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Off to the butcher shop we go!

"They're all mistakes, children! Filthy, nasty things. Glad I never was one."
Agatha Trunchbull, Matilda

Classic villain type in children's stories and films, a person who cannot stand children. At all. It may range from them being very irritated by them but not saying anything to seething hatred of insane comedic levels, but whatever the case, they simply do not like them.

A Child Hater can be either gender, and often either a glamorous woman with a shallow personality, or a bitter, cantankerous old man. The fact that they themselves were once a child never seems entirely relevant to them, though, in a few cases, said child hater may have had a difficult childhood filled with trying to deal with other, less than kind children, or may have become embittered by an early adulthood of dealing with kids at their worst. Ironically, for some reason they have a tendency to have a career that involves working with children, such as a camp counselor or a Sadist Teacher. They may be in a job that focuses on children (teacher, host of a children's TV show, toymaker), or as a particular type of Depraved Kids' Show Host. Otherwise, they are likely to become a Cranky Neighbor who confiscates any toy or other plaything of theirs that lands on their property.

If one of these is trying to marry a single parent, expect the Child Hater to make plans to ship the poor kid or kids Off to Boarding School so they can have the parent all to themselves. The Child Hater usually doesn't have any children of their own, but if they do, expect them to either be a Resentful Guardian or an Abusive Parent.

Another variant is a teenager or young adult who hates anyone more than a few years younger than them, generally for presumed immaturity—which ironically tends to make them come off as very childish themselves.

Needless to say, it is highly probable that such a character Would Hurt a Child, but it isn't obligatory. In extreme cases, they may even aim for a full-on Childless Dystopia.

In Real Life, this is known as misopedia.

See also Teen Hater for the adolescent-themed Sub-Trope. Compare Children Are a Waste. Contrast Friend to All Children, who is often the natural enemy of this kind of villain. Also contrast the Adult Hater, who is equally bitter but towards everyone except other children.

While this is described as a villain trope, plenty of the examples shown are of relatively sympathetic characters who simply don't like children.

It should be noted that some people in real life dislike children, but more information is not necessary.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Fujiura from Ana Satsujin is a Black Widow who pretends to be a shy, kid loving woman when she really is a Child Hater to the degree where she'd kill one.
  • A non-villainous example, Senjougahara Hitagi of Bakemonogatari has made it abundantly clear that she has an intense distaste for children, mainly because of an incident whereupon bumping into a small child she lost her composure and began apologizing to the unfettered child. Not particularly fond of feeling submissive to what she considers a lesser being, she has since held firm that all children should be exterminated.
  • Hinako from Bitter Virgin is a non-malicious example. She more specifically doesn't like babies, mostly newborns. She was sexually abused by her step-dad in middle school which caused her to become pregnant. She sees fetuses as parasites living off their mothers.
  • Subverted with Case Closed's Kogoro Mouri. While he does have traits of a Child Hater, (i.e. Calling them brats, physically assaulting Conan for opening his mouth, etc), he adores his daughter Ran and has the rare Pet the Dog moments with Conan.
  • Death Note: Roger, who is in charge of the Wammy's House orphanage, dislikes children, although apart from being mentioned in the databook, this is never shown anywhere else.
  • Souther from Fist of the North Star uses child-labour to build his mighty empire and generally treats them with contempt. It is this trait among others that marks him as one of the vilest villains in the series. It's later revealed that the trauma of unwittingly killing his own master as a boy is the trigger for wanting every other child in the wasteland to suffer like he has.
  • Subverted and then played straight with Akito's mother Ren from Fruits Basket. On one hand, she said that she hated how the then-tiny Ayame, Hatori, Kureno and Shigure swarmed to her and cried, but it was more about annoyance than outright hate. (She didn't know it, but their tears were because they sensed she was pregnant with Akito, the future God of the Zodiac.). However, she plays it straight via noting that she has always hated her niece Rin, and she always abused her child Akito ever since early childhood.
  • Hougen from Ginga Densetsu Weed appears to have something against puppies. One time, he tells his minions to kill a litter of puppies because he thinks someone was hiding a female from him.
  • The victim of the week in episode 3 of HuGtto! Pretty Cure is a businessman who is one of these. He yells at the girls for not being able to control Hugtan's crying because he finds kids annoying. Homare yells at him for not understanding their situation, and this causes other families at the petting zoo to get in on the situation as well. This causes him to leave the zoo, but not before Charaleet uses his anger to summon an Oshimaida.
  • Michiko & Hatchin: The woman who runs the orphanage hates children.
  • Yukimi of Nabari no Ou, who constantly mutters about he hates "brats" (even including Raikou, who is 20). Ironically, Yukimi himself is childish to the point that he blows out other people's birthday candles and is reduced to elementary school level name-calling when he's annoyed. And despite his self-proclaimed hatred of kids, he's still fiercely protective of Yoite and Miharu.
  • Asuna Kagurazaka of Negima! Magister Negi Magi is a self-proclaimed Child Hater and in earlier chapters took every chance she could to state this. Ironically she's the female lead/Lancer in a series that revolves around a ten-year old Mage/Teacher, whom she develops at times ambiguous feelings for. To be fair, she states her reasons for not liking children; they cry when they don't get their way, they expect others to do everything for them, etc, etc.... these being traits the child lead does not possess. Eventually, he evolves into a full blown badass in later chapters, even by shōnen lead standards.
  • One Piece: In a flashback to Trafalgar Law's past Corazon was stated to hate children, a fact he showed by chucking a then-ten-year old Law out of a window. Eventually subverted when we learn it was all an act. Corazon was really a Marine who really liked kids, but deliberately kept a child-hating image, in an attempt to prevent them from joining Doflamingo's crew and turning to a life of piracy.
  • Reborn! (2004): Hana Kurokawa, Kyoko's Best Friend, makes her displeasure towards children well known to all of her companions, even stating that she hated herself when she was a child and that she couldn't wait to grow older. She mostly grows out of this as the series goes on.
  • Remy: Nobody's Girl has the man who runs the Orphanage of Fear, Gaspard. He only takes in kids so they can steal from others and bring him money, and also constantly abuses them.
  • Rooster Fighter: Keiji dislikes children, human or bird, for typically being abusive idiots, but he's not above defending them.
  • Shugo Chara! has Yuu Nikaidou-sensei who is a teacher because his real job actively involves crushing childrens' dreams in order to draw out their "Hearts Eggs" in order to check if it is the mystical wish granting "Embryo", and there is reason to believe the possessor of said Embryo is at Seiyo Academy. It's kind of a win-win situation for him.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Chono-sensei, a Monster of the Week villain, fits the "vain and shallow" personality to a tee. Until the Pharaoh hits her with karmic retribution.

    Asian Animation 
  • Season 8 episode 15 of Happy Heroes features a village populated by an entire tribe of child-hating adults. The tribe members strictly forbid any children from entering their village, and whenever a new baby is born within the village it's sent out and not allowed to re-enter the village until it's grown into an adult. Happy S. thinks he has the location of one of the elemental staffs pinpointed to this territory, unfortunately for him and the other Supermen since they're all Robot Kid superheroes.

