Rage against the ‘breeders.’

By Jonathan V. Last
September 13, 2010

Like a puckish uncle determined to cause trouble at Thanksgiving dinner, the Washington Post periodically homes in on the existential conflicts that divide its readership. Earlier this summer, the Post Metro section headlined such a story “With City’s Baby Boom, Parental Guidance Suggested.” The article opened in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park, where a sudden outpouring of babies has caused altercations between parents, who bring their children, and childless adults, who bring their dogs, to play in the park.

The Lincoln Park neighborhood is gentrified and expensive—the median price for a rowhouse is in the $900,000s—and the dog owners there are annoyed at having to share space with human dependents. In an attempt to bring peace, a local pet coach who calls herself the Doggy Lama has been holding “dog citizen” workshops to help pet owners learn to deal peaceably with the interlopers. But it’s tough sledding. One dog owner interviewed by the Post said that she wished the kids could be confined to a fenced-in area of the park. “I find people with children to be tyrants,” she explained. “As someone who doesn’t have children, I think children are fine. I don’t think they own everything.”

The Post story detailed similar scuffles in other trendy Washington neighborhoods and generated 479 comments on the paper’s website before commenting was finally shut down. Readers ran about 60-to-40 against parents and children. the rest image

Yet for all the Malthusian worry-warting, at the street-level, being childfree is mostly about disdain for conservative traditionalists. Thus, the childfree refer to parents as “breeders” and mothers who breastfeed as “moomies” (as in cow). Those are the nicer terms.