’re “paying attention to gestures wildly THE STATE OF THE WORLD?!?!?” we should probably just get off their asses about how “selfish” it is not to want kids. Most of us have or don’t have kids because it’s what we wanted. I was “selfish” to have kids, because my kids actually didn’t ask to be born at all and I just wanted to have them because I wanted it. That’s no different from a voluntarily childfree person devoting their life to something other than parenthood, because they wanted to.

Troublingly, this shaming trend persists with people who identify as “one and done,” a community of parents who have (usually) chosen to have only one child. Surely, there’s nothing wrong with a couple deciding to have an only child so they can give that child more time and resources, right? WRONG! Every time I see a video from a one and done influencer, the top comments are full of people accusing them of being “selfish” for prioritizing “material comforts” over an apparent duty to have three or more children. Even if you have a child, it’s not enough for these people.

I can see why, for those who are deeply concerned about the birth rate, it’s troubling to see people turning away from parenthood. But I don’t think voluntarily childfree people are the singular (or even a major) cause of the birth rate decline. The whole thing is downstream of an increasingly prosperous world with higher living standards and more than ever options for things to do other than having children young. The black pill is that I’m not sure what can really be done, because rolling back human rights and making the world poorer probably wouldn’t help either (and would be, uh, bad) but pressuring people who admittedly dislike being around children into having them anyway is probably not the way to go. If you really want to raise the birth rate, you should focus on getting people to meet their spouses earlier on in life, and then making it easier for couples who want children to have more of them. Getting people off their phones would probably help (unless they are reading this Substack).

In fact, a while ago, I polled young childfree people on their reasons for not wanting kids. They were allowed to select as many options as they wanted. The most common reasons were as followed:

• I wouldn’t enjoy being a parent (67%)

• Children would make it harder for me to do things I enjoy (64%)

• Children are too expensive (48%)

• I wouldn’t make a good parent (45%)

A smaller percentage of people did select antinatalist or “state of the world” reasons, but it was a much smaller percentage than the people who selected these far more typical, self-interested reasons. My theory is that most of the people who state “climate catastrophe” or any other altruistic reason for not having children generally just don’t want kids anyway but feel the need to provide a reason that people won’t judge. Likely, Jameela Jamil wouldn’t even be writing an essay about how irresponsible it is to bring children into the world if people had just accepted her decision and left her alone!

When I said I was writing about this article, people assumed my interest was in “pwning” Jamil, which it really isn’t. People who don’t want kids should not have them, and I don’t mean that in a “thank GOD she isn’t reproducing” kinda way. Nobody ever should have bugged her about not having kids, or bugged any other childfree person for their choice. In general, you will find that childfree people’s explanations for why they don’t want kids will become a lot less annoying if you just don’t ask for an explanation at all.