    Comedy 
  • Donald Glover jokes about how children are "tiny Hitlers" in his stand-up. He says that the only reason he wears condoms is so that he doesn't have children, and not because of the risk of AIDS. He even compares having children to AIDS:
    "Think about it, they're not that different. They're both expensive, you have them for the rest of your life, they're constant reminders of the mistakes you've made, and once you have them you can pretty much only date other people who have them. What's the difference?"
He does point out, though, that AIDS beats out children because you can't go to prison for accidentally dropping AIDS.
  • Greg Proops jokes about being this in his standup. In real life, however, while Proops legitimately does not want kids of his own, he's reportedly completely chill with the children of his friends and family.
    "You children are like the lilies of the field: you toil not, neither do you spin! Come back when you're sixteen and can score drugs and we can ALL have a good time!"

    Comic Books 
  • Peter Milligan's run on Animal Man has its Arc Villain President Eagleton, who secretly wants to murder all children and had his secret discovered by the Angel triplets when they read his thoughts while he was kissing a baby.
  • In Batman, Damian rescues a young boy and swings off noting that he hates kids. Damian is ten.
  • Fables : Frau Totenkinder not only dislikes children as her last name (German for "dead children") suggests; she even turns out to be the Witch from Hansel and Gretel.
    • More of an occupational hazard as her powers are fueled by eating children. She later meets Gretel again, now a teenager, they bury the hatchet and Gretel even starts learning magic from her.
    • Frau Totenkinder's hatred of children seems to stem from her origin story. She was denounced as a witch and kicked out of her tribe after she got pregnant by the tribe leader's son (said son had promised to marry her, and then pretended he wasn't the baby's father after he had to marry someone else). This sent her on a downward spiral that caused her to think nothing of killing one child a year for great power and two children a year for eternal youth. By the time she joined Fabletown and was made a welcome member of the community, Frau Totenkinder mellowed out. Although she still gets her powers from the abortion clinics she finances...
  • Hellblazer's John Constantine bluntly states "I fucking hate kids" in the opening of one story arc while standing in the same line as a woman with a screaming baby. This throwaway comment actually foreshadows the rest of the arc: the Big Bad turns out to be a Creepy Child possessed by a hideous rape demon that impregnated a (male) gangster, the Creepy Child's father, with a child that was meant to be an Antichrist.
  • Grouchy Smurf is made out to be this in The Smurfs story "The Smurflings"...not that Snappy Smurfling was any help by preemptively commenting "I hate grownup Smurfs" before Grouchy could even say anything. In the cartoon version, however, he has a serious soft spot for Baby Smurf, oftentimes acting as a Papa Wolf when Baby is threatened.

    Comic Strips 
  • George Wilson harbors venomous feelings toward neighbor Dennis in Dennis The Menace, an antipathy that, as The Comics Curmudgeon has pointed out, hasn't at all decreased with Dennis' Menace Decay. Since Dennis is his main contact with childkind, it's not hard to generalize.
  • Therese from For Better or for Worse. However, her husband pressured her to have a kid anyway, but she didn't like being a mother and eventually divorced him.
  • A 2014 Heart of the City story had Heart and Dean taking shelter from a snow storm at a doll hospital where the owner despises children because of an experience he had when he was a kid, his rambunctious older cousins played too rough with his action figures and broke them all and they also blinded him in one eye when they fired a missile from a G.I. Joe toy into his eye, he tried to fix his favorite knight figurine but he grew frustrated and threw it in the river. He eventually has a change of heart after Dean shows him that he takes care of his action figures and gives him one as a good luck charm because it gave him luck in the past.
  • "Hate" may be too strong a word for how Garfield feels about them, but he really doesn't like them, and he has good reason not to; he's had plenty of bad experiences with children. One very early strip had him stalked by four dark figures in an alley, who turned out to be little girls who covered him from head to toe in ribbons. Then there was a two-week series of strips where Jon's cousin came to visit, bringing her Spoiled Brat daughter and her infant son (leading to Garfield finding out the hard way what a diaper bag was). A far darker example of this was a little girl who bribed Garfield into taking him home with her, only to throw him to her huge dog "Muffin". Maybe the reason Garfield doesn't like kids is, quite simply, they don't like him.

    Fairy Tales 
  • The Wicked Stepmother in any given Fairy Tale, although usually not for her own children, just her husband's. Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, etc. Somewhat unsettlingly, in the original versions of many fairy tales, the character was in fact the children's mother. The Brothers Grimm (ironically) were responsible for much of the bowdlerization when they realized this might be disturbing to younger readers. It itself is a cultural thing. At the time that the Brothers Grimm was written, women who were widowed were expected to remarry immediately. They were also forced to leave any children they had from the previous marriage at their parents' house. If their parents had died they had to just abandon their children. So the reason so many stepmothers were wicked was that they weren't given time to grieve, forced to marry an unknown man, and lose their children.

    Fan Works 
  • Retro, the villain of many of garfieldodie's works, is this in Can You Imagine That?. It's not really noticeable afterwards, though.
  • Invoked in The Chronicles of the Fellowship; Gandalf observes that Saruman never liked children even before he joined Sauron, which allows him to rule out the idea that Saruman might be using the Pevensies as spies.
  • A Diplomatic Visit: As noted in chapter 4 of the second sequel, Diplomacy Through Schooling, Trixie's old teacher from her hometown, Mrs. Hydia, was apparently one of these, Trixie describing her as "one of those types that makes you wonder why she went into teaching if she didn't like being around foals".
  • Downplayed with Asuka in Ghosts of Evangelion. She never liked children. However she didn't abuse them, either. And she made an effort to get over her disliking when she got pregnant.
  • In Give In, Give In [and Relish Every Minute of It]', single lawyers Claude and his co-worker Hades complain about their situations. Neither like kids, yet they're stuck taking care of teenagers (a son Claude never even knew of and Hades' nephew Hercules).
  • The entire Kid-Rid organization in Loud Boy: Altered. The name obviously gives it away.
  • In the Edwardian era fic Not Old, Alone or Done For, Wendy's suitor Gavin doesn't like kids much. In his mind, children are to be seen and not heard, and are to be left to the care of a nursemaid or nanny until they are old enough for boarding school. This puts him at odds with Wendy's Team Mom Friend to All Children nature.
  • The Palaververse: The Tempest: As Fairy Floss describes herself:
    I just cordially despise children in all their forms,
  • In Rise from Darkness, Samus hates everyone, but she especially hates children for being so innocent. She goes as far as to wishing that a group of kindergartners would all die.
  • We Must Be Killers: Lyme loathes the idea of motherhood and being around kids. She has a Freudian Excuse, as her mother was groomed and impregnated at the age of fourteen and eventually abandoned Lyme after years of an abusive relationship that also saw Lyme get beat up and neglected. This causes Lyme to have No Sympathy for a tribute with a pregnant girlfriend, and disagree with the idea that Cecelia deserves special consideration in the Quell for being one of the few victors to have kids.
  • You Are Mine: Frollo doesn't like children much. He thinks babies all look like old men and they usually grow up into spoiled brats. However, Esmeralda (known as "Agnes" in the fic) is an exception to his bias.

