TRANSCRIPT
I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t like children. I think it’s actually normal. Sometimes people even brag about it. “I don’t like kids. I don’t like them. They’re smelly, they’re nasty, they’re dirty. I like to stay away from them. I don’t want kids.” Or sometimes they actually have kids and they still say, “I just don’t like kids in general.” Yeah, maybe I make to some degree an exception for my own children, but I don’t like kids.
And then I think about in my own family of origin, in my own history, my own ancestry. The main example I think of this is my father’s mother. My father told me when I was a little boy, he said it about his mother almost in a funny way. He would say it sort of as humor. He’d say, “Yeah, your grandmother, she doesn’t like children. She says it openly, I don’t like kids.” And he would laugh about it. He thought it was funny.
And as a child, I remember because my dad stated it as fact, and because I was so young and I didn’t know any better, and he was sort of the god, the male god in my life. So sad, I thought it was funny too. “Oh yeah, my grandmother doesn’t like children.” But what I didn’t realize is that means she doesn’t like me.
And when I think about it now, reflecting on it all these decades later, it was actually true. She didn’t like me. And you know what the proof for her not liking me was? It wasn’t that she was actually mean to me, because she never actually was mean to me. That’s an interesting thing, and this is why it was hard for me to see back then.
The main way that I now realize my grandmother did not like me is that she actually had no relationship with me. I didn’t even know her. I mean, yes, she died when I was 12, but there were still 12 years for her to develop a relationship with me, and she didn’t do it. I talked about this in another video. I have one memory, and I remember my childhood very, very, very well. I’ve done a lot of work in my healing work and remembering my childhood. I always remembered a lot of it, but I remember, I’d say at least after the age of two, I remember almost all of it.
I have one interaction that I had with my grandmother. We played piano together for 20 minutes, a half an hour. She taught me “Chopsticks,” and I remember smiling and feeling so happy. And in the denial-laden version of my family and the denial-laden version of me, I thought that this meant that my grandmother and I had a great relationship. That’s how low my expectations were.
The truth is, she was just doing it for the camera. She was doing it because she was in a good mood. She’d probably had a cup of coffee and was feeling happy. I was 10, 11 years old or whatever I was then, but that was that. That’s my entire sum total of my actual interaction with my grandmother. There’s no more. She didn’t like kids.
What I was realizing, she didn’t like my dad. In fact, later I found out through my dad that one of his relatives told him, because this woman, this cousin of his, had been told by an aunt of his that my grandmother had admitted that she wanted to have an abortion when my dad was in her belly. She wanted to get rid of him, but because abortion was illegal, she had him anyways, and she hated him. She hated kids. She hated him. She didn’t want to raise him. She neglected my dad terribly. She just wasn’t interested in him. She actually actively disliked him.
And when he was raised and he left home, she didn’t have anything to do with kids anymore at all. She just wasn’t interested in them. She certainly was not interested in me. And when I think about that, I also think in a lot of ways she passed it on to my dad because there were a lot of things about my dad that really didn’t like children. Yes, if children paid a lot of attention to him, when I became old enough to him and I worshiped him and I’d listen to him, he would give me some time with him, but he wasn’t interested in my life or in me.
I mean, he knew nothing about my life. He knew almost nothing about my friendships. He didn’t really like any of my friends. He didn’t really like me.
Theory on Disliking Children
So now I’d like to get into some theory. What does it mean when someone doesn’t like children? What I have observed when someone doesn’t like children is that they don’t like the child that they were. There’s a lot of good reasons for that. I think one of the basic reasons that people don’t like the child that they were is because their childhood experience was terrible. It was painful. It was horrible. And they want to block it out. They don’t want to feel that again.
If they liked themselves, if they liked the person that they were, they would have to feel those feelings. They’d have to feel the neglect and violation and rejection and hatred that they experienced in their life, often quite primarily in relationship to their own parents. The little bits that I’ve heard about my grandmother’s childhood, she wasn’t a loved child. She wasn’t a liked child. She was unwanted. She hated herself.
