Newsflash: Children Aren’t Pets
By: Rachel Presser
Tags: Parenting, Society, Children, Pets

Newsflash: Children Aren’t Pets

For all the groan-inducing lectures from sanctimonious parents about how people who love their pets can’t treat them like children, they completely forgot that the reverse is ALSO true!

Licensed via Adobe Stock

Barely a day goes by on the ole Interwebz without someone — not to pigeonhole, but the culprit is more often than not a smug married cishet white father — bloviating about how your precious pets aren’t children. I have literally seen the following sentiments posted on some form of social media, online publications, or general discourse:

Your dog is not a child! You can’t actually teach them things. Don’t take off work and make your busy single mom co-worker take over for you just so you can take your cat to the vet. These spoiled childless assholes in America spend over $70 billion a year on their pets, imagine if they put that money into our schools! You can’t bond with your pet snake the way *I* have with MY CHILD, it’s not the same. Stop calling them furbabies, it’s criiiinge.*

*(To this one I say “Please go outside for a few minutes, you irony-poisoned gasbag. LIVE A LITTLE.” But given that this piece was published in the fifth month of pandemic times, wear a mask first.)

I’ve been mocked for referring to myself a toad mommy. As if I haven’t seen thousands upon thousands of eBay, Twitter, Pinterest, and Etsy handles that have some variation of “mom” in them.

Meantime, did the people posting these sentiments ever stop to think maybe the rest of us find it disturbing that they threw this Iliad-sized treatise up on Twitter about their kid’s potty training journey…complete with David Attenborough style video commentary that I really didn’t need to see splashed across my screen over breakfast?

I’m not saying you should avoid posting about your kids, or never speak of all the icky aspects of parenting. But as a chronic over-sharer who happens to be a child abuse survivor?

Telling your own stories is one thing. And some people want to see that kind of content, others don’t, and that’s totally okay! But the keyword here is YOUR stories. You, a consenting adult, are posting pictures, videos, or stories about your drunken night out or that IBS attack where nary a pair of pants was spared and much mortification was had, but now you can laugh about it.

Whereas over-sharing your child’s embarrassing moments — someone who cannot necessarily consent to this act — is just cruel, yet people are doing it for a couple likes.

At least if your parents tell humiliating stories about you in person, only the people in that room hear it. Those Polaroids of you wearing hideous clothes you hated? You can destroy them! But when they plaster it all over the Internet at large, there’s a chance that it could come up again in the future. Things get archived and the Internet doesn’t forget. IP addresses are easy enough to track, and facial recognition software is going above and beyond with its frightening overreach!

And far be it for me to contribute to our culture of pervasive, omnidirectional fear, but you should be aware of the major risks that come with frequently posting your children’s images online. It’s been conservatively estimated that by the age of 13, the average child will have had 1,300 images of themselves posted online without their consent. We somehow live in this age where moms will get arrested for using an ATM for two minutes while her kid waits outside, because of this intense of fear of child abduction, yet no one stops to think about what it’s doing on both personal and cybersecurity levels to over-share their kids.

If someone posts a video of their dog ripping up a couch cushion, we laugh at it and move on. You post a video of your kid doing that, it could inadvertently screw up their future job prospects at the rate these draconian employers and institutions are going.

But I’ll let the Internet privacy experts handle that one. I’m thinking more in terms of how school bullies evolved from the insufferable brats who’d make your life hell on earth to the point that your abusive home is like Disney World in comparison, to doing it off the clock on TikTok and whatever else kids are using these days. Youth suicides have been on the rise in the past decade, making it the second leading cause of death for people between 10-24. While many factors contribute to this, I think this one in particular has been overlooked.

For all the panicking I’m hearing about how “Kids are missing out on socialization!” in regards to schools staying closed as America continues to willfully bungle the pandemic response so that families can go die for NASDAQ, I know they don’t actually care about these kids and how they’re socialized. American public schools are another microcosm of institutional abuse that can traumatize you for life. Bullies taunted me to the point of suicide idealization, a few of my classmates actually went through with it, and I was in middle school when it was considered dorky to play computer games and have an AIM account. These days? They literally goad them into the act after school’s out for the day. I can’t fucking imagine how these kids must feel when their archnemesis does some digging and finds photos from that Facebook leak from the years where they were a literal shitstorm, or worse yet, something more recent that their parents find funny but will make that kid hate them for life once other people they know see it.

Then we have the worst thing of all: those viral child abuse videos.

There are very few things more heartbreaking than when I log into Twitter and find a video of a child being repeatedly humiliated and yelled at in some fashion, sometimes with some variant of “I’ll give you something to cry about!” where the reaction is tens or even HUNDREDS of thousands of likes and retweets. While plenty of comments and quote-retweets are from people decrying it, which is always heartening, the comment section is laced with jokes and encouragement from other abusive parents about how this is sooooo funny.

Most sadly of all, much of their sentiment seems to stem from taking out their own childhood trauma on their kids. Just like I saw with my own dysfunctional family.

It makes me want to rage-cry. If someone treated an animal the same way these people treated their children, they’d be getting the report button clicked on them or even an investigation opened up. As horrendous as my upbringing was, my mother at least kept it behind closed doors. While this meant years of being gaslit that I wasn’t actually abused, at least she didn’t have thousands of other catastrophically bad parents like her to encourage this behavior.

Putting your kids into hand-picked outfits and posting them on Instagram could make them grow up to be overly self-conscious and that they only have value to you as a creation. If you verbally abuse your children or subject them to other forms of trauma like shaving their hair off or being given purposely ugly haircuts on camera, all for a couple likes? I’m not joking when I say that I hope your kids never speak to you again and if you expect them to take care of you when you’re old, remember that they choose what home you wind up in. That is, if they don’t leave you to fend yourself as retribution for your atrocities.

At least if I dress up my toad in little outfits, she just pees on me if she doesn’t want to be handled, and I know that’s my cue to stop. You’d think that crying and being told “no” and “I don’t want to” would be clearer indicators, but apparently not.

I tried fashioning a pumpkin costume for Yael out of an old sock, and she was having noooone of it. I apologized, gave her a quick pet and some roaches after I put her back in her tank, and then all was well after she had some time to burrow by herself.

Children are not possessions, despite what our hyper-capitalistic hellscape has told you.

While our acquisition-focused culture and society this contributes heavily to treating children like possessions, it’s also deeply-rooted in settler colonialism. Even though I don’t have children and want to keep it that way — yes, even if I meet a good-hearted socialist fella who shares my love and punk, metal, indie games, and amphibians — reading about motherhood from a First Nations perspective has been fascinating. Our ancestors screwed the pooch on these lands in numerous ways, one of the worst being the utter supremacy over children and treating them like another possession you just add to a shopping cart, like a new couch from IKEA.

Okay, I better stop this essay before I give Jeff Bezos any ideas.

The point remains that for all the pontificating about how we can’t treat pets as children? At least we’re putting our households and futures at far less risk by posting about them, and I think that even the “cringiest” pet owner is well aware that they’re not children, no matter how deeply we love them and base our homes and lifestyles around them. But even after they grow up, they’ll always be your baby — even if you’re not very maternal/paternal.

It’s too many parents who didn’t get the memo that their children aren’t actually pets.