    Films — Animation 
  • In Monster House, Mr. Nebbercracker is an angry man who is often yelling at kids to get off of his property but is actually trying to protect kids from this spirit of his wife Constance, who actually was this due to being mocked by kids as a circus freak.
  • The Cat Shepherd and Moka, in Nocturna. The Cat Shepherd is a non-villainous example, who finds kids to be really annoying, but slowly warms up to Tim. Moka, meanwhile, is also a non-villainous example, as it was part of an act to goad Tim into journeying across Nocturna and confront the Shadow.
  • Dr. Phillium Benedict in Recess: School's Out. When this guy became principal of 3rd Street School in the spring of 1968, he tried to abolish recess, which resulted in him losing his job to his then-best friend Peter Prickly. 33 years later, he schemes to eliminate summer vacation by altering the moon's orbit and sending global temperatures below freezing to keep kids in school longer, believing it can raise test scores, although it is pretty clear that he's only in it to advance his career. In one scene, he derides Prickly for "always standing up for the rights of children."
  • Tom and Jerry: The Movie:
    • Robyn Starling's "Aunt" Pristine Figg. She raises Robyn more like a slave than a "niece", mentally and physically abusing her by sending her to bed without supper and locking her in the attic at night. She has the titular characters, Tom and Jerry, dropped off at the pound and hires its owner Dr. Applecheek to exterminate them in order to prevent them from informing Robyn that her father survived the avalanche. She was even unwilling to rescue Robyn when the Starling cabin was set on fire, strongly believing she deserves it. Obviously, Figg despises Robyn, only looking after her so she can maintain the fortunes belonging to the Starling family and isn't hers to begin with.
    • Figg's lawyer, Lickboot, is almost equally vile. He was also only in it for the Starling fortune as well and willingly assists Figg in keeping Robyn in line, even though he does show concern for Robyn when the cabin starts to burn down.
  • The Willoughbys: Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby are this, which makes them obliviously continuing to have them to abuse and neglect that much worse.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Batman Returns: The Penguin, one of the villains, plans to kill all first-born children of Gotham City as a twisted revenge for his own Parental Abandonment. Actually, he hates the human race, and is just scapegoating children in this scene. It also should be pointed out that all his would-be victims are rich boys, with girls apparently being too beneath contempt to warrant hatred. When this plan is foiled by Batman, he decides to "punish all God's children," no matter what their sex or socioeconomic status.
    • The Penguin only kidnaps the rich boy firstborns and ignores the girls because he's pissed at how his own parents abandoned him when he was a kid (he himself having been born to a rich family). His plan was to make all of Gotham suffer because of what his parents did to him.
  • The Burning: The kids in the flashback pranked Cropsy for mistreating them. According to them, he has been beating kids and gotten away with it for years. Receiving third-degree burns all over his body only makes this trait worse.
  • Chickens in the Shadows: Toasters, who seems to have a lot of issues, lashes out at Natalie with no provocation.
  • All of the villains from Children's Party at the Palace. Especially the Child-Catcher and the Grand High Witch (the latter talking about boiling and frying children as well as pulling a Fish out of Temporal Water by talking about “selling their GameBoys on eBay”).
  • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Baron and Baroness Bomburst of the country of Vulgaria were added to the film version and fit this trope to a T. The Baroness is even afraid of children. Both employ the Child Catcher, who could very well be this Trope personified, to capture and abduct any children in the country. Her fear is most likely born of jealousy. A person so vain as to faint from shock when they are told they are ugly would undoubtedly be jealous of anyone more beautiful, or in this case more youthful looking than themselves. It's even explicitly laid out by the Toymaker: children growing up remind her that she's growing older herself, so she decides that if there aren't any children around growing up, she won't age.
    • In the stage musical version, she's so terrified of children that just hearing the 'C' word causes her to scream in terror or have a panic attack.
  • Phineas T. Prune from The Christmas That Almost Wasn't. He hates everything about them, hates to see them happy, and especially hates Christmas. He's forgotten that he ever was a child, a fact he's reminded of at the end when his Freudian Excuse is rectified.
  • The Family Jewels: Everett Peyton is a circus clown who, off the clock, has only contempt for the "squealing brats" he entertains. Any questions about why he's definitely not Donna's pick as replacement father?
  • Jagged Mind: Alex expresses a dislike for children, due to their dirtiness, and she doesn't just recoil from Kim's son after he puts his chocolate-covered hands on her (understandable) but violently shoves him away in anger.
  • In the Jurassic Park films (but not the book), Dr. Alan Grant starts out not liking kids very much. He doesn't exactly hate them, he just doesn't particularly like them. In his introductory scene, he goes out of his way to scare the hell out of a mouthy kid who annoys him, then gives his colleague Ellie Sattler a list of all the reasons he dislikes children. However, after getting lost in the park with two kids who have only him to help them while the park's Tyrannosaurus rex is on the prowl, he finds his natural parental instincts getting the better of him. By midway through the film, he doesn't mind them napping on his shoulder and such.
  • Aunt Dorothy in Krampus says that she has never been able to stand kids, even when she was one. Her idea of keeping the kids occupied is to show them how to make peppermint schnapps and let them have some. However, when the chips are down, she does show some protective instincts towards them.
  • The Hallmark movie Love Takes Wing has Ray Russell, a man with a serious chip on his shoulder and an unexplained grudge against children. He constantly says orphans are worthless no-counts and should just die or get out of town.
  • Max Keeble's Big Move: Principal Jindrake plays this part real good, who he sees as acne-scarred riffraff.
    " Here they come, With their pimples and their braces..., and their rickets and their lice, Their snot-nosed, baggy-pantsed..., high-pitched, squealing voices."
  • Gordon Bombay from The Mighty Ducks is this, which is one reason why he hates spending his community service as a kids' hockey coach. He gets over it, largely thanks to Charlie.
  • My Pet Monster: Dr. Schneider hates being a tour guide to "brats".
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger is an extreme version of this trope, being a child murderer — though if you take his original concept into consideration, he liked kids in entirely the wrong way. It's also played ambiguously in the case of his own daughter, Kathryn.
  • Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter, although he's very good at hiding it.
  • The Parent Trap (1961) and The Parent Trap (1998): The wicked-stepmothers-to-be fall into this trope.
  • Problem Child 2: LaWanda Dumore; in her reveal in the climax. Although it's hinted at earlier, since she quickly becomes annoyed upon learning that Ben has a son (and mind you, it's before she sees the articles about Junior's antics in the previous films), and later she threatens to send Junior Off to Boarding School in Baghdad — and there was a goddamn war on over there at the time the movie was made.
  • Saddle Tramp: Chuck's boss Higgins doesn't want to see or hear of any children, or men who might have them, hence why Chuck keeps the four boys in his care hidden away in the woods. Higgins' wife says that his attitude to kids is due to bitterness that their son left them at the age of 16.
  • Baroness Elsa Schräder in The Sound of Music: "Darling, haven't you ever heard of a delightful little thing called boarding school?" Downplayed, though, in that there's no indication that she hates children, or even her fiancée's kids specifically; she just has no interest in bonding with them or being a new mother to them.
  • Teri Hatcher's character in Spy Kids. At least she has an excuse, as the last two kids she met burned most of her hair off. (She was trying to kill them at the time, but still.)
  • Three Men and a Little Lady: The evil would-be groom. He even outright says that he loathes children in an effort to make the audience hate him!