And I think this is true with a lot of people who don’t like children. They don’t like themselves on the inside. They don’t like the child that they were. And what I have seen is the child that they were still lives on inside of them. This is the key. True with my grandmother, true with my father, true with so many people that I’ve seen. The wounded child that a person was, if you don’t heal it, if you don’t feel those feelings, if you don’t resolve those feelings through grieving them, bringing them up, unburying them, remembering them, working them through, working through the traumas, figuring out how to heal from those traumas, those feelings live on. That dissociation lives on. That pain lives on below the surface.
So people don’t like themselves. I think even more so, they don’t really have a self. They don’t really have a true self. And so when they interface with an actual child, a child being a more connected, manifested, alive version of humanity than they are now, a reflection of what’s buried in them, a reflection of what they were and what was killed and shut down, it overwhelms them. It repulses them. It’s like, “Get me away from this creative, alive thing. Get me away from this thing that reminds me of what I once was and what I could have been and what I’ve given up on.”
And yes, what I still could be if I could look inside myself, feel myself, feel my history, feel my pain, feel all my split-off stuff, bring alive the parts of me that I feel more comfortable when they are dead. I’ve seen this about a lot of people who don’t like children. Children threaten them. That’s why they don’t like them. Children threaten their fakeness. Children threaten their grandiosity. Children threaten their false self.
Children don’t play by the fake rules of society. Children are innocent. Children are vulnerable. And that innocence and that vulnerability threatens people who are cold, who have lost their innocence, who are rigid in their lack of vulnerability.
And what I’ve seen also is a lot of people pretend as adults to be innocent. They pretend to be open-minded. They pretend to be wise and thoughtful and mature, but it’s false. It’s a fake artificial front that they present to the world. It’s a false self. It’s a hologram, a mirage, an image. And when they are confronted with someone who is the real deal, and what I’ve seen as children, if they’re not crushed, or to the degree that they’re not crushed, they are the real deal.
When falseness meets realness, falseness is terrified of it and doesn’t like it. And from what I’ve seen also, when people who are more false, more shut down, more of an image, more of a fake self living in the world, when those people start to wake up, become more real, feel more of their feelings, become more alive and more honest with themselves, and they start to reconnect with the child who they once were through their memories, through the feelings that they had that are buried and still alive within them…
They start to learn how to love the child that they once were more when they start to become a real self. More when their false self starts to crumble and go away and dissolve. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen people start to respect children more and also to realize that they can learn a lot from children. They can learn a lot from watching children, from interacting with them.
I’ve seen some people go through this process by having children of their own. I’ve heard people—I’ve heard actually many people say this: “I reconnected with the child who I was in my inner child by having children of my own.” I’m grateful. My children helped me learn how to connect with myself. My children are my teachers.
And in one sense, that can sound nice. In another sense, what I’ve seen a lot of times, most of the time when people say this, is it’s disturbing. Because really what they’re doing is they’re using their children to grow. Sometimes they give a little bit of back of what they’ve learned. But what I think is there’s lots of ways of doing this healing of reclaiming the child that one once was without having to use one’s own children.
Better to do this before you have children so that you don’t have to in any way use your children to help you. Instead, you can use your own history, your own knowledge. You can use your own mature growing parts to help yourself. And then if you ever do have children, you can give to them without having to have them give anything to you first.
Having them give to you first often being the underlying part of the dynamic of conditional love. The more people grow, the more people heal, the more people manifest the child who they once were and reconnect with that child who they once were and become a real adult in their own inner life, become a more real self. The more that actually they can unconditionally love others, unconditionally love themselves, the hurt parts of themselves, unconditionally love the people in their lives, unconditionally love children in general, which is a healthy way for a mature adult to be.
And also, if they ever have children of their own, they can much more unconditionally love their real children.