If you want a child centered society, then we need to grow the f*ck up.

Sex isn’t even that good to be getting pregnant, but here we are. That’s the irony. Despite how fleeting most people’s sexual experiences actually are, the biological consequences are permanent, and yet we’re still doing it. Still making babies, still writing the same story with different names. You’d think with everything going on—rising temperatures, rising rent, rising fascism—we’d take a step back and ask ourselves if this is really the best time to introduce a whole new human to this planet. But humans are addicted to continuity. Even when it doesn’t make sense.

We’ve mistaken reproduction for legacy. Like birthing a child will validate our existence. But sometimes the urge to “leave something behind” is just a distraction from doing the work of living fully right now. People talk about wanting a mini-me before they’ve even learned how to like themselves. They confuse inheritance with impact. But kids don’t need your DNA, they need your presence.

Unlike animals, we don’t stop to assess the environment before bringing offspring into it. A lioness won’t mate if she knows her cubs won’t survive. But humans? Humans will make a baby in a war zone and figure the rest out later. We justify it with statements like “the child will be my reason to change,” or “children are a blessing,” but that doesn’t cancel out the conditions we force them into. That framing puts the emotional burden on the child before they can even speak. Suddenly their job is to motivate, inspire, fix. They’re cast as catalysts for someone else’s growth, before they’ve had a chance to even figure out their own needs.

In fact, it exposes something darker… our belief that children should suffer through the same world we’ve failed to change, because we did.

The cruel irony is that adulthood doesn’t erase childhood jealousy; it just sharpens it. Plenty of parents are still grieving the safety they never got, so they treat reproduction like a personal do-over. If I couldn’t be the protected child, I’ll be the controlling adult kinda mental model. It casts children as props in an unfinished fantasy instead of partners in a new reality. The baby arrives, the illusion collapses, and the cycle reloads with a different last name.

And that’s where this starts. Not with sex. Not with reproduction. With the romanticization of trauma as character building. And if that means repeating the cycle of emotional starvation under the label of “unconditional love,” so be it.

But kids don’t have the language to fight back. They don’t get to say “I didn’t ask to be here” without being labeled ungrateful. They can’t tell a teacher or a parent, “you’re emotionally unavailable,” and be taken seriously. Children are the only group expected to endure mistreatment with grace while being micromanaged by people who haven’t matured past their own inner child.

But the moment you name that out loud to parents, the defenses fly. “Do you have kids?” becomes a rhetorical shield for accountability. As if you have to have reproduced in order to empathize. As if not having a child invalidates your experience of once having been one. Every adult on this planet was a child at some point. And most people never fully recover from how they were treated. That’s the real legacy of humanity.

And it bleeds into every system. Economically, children are dependent but exploited. Socially, they’re patronized. Politically, they’re invisible unless they’re being used as pawns in policy debates. Institutions claim to protect them but often operate on the assumption that their voices don’t matter. Children are the most oppressed class and we keep disguising dominance over children as discipline.

Not all children get protection even when they’re in plain sight. Let that child be poor, disabled, Black, trans, undocumented—watch how quickly protection becomes punishment. Watch how fast concern becomes containment. Society has a sliding scale for which kids matter and who’s worth saving, and that scale is built on the same systems we swear we’ve outgrown.

This is why so many adults are still living out of spite. They didn’t survive childhood; they outperformed it. And now that they have some form of power—be it financial, academic, social—they use it as a weapon or a shield, depending on what they lacked. Because when you’re denied autonomy young, you either become obsessed with control or allergic to responsibility. There’s rarely an in-between.

And some people never got to be children in the first place. They were handed bills before boundaries. Apologies before affection. They grew up in homes where survival was the priority, not safety. So now they perform adulthood like it’s a costume—always neat, always productive, always emotionally armored. But underneath the polish is someone who never had the space to just be. Assigned adulthood isn’t the same as assumed adulthood. One is forced. The other is chosen.

Power, whether it’s money, intelligence, beauty, or charisma comes with the same moral surcharge: responsibility. You don’t get to wield something that bends other people’s lives and then plead innocence when the shape distorts. Parenting is just another arena of power, yet it’s the only one where we demand no training and accept every excuse. When a genius hoards knowledge, we call it sabotage; when a parent hoards authority, we call it tradition. Both are malpractice.