    Literature 
  • Angela Nicely: One of the Nicelys’ neighbours, Mr. Monk, hates children and complains when they play on the streets.
  • Aunt implies that Lobelia doesn't like kids and prefers pets, with her line to her recently orphaned niece Iona, "Things like you take and give so little, while my little poopsies love me always." While she doesn't seem to like them, she does take in five kids if only out of obligation than anything else. Weirdly enough, she has a fondness for her toddler nephew for some reason but Iona wonders if it's because Eugene is two and so isn't old enough to annoy her yet.
  • Benny Rose, the Cannibal King: The senior citizens of the suburb that the teenage protagonists are in despise children and teenagers to the point they even happily help a Serial Killer monster who preys on them to hunt his victims in their suburb at long as he keeps it free of kids.
  • The Blue-Nosed Witch has Old Man Skinner, who has a sling shot and is skilled with it. He's blamed the neighborhood kids for stealing apples they didn't take, ruining his corn, and upsetting his hens. He's even shot rocks at one of the kids and their dog for crossing his lawn. One of the Bedsheet Ghosts says he's especially mean to children on Halloween. When the kids go to his house to trick-or-treat, he gives them rotten apples to be nasty. Blanche gets back at him for the sake of the kids and because she's annoyed as well.
  • Men who don't like children are looked upon unfavorably in A Brother's Price; because they are so rare, Childfree Is Not Allowed and they are expected to take on many of the nurturing aspects of childcare. Some of the Whistlers dislike Balin Brindle for wincing and doing nothing every time his little sisters/possible incestuous children start to cry in public. The fact that Keifer never could stand being around the little princesses or even fake any degree of liking for them is yet another mark in a very long list against him. There doesn't seem to be any cultural antipathy towards women who don't like children, as demonstrated by Captain Raven Tern, whose discomfort around the Whistler girls is Played for Laughs and generally accepted since her sisters will presumably handle carrying on their family line.
  • Almost every staff member (except for Mr. Fyde and The Lunch Ladies) in Captain Underpants who works in Jerome Horwitz Elementary School comes off as this to the students.
  • The Color Purple: Sofia's father hates both children and women. Unfortunately, he has twelve kids.
  • Cormoran Strike of the Cormoran Strike Novels is a downplayed example. He definitely never really wanted to have children, even when he still had a girlfriend. He can make a decent pretense of getting along with them when he has to and has a godson, but throughout dinner with his godson's family (which has recently grown), he is somewhat secretly uncomfortable, and the screaming and antics of the children remind him of exactly why he never wants to have any.
  • Roald Dahl loved this one. There's The Witches, Miss Trunchbull from Matilda, and in his script for the film version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Lampshaded in a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, where one character says "It's like I'm a villain from a Roald Dahl book — the man who doesn't like children." On other occasions he mentions his dislike of children makes him feel like a Disney villain.
  • Implied with the Heffley brothers' aunt Cakey in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: When she babysat Greg while he was eight, she wouldn't give him anything to do and made him take a nap. When he told her he didn't take naps anymore, she accused him of "talking back".
  • In Dirty Bertie, Mr Grouch the janitor at Bertie's school dislikes all children, especially Bertie because Bertie is a bit of a slob and Mr Grouch is a Neat Freak.
  • Discworld:
    • Would-be Wicked Witch (who couldn't become one because of family obligations) Granny Weatherwax strongly dislikes children. Ironically, since she's the good witch, she's also one of the series' strongest examples of Wouldn't Hurt a Child, and is completely harmless to children (in fact, if you try to hurt children on her watch there are not enough words for how utterly screwed you are). Granny is thus stuck in the unenviable position of being unable to do more than complain about how much she dislikes children to others and threaten annoying children with over-the-top punishments she would never act on. Children, on some instinctual level, recognize this as they think her threats are funny and cling to her at every opportunity. This causes her no end of annoyance.
    Nanny: If you think Esme Weatherwax'd curse kids you've got the sense of an earthworm. She'd cuss 'em, yes, all day long. But not curse 'em. She don't aim that low.
    • Susan is another ironic variant: she's very good with children and content to work with them, but she detests childishness and treats kids like inconveniently small adults. As a result, they adore her and learn much, much faster from her lessons than from "See Spot Run" books or curricula aimed at children.
    • As in many things, Magrat (at least, before she became a mother herself) is kind of the opposite of Granny; she wants to be good with children but isn't, and the fact she doesn't actually like them very much worries her.
  • One Polish crime novel (Drugi Watek by Joanna Chmielewska) subverts this. The protagonist's father abandons her and her mother since he hates children, acknowledges he wouldn't make a good father, and pays his child support. He's a decent man and not the murderer in this case.
  • Zig-Zagged with Smallbone, the title wizard from The Evil Wizard Smallbone. He's presented as a child hater who only takes Nick on because he needs an apprentice who can't read. Then as the story goes, he's portrayed more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, who actually grows to like Nick. Then we find out that Smallbone has actually caused serious harm to kids in his couple hundred years of living— except it wasn't him, it was the previous few Smallbones.
  • Leo Chin from Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria hates kids and pets for being so dependent on others. This is implied to stem from childhood abuse he received from his father.
  • From the Harry Potter series:
    • Argus Filch. Filch's hatred of students comes from the fact that he is a squib who resents most magical folk while having a job with children who enjoy using magic rather than genuine hatred for children in particular. It does not help that Filch's job is to clean up after children and fix the things they break, which is a full-time job.
    • Voldemort appears to be one in a flashback sequence depicting his attempted murder of Harry. At first, he is casually mulling about killing an innocent child who just happened to speak to him about his outfit, mistaking it for a Halloween costume. When baby Harry starts to cry, Voldemort wants to kill him even more, as he really dislikes the sound of crying children.
    • While Dolores Umbridge explicitly says she hates children in the film of the fifth book this trope is averted in the books themselves, as she doesn't particularly hate children, but rather all people who challenge her power. The only reason why she abuses children in the books is simply because it's a way to assert power over them and because she can get away with it.
    • Severus Snape is very-much-portrayed-as hating kids. Why does he take a job as a professor who deals with young, vulnerable, impressionable children only for the sake of the plot, which requires him to be at Hogwarts? He is never once shown in the books to be comforting, mentoring, or in any way acting as a positive role model for his students, with the only possible exception of Draco Malfoy. He fights for the "good guys", but not out of love for Harry or any other child, but rather due to his promise to be a spy in exchange for Dumbledore protecting two of his own soldiers. This could be due to his abusive father and generally terrible childhood.
  • Downplayed with Helena in The Hike, who doesn't despise children but doesn't enjoy being around them for long periods - the only exception being Maggie's three year old daughter Phoebe, who she adores - and is convinced she isn't patient or selfless enough to be a mother; she's stated for years that she never wants children and it was the main reason her last serious relationship ended, as her ex changed his mind regarding that subject. She's shocked when she finds part of herself does want children after finding out she might be pregnant (and learning her ex now has a daughter), despite her current lifestyle being ill-suited to have children and her not even being in a relationship. It's later subverted, with Helena realising that she wants children but was afraid of failing as a mother, and deciding to keep her unplanned pregnancy.
  • In The Ickabog, Spittleworth and Flapoon hate children because they wake them from their afternoon naps.
  • The In Death series: Eve's mother turns out to be this. She hates kids, do-gooders, and... everyone and everything. She has no Freudian Excuse for this.
  • IT: Pennywise the Clown. Though the one thing he loves about children is their taste.
  • Downplayed with Doctor Narlikar from Midnight's Children, who just prefers to avoid them and has no children of his own. He's also a major advocate for birth control. Oddly enough, he works as a gynecologist despite this.
  • This shows up a lot in The Pale King. Anyone who went to elementary school with Leonard Stecyk has what is described as a 'complex hatred' for him. People hate themselves for hating such a well-meaning kid, then hate him even more for creating such self-hatred. The principal has nightmares about the boy and occasionally fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into his face and dragging him behind his car through the streets of Grand Rapids, MI. A homeroom teacher even attempts to kill him with a pair of blunt scissors. It eventually culminates with someone blowing up his locker.
  • Peter Pan: Captain Hook in many versions. In the original, he only hates Peter Pan specifically.
  • All adults in Quicksand House hate children on sight, thanks to a combination of Bizarre Alien Reproduction which means that children are no longer born but hatched as blood-drinking leeches that only gradually gain human form, and the fact that adults in the world of Quicksand House are just generally assholes.
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events:
    • Count Olaf hates children. He uses them as slave labor in one of the later books. The only reason why he adopted the Baudelaires, thus, was in an attempt to steal their family fortune.
    • A number of the guardians of the protagonists don't seem to think very much of children, given how most of them force the children to take adult jobs and then mock and ridicule them for being unable to manage properly. Possibly the worst is in The Austere Academy, when the infant Sunny is forced to be a secretary and is blamed for being unable to answer the phone, because she's not old enough to talk.
  • Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Arden Gillespie in the book Lethal Justice reveals in her thoughts that she doesn't like children. Rosemary Hershey had promised her husband Bobby Harcourt that they would have kids in the book Sweet Revenge. Bobby, when he announces his intentions to divorce her, throws her words back in her face, saying that he doesn't see any kids around, indicating she doesn't like kids and was lying through her teeth.
  • In The Surgeon , the first Rizzoli & Isles book, it's explicitly written that Jane Rizzoli "did not care for babies", acting outright edgy and uncomfortable while trying to interview a woman who's taking of hers. Unusually for this trope, she's technically a heroic character rather than a villain, but she's been presented as a rather unlikable person thus far and this appears to be just one more reason for the readers to hate her.
