You don’t hate kids. OK, maybe you know that. Maybe you think you hate bad parents, the kind who let their kids throw tantrums in public places. Or take them on airplanes where they cry and you can’t get away from it.
Here’s the piece you may be missing: your body loves kids.
The feeling you feel in your body is hundreds of thousands of years of hominid evolution crying out to do one thing and one thing only: run to the aid of the tribe-member in distress. To soothe, to distract, to aid their caregivers, to gather round and tell jokes and sing songs and make silly faces and pass the crying baby around from adult to adult.
Your entire body is activated by a screaming child because every cell in you is adapted to run to their aid. And absolutely nothing in our society has given you a mental model for this, let alone license to do anything about it. So you’re just stuck in that activation, and your Western individualism tells you to put that feeling on someone else.
