PicoBlog

I had forgotten all about Vulgaria.

Perhaps you have too—the fictional Old World microstate in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, ruled by Baron and Baroness Bomburst, in which children are outlawed. 

I have returned to Vulgaria in recent weeks, however. My mother took my five year old daughter to a stage production of Chitty not long ago, and since then I have been repeatedly asked the same question: “Daddy, why does the Queen hate children?”

By “Queen”, she means Baroness Bomburst. Vulgaria’s aggressive antinatalism comes from her animosity toward the little blighters. I confess, the intricacies of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were not fresh in my mind, so I had to rack my brains. Flying car, toot sweets, Truly Scrumptious, “The Ol’ Bamboo”... and the Toymaker. 

“I think”, I said to my daughter, “it’s because she wants to behave like a child herself.”

The Baroness’ motives aren’t explicit—she seems simply to find children a nuisance. But she is herself infantile: baby talk with her “Chu Chi Face” husband; dressing like a doll (creepily like an anime character). The film climaxes with the Baron’s birthday party, for which the Baroness commissions the Vulgarian Toymaker to make gifts. The Baron himself is no great fan of children, and similarly infantile, but he is mainly an appeaser of his wife (who he clearly finds annoying and repeatedly attempts to murder). It is a feminine hatred, the Devouring Mother, which drives Vulgarian domestic policy.

And so: the Baron and Baroness loathe children because they prevent them from behaving like children themselves. Perhaps, we might speculate, it’s because they’ve not been able to have any of their own(maybe this is why they’re not “King” and “Queen”, but instead barren). But whether their arrested development is down to a semi-tragic resentment or pure indulgence, it’s still driven by the desire to be the only children in the room.

All this might seem like too much Jordan Peterson-ising, searching vainly for psychological archetypes in a 1960s family film co-written by Roald Dahl and based on a book by Ian Fleming. But there’s a reason things like this work. Writers inuit something true in enduring characters, stumbling upon kinds of people whom we know exist.

My daughter was clearly unsettled by the idea of a child-hating Queen. Why on earth would a grown-up hate children? An unfathomable idea, terrifying in a way she can’t explain. In the end, a dismissable idea for her—of course no adult hates children.

And yet. Is my daughter growing up in a new Vulgaria?

We live in a world increasingly hostile toward children. There are obvious ways, much commented on. We hear a lot these days about “DINKs”—“Double Income, No Kids”, young professional couples who have no dependents and brag on social media about all the benefits (were the Bombursts the original DINKs?). The aversion to childrearing among Millennials and Gen Z is well known at this point. Plenty of this is structural factors (sky-high mortgages etc.), and Western birth rates have been declining since long before Millennials were born. But there is undeniably an active disdain for children animating many younger adults. 

DINKism is basically an attempt to recapture how people remember their childhoods—unfettered freedom, your time spent with friends and having fun, and never needing to worry about money. Becoming parents would shatter this whole setup. You would then be responsible for facilitating someone else’s childhood rather than recreating your own. 

The internet has also allowed Millennials to enter adulthood with an unprecedented level of access to their own past. My mum was born in 1962; she obviously has favourite films and childhood TV programs, but it would never have occurred to her as an adult to have an ongoing interest in Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men—both because she had no way to access such things sans internet, but also because it would be pathetic.

Even for many Millennials who do have kids, the fact is that their parenting is often a sustained attempt to recreate their own childhoods. Millennial parents seem peculiarly preoccupied with raising their children to understand the same pop culture references that they enjoy. 

Here we unearth what may well be a necessary consequence of a world in which adults act like children: a world which demands that children behave like adults.

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