  • Implied with Jumptall in Tailchaser's Song. After reporting that kittens have gone missing all around the forest, the Meeting Wall Clan and a neighboring Clan try to figure out what to do. Jumptall happily exclaims "No more kittens!", which gets him stared at by everyone else and causes him embarrassment.
  • In Viveca Lärn's Tekla books, this trait is often exhibited by shallow Valley Girls who try to make their moves on Tekla's father. Tekla and her friend Ulle make a resolution not to hate kids when they get older.
  • Togetherly Long: The town cooper, who doesn't like the sound of children's happiness and isn't above loudly telling his friends how much he hates them just so he can be overheard by them.
  • Lizardstripe from Warrior Cats appears to not like having any kits, showing dismay at Hollyflower for missing her kits at one point. She even said she didn't want any with Mudclaw (in ShadowClan, not WindClan) in front of Yellowfang and Raggedstar.
  • Wayside School:
    • The meaningfully-named Mr. Kidswatter, principal of Wayside School.
    • Many teachers in the third book apply. Mrs. Drazil, for the most part, appears to be trying to atone for her previous Evil Teacher tendencies, and is nothing but pleasant to the Wayside kids. But she finds herself sucked back into her role when she shows a grudge against former, troublemaking students. Miss Nogard mostly hopes to bring misery to everyone around her, and so she applies for a teaching position. She learned to get over this. The Gorf family, however, is a pure example of this trope.
  • Downplayed in Winds of Fate. Nyara isn't looking to harm children but she doesn't want to be around them in general and begs off staying in a home with two, and with parents looking to have more.
    "I am very sorry, for I am about to say something that will revolt you, Birdkin, but I cannot bear little ones. No matter the species. Giggling in voices to pierce the ears, running about like mad things, shrieking enough to startle the dead - I cannot bear little ones. I have no maternal instinct. I do not want maternal instinct. I do not want to see little ones for more than a short time, at long intervals. And soon there will be two more, this time the very little ones, who cry and cry all night, and will not be comforted; who become ill for mysterious reasons and make messes at both ends. No. I care much for Treyvan and Hydona, but I will not abide living with the little ones."
  • Kestrel from Wings of Fire hates dragonets, or at least the dragonets she is made to take care of. They remind her of the two dragonets she lost a year prior. In reality, only one of her children died, however she didn't learn this until they were nearly grown.
  • Plenty of P. G. Wodehouse characters, although it's somewhat justified in that the kids in his stories tend to be Bratty Half Pints.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 3rd Rock from the Sun: Mary Albright openly admits that she never became a mother because she hates children. Her students at the university may be older, but she still doesn't like most of them.
  • Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory was forced to babysit her little siblings as a child, which negatively colored her opinion on children. She has little patience for kids and doesn't want to have her own that will interrupt her career and ruin her body. This came as a blow to her fiancée whom couldn't picture himself not being a dad someday (they reach a compromise that when the time comes he'll stay home with the kids).
    • She does seem to be changing her mind based on how things are going with her pregnancy.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Principal Snyder. We eventually get something of an explanation to the effect that he was the kid who was always picked on; presumably he became a school principal by way of revenge.
    • Lothos. With the exception of Merrick, Lothos and his minions are never shown attacking anyone over the age of 18.
  • The Criminal Minds episode "The Boogeyman" had a killer who specifically targeted children. Since the victims, who were male and female, showed no signs of sexual abuse, and were killed with excessive violence, its concluded the killer is driven exclusively by rage, and just really, really hates kids. In a twist, it turns out he's about the same age as his victims.
  • Heroes's Hiro has issues with babies. It's not that he specifically hates them, but rather that they freak him out and he's slightly afraid of them because he isn't quite sure how to deal with them (Ando also teases him about their "razor sharp baby fingernails"). Naturally, he and Ando end up taking care of Matt Parkman Jr. (who Hiro mistakenly believes is the actual Matt Parkman somehow regressed to infancy). This is slightly funny because much of Hiro's likeability comes from his child-like enthusiasm, though he seems to have no problems with older children.
  • Hotel Babylon: The manager of a premier league football team asks for extra security to be put in place in order to keep children out of the hotel and away from her team. She also won't allow the team to appear on children's television because she believes that all children naturally have germs.
  • Frank Underwood of House of Cards (US) will happily use a child's death as a political prop, but he admits to the viewer that he personally despises them. Examined here, which suggests this is due to Frank seeing almost everyone in terms of leverage; kids have nothing he can use to get ahead.
  • How I Met Your Mother: While not cruel or anything to them, Robin isn't particularly fond of babies or small children. In addition to being aware of how messy and stressful they are, she has a phobia about babies due to their large eyes and that soft spot on the top of their heads. However, in the third season episode "Little Boys", Present Ted voiceovers to his kids that, as they knew, Robin got over this enough to be an honorary aunt to them. Adorably, this voiceover plays over a montage of Ted's kids' drawings of them with their Aunt Robin. Discovering she was infertile probably played a part in that.
  • Jojo from InSecurity is not fond of children, though they adore her (every single one of them.)
  • Bandora in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger hates children and often explicitly targets them in her attacks — the first thing she did upon release from her can was to capture the kids who were riding in the space shuttle whose astronauts originally freed her and try to crush them with a giant rock. This trope is subverted in the finale, where it is revealed her hate for children stems from her grief for losing her only son. After accepting a Deal with the Devil to gain magical powers, she lost all memories about her son and her grief for losing him turned to irrational hatred towards all children. She fully loses this status once she meets Lamie and Grifforzer's baby in spite of initially trying to be cold towards them, as she is last seen laughing in joy as she plays and dotes over the child.
  • When Cassandra and Ezekiel are stuck telling each other secret truths in order to keep a door open in The Librarians 2014 (It Makes Sense in Context), one of the things she shouts is that she can't stand babies. The magical lie-detecting door doesn't close.
  • Life of Riley: In one episode, Maddy starts working for an executive yet lazy woman who dislikes children. She hasn't anything against them per se, but she doesn't believe that employees can work when they have kids. Ironically, by the end of the episode, she actually finds Maddy's children more useful than she is.
  • Little House on the Prairie: The one-time character Hannibal Applewood in the 1976 episode "Troublemaker." Applewood was the teacher who briefly replaced the beloved Miss Beadle for a brief time at the Walnut Grove School, and his true feelings for children become known when Charles Ingalls pressures him into explaining why his resume was so long and why there were several unexplained gaps in his work history.
  • The titular character from Lucifer doesn't outright hate children but really doesn't like having them around. Being the Fallen Angel, it seems that most of it stems from him just not knowing how to deal with them properly. He regularly calls them "little humans", winces when his Love Interest Chloe's young daughter gets in his personal space, and has no compunctions about doing unhealthy things to them (or letting them do unhealthy things when told to babysit one by an unsuspecting parent). His right-hand demon Maze is even worse about it due to being a vicious Hell-born Torture Technician with even less of a moral compass than the otherwise decent Lucifer. Both grow out of it to some degree as the show progresses, though, with Maze in particular forming a close bond with Chloe's daughter in her own weird but heartwarming way.
  • My World… and Welcome to It: Once he gets tipsy on bourbon, children's book author George Lockhart is ironically revealed to be a man who doesn't much like children — and decidedly to Ellen's disgust, given how much she likes the man's books.
    John: Come to think of it, though, if we didn't have wives, we wouldn't have children.
    George: You bet your sweet life you wouldn't. I used to think that children were nature's practical joke upon the human race — pointless, tedious, and in questionable taste, but still a joke.
    John: Aren't they?
    George: No — a mistake, not a joke. Nature, my boy, has no sense of humor. Nature goofed.
    Lydia: That's funny!
    George: In five thousand years of comparative civilization, no one has ever discovered a practical use for the human young. In many of the higher forms of animal life, the adult male devours the young — the guppy, the alligator, the lowly hamster...
  • Rich Bitch C.C. Babcock on The Nanny. She can't even remember the names of Maxwell Sheffield's children, or even the number, despite knowing them all their lives, and working from their home.
  • The Noddy Shop episode "Telling The Whole Truth" features a haughty Englishwoman who is one of these named Charlene Von Pickings whom Agatha Flugelschmidt is attempting to impress into going to her hat shop. She objects to the presence of children even in the toy shop owned by Agatha's brother Noah, who points out that they have more place there than she does.
  • Peep Show has Mark Corrigan admit he's a pedophobe (afraid of children) to Jez while his ex-wife is having their child. Jez naturally misunderstands and thinks it means some sort of combination of pedophile and homophobe. He does seem to like his own child in the end and is not abusive. He's not a good father though.
  • Rodney McKay in Stargate Atlantis is very uncomfortable dealing with children. Naturally, every child he interacts with responds to his attempts to brush them off by forming an immediate attachment to him.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Jean-Luc Picard is a Downplayed example. Children make him wickedly uncomfortable, due to difficulty relating to them and reminders of his strained relationship with his family, but he doesn't hate them. He does, however, ask for Riker's help in not "making an ass of [himself] with children." He gets better as the series goes along, though. A transporter accident that meant he spent most of an episode as a twelve-year-old might have helped. He's also genuinely nice to his nephew René (and tearfully mourns his death in a fire), and years later becomes a Parental Substitute to a Romulan orphan named Elnor.
  • Downplayed also with Lisa Cusack in "The Sound of Her Voice" from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who mentions in passing to Dr. Bashir that she can't stand children, that she knows everybody loves them, but not her.