So what happens when those developmentally arrested or traumatized adults become parents? What happens when people who never fully processed their own childhoods start raising others? They do what was done to them. Maybe a little softer or harsher. Maybe with better snacks or none at all. But the cycle repeats, just dressed in more palatable language. People love the idea of gentle parenting until it asks them to confront their inner violence. Until it asks them to pause, breathe, and reflect instead of reacting with authority. Until it forces them to admit that yelling, manipulation, guilt-tripping, and overcorrecting are not love languages… they’re trauma responses.

Accountability as a parent doesn’t mean being perfect. It means being self-aware enough to know when you’re projecting, when you’re punishing your child for the choices you never got to make. It’s realizing that your child is not your therapist, not your redemption arc, and not your second chance at getting it right. They’re your mirror. And if you can’t look at them without defensiveness, it’s probably because you haven’t looked at yourself honestly yet.

And while it’s easy to say the solution is “parents need to do better,” that’s only a fraction of it. The bigger truth is that everyone becomes responsible for children the moment society becomes collective. You don’t get to opt out. If your taxes fund prisons more than schools, that’s your business. If you vote for leadership that cuts food programs or shelters, that’s your business. If you ignore the foster system, the housing crisis, the lack of comprehensive sex education, that’s your business.

BUT a child-centered society is about allocation. It’s about budgets that prioritize childcare over warfare, education over incarceration, nutrition over surveillance. You want to know what a culture values? Look at where it sends its money. Look at which neighborhoods have playgrounds and which have curfews. Look at how fast a corporation can get a bailout while schools beg for clean water.

Children can’t vote, can’t lobby, can’t unionize, but they inherit the world adults design. So if we’re serious about breaking cycles, we have to stop acting like parenting happens in a vacuum and start treating every public policy as a blueprint for someone’s childhood.

And to spin back to responsibility, the power that comes with being intelligent, puts you at the forefront of helping people be less ignorant and have accessibility to information. Point blank period. The power that comes with being an adult, puts you at the forefront of helping children. Mind you I said adult, not parents… if you want a child centered society you have to treat every child like they’re your responsibility, not just someone else’s problem. That means you don’t get to opt out because you didn’t give birth. You don’t get to clock out of caring because they’re not your blood. If you’re old enough to vote, earn, speak, or take up space in the world, then you’re old enough to contribute to shaping the world children are inheriting. Adults love to flex wisdom and experience, but what good is either if it doesn’t translate into protection, guidance, or change?

So I’ve always wondered (and don’t beat my ass when I ask this) for those who struggle with infertility or are unable to conceive who really want kids, If the desire to parent is genuine—not rooted in vanity, legacy-building, or trying to heal unprocessed childhood wounds—then why does it have to be a biological child? There are children already here, abandoned, neglected, or simply waiting to be loved. Why isn’t that enough?

I don’t think the biological connection shouldn’t be the line that separates commitment from indifference. If you could fall in love with a stranger, you eventually get to know, I’m sure you could be a parent to a kid that ain’t yours. Like I get it your pain is significant of not being able to biologically reproduce, but your response to it doesn’t get to make the world worse.

With that being said, no child should be born or adopted to fill the gaps in someone else’s ego regardless. Adoption isn’t some last-ditch backup plan or a consolation prize; it’s the clearest expression of collective responsibility. Choosing to step into the life of a child who already exists is not settling for less, it’s stepping up. It says I see you. I’m here. I don’t need to create a new life to prove my capacity for love because love has been waiting for me in the lives already around me. That kind of love isn’t less real. It’s just less self-serving.

For me personally, adopting kids that are aging out of the system is the responsibility I want to take on because there are children still entering a world they didn’t ask for, built by people who still don’t know how to be honest about what it takes to raise one. And until that’s confronted, until we stop seeing kids as blank slates or legacy trophies and start seeing them as people—the oppression will continue

Assuming adulthood looks different to everybody. Some people think the performance is an automatic qualification, external attributes like having a career, overly independent, and making decisions based on optics. Looking like you're grown, but not necessarily being grown in the way you self-regulate, self-reflect, or self direct. Assumed adulthood is internal, grounded, and deeply honest. Accepting the full weight of your life even when it is glamorous. And this isn’t appealing to most people because it doesn't look impressive. However, one builds capacity and the other build pressure.

So If you’re going to keep bringing kids into a burning house, then you better learn how to build a fireproof system. Because the world doesn’t get better through birth rates. It gets better through responsibility. And every child you ignore, minimize, dismiss, or disrespect today becomes the adult who remembers exactly how that felt.

The child who is not embraced by the village will eventually burn it down to feel its warmth.