    Mythology and Religion 
  • As a warning, Jesus in Matthew 18:10-11 tells His disciples, "Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven. For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost."
  • Most tales of the Jersey Devil claim it originated because a woman who already had twelve kids, upon discovering that she was yet again pregnant, cursed aloud that if she had to bear it, let it be the Devil instead of yet another child. Granted, with so many children, she probably had liked them until the burden of caring for so many became too arduous to stand.

    Music 
  • The Decemberists' Rock Opera The Hazards of Love features a character identified as the Rake, who was shocked to find that schtupping his wife produced babies. After his wife died in childbirth, he killed them all. He doesn't even feel guilty. He's contrasted with the young Star-Crossed Lovers who are the main characters, who have a surprise pregnancy in accordance with the Law of Inverse Fertility, but are extremely happy to be expecting "a sweet little baby".
  • Joy Division's "The Eternal":
    Cry like a child, though these years make me older
    With children my time is so wastefully spent
    A burden to keep, though their inner communion
    Accept like a curse an unlucky deal
  • In Barry Louis Polisar's "I Have A Teacher, She's So Mean", the narrator asserts that his teacher must hate kids because she always screams at her students and won't let them laugh, smile or have fun. This is made more explicit in the Updated Re Release of the song, where the teacher actually states that she does, indeed, hate kids.
    ''She never lets us laugh, she never lets us smile,
    "Wipe that grin off your face, you're acting just like a child."
    "It's work, work, work—no late papers today."
    "I'm tired of excuses, cause I hate kids anyway."

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Mary Elizabeth Monroe was one prior to her Heel–Face Turn. Her rival, Hailey Hatred went in the opposite direction, starting with a mild distaste for the younger that escalated to a willingness to attack tots in the audience.
  • "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase was one of these during his feud with Hulk Hogan, since Hogan was a heroic Friend to All Children, Dibiase delighted in using his wealth to make kids miserable, which was shown in taped skits such as renting out an entire public pool on a summer day so kids wouldn't be able to swim. Another infamous stunt was when he would offer to pay an audience member 100$ to perform some sort of stunt, and he chose one child to bounce a basketball a set amount of times, only to kick it away at the last moment, just to be a dick.

    Theatre 
  • Annie: The titular character is raised in an orphanage overseen by the cruel Miss Hannigan, who has nothing but contempt for the girls placed in her care, and takes particular delight in teasing Annie over the fact that her parents are most likely not coming back for her. Her big solo number, "Little Girls", is about all the ways children get on her nerves.

    Video Games 
  • Amanda the Adventurer: The Hameln Director runs a business that involves abducting children one by one using the titular television program to lure them by some means. These children are then implied to have become the sentient objects that appear in the show, a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Anna's Quest is a game in which you play an innocent young girl caught up in the schemes of witches and devils. Inevitably some of these turn up in the plot.
  • Guillo of Baten Kaitos Origins, with the possible exception of Sagi's "siblings", due to children thinking Guillo is a toy and abusively "playing" with Guillo and partly because Guillo seems to dislike everyone except Sagi (Guillo also claims Kids Are Cruel is part of it).
    Guillo: Blasted parasites! I will eat you all!
    Kid: Yay! Eat me first!
    Guillo: *sigh*
  • Dr. Yi Suchong from BioShock is definitely one of these. Unfortunately, he also had to work with them constantly, being in charge of the creation of the Little Sisters and bonding them to Big Daddies. Him slapping a Little Sister who was annoying him while he recorded an audio diary caused his death on the end of a Big Daddy's drill.
  • Drakengard: Enemies include conscripted Child Soldiers whom you can, and in some cases must kill. Your party is led by a sociopath who kills anything that moves, an almost tragic pedophile, and an Ax-Crazy child eating elf as well as an amazingly lucky cute little boy. Together, they are the perfect child killing team!
    "Did I mention this game isn't family friendly? Well, it's not family friendly. Indeed, I cannot think of a video game that hates children more than Drakengard."
    • He later expands this to "Cavia+ Hates Children" in Gaiden Game NieR; the mooks that Nier's been carving through? They're actually the souls of humans, transformed but still fully sapient. On his path to save Yonah, Nier cuts down A Boy And His Robot, children wandering around the countryside and babies in the final dungeon.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gives us Grelod the Kind, the incredibly cruel headmistress of Riften's Honorhall Orphanage. Her idea of "kindness" is regularly beating the children unfortunate enough to come into her care, handing out extra beatings for those who "shirk their duties", and denying any of them a chance at being adopted, stating that "nobody needs you, nobody wants you." She also has a closet with shackles — the kind normally found in prisons — where it's implied she locks kids into as punishment or in conjunction with their beatings. It's little wonder that she is your first unofficial target for the Dark Brotherhood. Grelod is the only character in the game you can murder in front of a guard and not be punished for killing at all - even the guards want to see her dead.
  • In Fallout 4: The Sole Survivor, if played like an asshole, clearly doesn't like kids all that much (not like he/she likes anyone else more) and will frequently cut sentences short with an exasperated "kids" and might even say "I hate kids". Ironically their primary motivation (aside from avenging the murder of their spouse) is to rescue their kidnapped infant son.
  • William Afton from Five Nights at Freddy's. While it’s unclear if his preference in murdering children is due to hatred or some other reason, the fact that his top priority in life (or undeath) seems to be murdering children lands him in this category regardless. The novels imply that it's just fun for him.
  • Amarant from Final Fantasy IX, though he'd never hurt one and attacked Lani who was using Eiko as a hostage. He's nice enough to Vivi, though.
  • Little happens in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to shock multiple-murderer, crime lord, and overall badass Tommy Vercetti. Until he buys an ice-cream company and meets the Child Hater who owns it, a creepy old lady who viciously loathes the children she serves (despite no children existing), threatens Tommy for having ever been a child, and reveals that her business is just a front for selling drugs.
  • Two of the potential home buyers from House Flipper, Jimmy Traitor and Veronica Liptson, both dislike kids and won't want to buy a house if there are kids' objects or toys in it. Jimmy outright says he doesn't like kids, and Veronica calls them "little snots." Raphael Erko also doesn't want stuff for kids, though in his case it's because toys "offend the honor of his masculinity" rather than because he hates kids.
  • I. M. Meen, although he apparently only traps 'goody-goodies' and 'bookworms' in his labyrinth... which you can only escape if you're clever.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Chief Administrator Seeq's in-game profile gives the player three pieces of information about them: their pronouns, their occupation and their dislike of children. Unfortunately, they are short-staffed enough that their only known regular helpers are among the youngest colonists, with Sol being potentially as young as ten years old when they start working for Seeq.
  • Lorraine Maillard of The Park delivers a long and bitter rant about how children ruin the lives of their parents, and goes so far as to say that it would serve her son right if she just abandoned him in the resident Amusement Park of Doom. And yet, moments later, she is suddenly consumed with fear and concern for little Callum's safety, practically turning into a Mama Bear on the spot. She's actually under the influence of the emotion-siphoning machines at the park, meaning Loraine isn't in her right mind while narrating - or when the Bogeyman makes her kill Callum. Unfortunately, that really doesn't make her feel any better, as The Secret World demonstrates.
  • Sam & Max: In What's New, Beezlebub?, Santa is revealed to be this as his Hell is being forced to deal with children. Santa even questions why people assume different, since he took the one job where there's only one day a year there's even a chance he'd be near children and there were strict rules that they weren't allowed to see him.
Sam:Everybody knows Santa loves kids!
Santa: Yeah, so much that I moved to the one place in the world where there's no children! Wake up, people!
  • The Sims 3: One of the traits you can give Sims is "Dislikes Children". This is a slightly more realistic example in that Sims who Dislike Children usually won't torment or antagonize them unless they're also Evil or Mean-Spirited; they just don't like being around kids or talking to them.
  • The Baron and the other industrialists from Stacking have a bizarre fixation on working children to the bone in a series of bizarre jobs. After the law has been past to make child labour illegal he tricks and kidnaps children and plans to elope to another country.

    Visual Novels 
  • Maki Harukawa in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony manages the unlikely combination of a child-hating Friend to All Children. Having grown up in an orphanage certainly helps in that regard. This is a cover for her true identity as the Ultimate Assassin.
  • Amber in Highway Blossoms isn't terribly fond of children, or at least "not the rotten ones," compared to her friend and eventual girlfriend Marina. She scares off a group of "brats" just by glaring at them, and finds Tess to be a Creepy Child, although she doesn't get along with her as badly as she does with Tess's older sister Mariah.
  • Taken to truly despicable levels in Higurashi: When They Cry with Teppei Houjou and his methods of treating Satako in Tatagoroshi and Minagoroshi-hen. Even the Big Bad thinks he's scum and has him murdered in the PS2 alternate final chapter Miotsuki-hen.

    Web Animation 
  • Camp Camp: Unsurprisingly, Cameron Campbell professes to despise children, viewing them as little monstrosities that drive people crazy. As such, Cameron is thoroughly shocked at David choosing the campers over him, even when David points out that it was a part of the job.
  • Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation has made it clear that he finds children annoying. Becoming a father himself has caused him to retract some of these views, however.
    "I do despise kids, seriously, I don't think you quite grasp how much I loathe children, given three wishes I'd ask for a puppy, a decent chip sandwich and for every child-bearing womb on the planet to pop out and fly away like a cheery parade of greasy red balloons."

    Webcomics 
  • Bug: The main character seems to be one, though he may be just brutally honest.
  • Mrs. Cruddletwat from Ennui GO! hates children so much she pretended to be a teacher just so she could torture the students attending the school she was squatting in.
  • Webcomic/Forward has Zoa, who (despite denying it) is deeply uncomfortable around children. This is rather ironic, considering Zoa used to be a childcare bot before being repurposed into a general services provider (read:robot sex worker).
  • In Jupiter-Men, beneath Binny's cheery veneer is a woman only interested in partying and in fact hates children, calling them a "blight on the world". If anything, she's relieved when Nathan bribes her to stay out of his life and just curls up on the couch to watch TV.
  • Satan and Me's Satan apparently isn't a huge fan of children.
  • Sequential Art: Art is no fan of children. Regardless, he's actually a good-natured guy, if a little cynical and misanthropic in general, and his specific antipathy for kids seems to stem from the fact that the neighbor kids take every opportunity to torment him (notably with snowballs). Hillary Locke, on the other hand, has been depicted by creator Phillip Jackson as screaming and swearing at a group of kids who mistook her for the Easter Bunny, and he has stated that she "has zero tolerance for kids at the best of times". She is also a recurring antagonist for the main group and Kat's arch-nemesis since grade school.
  • In Sinfest, Death is disgusted by a woman's pregnancy.

    Web Original 
  • Maddox of The Best Page in the Universe hates children, old people, and basically everyone who isn't Maddox.
  • In this CollegeHumor sketch, there's a subversion. Gary hates holding babies...but it's not because he actually hates babies. It's because he's deathly afraid of accidentally hurting something so fragile... and being responsible for it.
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-956 is a living pinata that despises children for obvious reasons, and kills them by transforming them into pinatas and bludgeoning them to death. When given SCP-3392, a set of enchanted Halloween masks that make monsters look like human children, it visibly retched before clawing at its face in an attempt to remove it. The Foundation had to relocate it to another site when they noticed that, when left alone in its containment cell, it would always turn to face the direction of the closest elementary school... several miles away.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Lemongrab has catastrophically bad social skills in general, but when Princess Bubblegum gives him a baby Candy Person to hold, he goes from tentative "goo"ing to screaming with revulsion in seconds.
    Lemongrab: [slapping the child] PUT YOU IN MY OVEN! [shoves it off his lap] It's gross!
  • Archer: Cheryl Tunt; her gift at a baby shower was a bunch of plastic bags and a book on SIDS. Mitigated a bit because it's more that she's afraid of and disgusted by babies as opposed to despising them. Lana used to be wary of Cheryl being left alone with young AJ because of this, but she's never made a move to cause her any harm or even shown her any animosity.
  • Bump in the Night: Bumpy can't stand babies, yet in one episode, he grows attached to a lost baby snail. In another, he accidentally swallows some baby formula and becomes a baby.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door: A few villains; namely Father, Chad (despite Chad actually being a double agent for the kids), Cree, Mr. Boss, etc. Also, the Delightful Children hate children too as a result of being brainwashed at Father's hands. Mr. Boss, however, makes an exception for his own kids.
  • The Cramp Twins: Miss Hissy is a teacher who isn't subtle about her hate for children.
  • Dad'X: Foudror designed dangerous toys with the intent of harming children because he hated their guts, which led to him getting kicked out of Dad'X's Toy Factory.
  • DuckTales (1987): Millionara Vanderbucks in "Till Nephews Do Us Part''. Upon marrying Scrooge, she intends to send Huey, Dewey and Louie to military school and Webby to finishing school.
    Millionara: [upon first meeting Webby and the nephews] Children! How ghastly! ...Er, how charming!
  • Magica De Spell from DuckTales (2017) had no qualms attacking any of the McDuck kids in Season 1, but didn't seem to particularly hate them any more than her adult enemies. By Season 2, however, after being stripped of her powers and working as a party magician at Funso's Funzone for an undisclosed period of time, she has apparently developed a habit of declaring magical war on children, especially those with birthdays.
  • In Ed, Edd n Eddy, this trope is heavily implied in Eddy's brother. Specially when you consider the Fridge Horror that he lives in an amusement park, implying that he seems to get a genuine kick out of torturing children.
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • Vicky, Timmy's abusive babysitter. She's actually the whole reason Timmy even has fairies, as she made him so miserable he qualified for fairies. She's even worse to her sister Tootie, something even Timmy notes, since at least he doesn't have to LIVE with her.
    • Crocker too. Maybe Dinkleberg. (Dinkleberg...) Crocker does have one sole exception. Ironically, it's Poof. Who happens to be a fairy, but Crocker briefly raised him as if he was his own son and genuinely cares for him.
  • Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: The show's second Horror Host the Night-Night Porter, who replaced Uncle Grizzly after the Framing Device was changed to take place at the HotHell Darkness instead of the Squeam Screen theatre, is indicated to have a very dim view on children. Aside from thoroughly enjoying subjecting children to torture, the wraparound segment of "Frank Einstein's Monster" has him give a speech where he compares children to dogs by claiming that both are guilty of the same unsavory habits and remarking that he isn't terribly fond of either.
  • Invader Zim: Ms. Bitters, true to her name, she is devoid of any compassionate emotion and having a very demonic hatred for children. To be fair, Ms. Bitters seems to hate everyone.
    Ms. Bitters: When you were my students, I said you'd amount to nothing. And I was right, you're nothing!
  • Miss Hartman from Jackie Chan Adventures seems to be one of these for most of the series, but it turns out in the last season that she's a subversion. She actually adores children.
  • Pizzazz of the Misfits from Jem doesn't like children, but then again Pizzazz doesn't like many people. In contrast the nicest member of the band, Stormer, gets along with children.
  • Johnny Test: Wacko. Ironically, he's a toymaker. But his toys are designed to get rid of children.
  • The Pound Puppies (2010) episode "Little Monster" has Leonard McLeish state that children give him the creeps.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
    • Sedusa disguised herself as one of these.
    • The writers had Ms. Keane be one for a single episode, no matter how little sense it makes for a kindly kindergarten teacher, just so there would be an excuse for why the girls couldn't just leave a lost baby in her care while they looked for the parents. To elaborate, she refuses to look after the baby because she is busy, which is a lie, and the girls notice that she has thrown all the apples her students gave her into the trash.
  • Mr. White, Mayor Fitzhugh, and Doctor Slicer from Recess all have shades of not being very fond of children. Downplayed with Principal Prickly and Miss Finster, however, who only think that they're examples of this trope, but, as Miss Grotke points out in Miracle on Third Street, Prickly and Finster secretly enjoy the company of TJ and Spinelli respectively, no matter how much they deny it.
  • Robotomy: "The Playdate": The Tickle-Me-Psycho doll, ironically for a children's toy, cannot stand kids and tries to run away from them at its first opportunity.
  • Rugrats:
    • Angelica is a twisted variation of this trope, with a level of Boomerang Bigot considering that she herself is a child.
    • Coco Labouche from the sequel movie Rugrats in Paris is a grownup version of the current Angelica. Coco despises kids with a passion but pretends to like kids in front of certain people like Kira, her boss, and Chaz. Only the kids can see her true colors. In fact, Coco stops hiding her true colors as the movie progresses.
    • Another episode deals with Angelica visiting the set of her favorite show Ms. Carol's Happy House and discovering that the host actually despises children. In her own words: "I'll let you know what I think of my kids, I think they're all little... (Sound-Effect Bleep)". Later, when Angelica tells her she heard her say it, she proudly admits it and is shortly thereafter fired and replaced by her much nicer assistant.
  • Santa Inc.: The protagonist Candy is an elf who wants to become the new Santa but when put in an environment with children proves to be extremely uncomfortable with them. Upon seeing this, the current Santa states that while she has the necessary business skills for the position the fact that she hates kids (which in turn causes them to hate her) means that she would be a poor fit for the position.
  • Sheep in the Big City hints that Lady Richington doesn't like children very much in the episode "The Wool of the People", where General Specific and Sheep run for mayor. There is a chase sequence near the end of the episode where General Specific and Sheep stop their chase so they can both kiss a baby. Lady Richington is handed the baby after General Specific and Sheep resume chasing, prompting her to make an uncomfortable expression and have her butler kiss the baby instead.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Very implied in Moe Szyslak. Interestingly, he emphasizes the cruelty to children even more than any other adult on the show. Go figure. "See, this is why we should hate kids!". He doesn't seem to hate all kids, however, and has sometimes been seen interacting positively with children (especially Maggie in "Moe Baby Blues"). A very early episode also showed that he (and his patrons) are pretty fond of Bart.
    • Krusty The Clown, being a Depraved Kids' Show Host, is not fond of kids, despite being a children's TV star. This is a later addition to the character, as he was originally portrayed as perfectly nice to them, but as the show progressed, it put more focus on his seedy personal life and unstable mental state. As a result, when not on camera, Krusty tends to be, at best, rather short and brusque with kids, and at worst downright mean, and only views kids as a means for his obsession with being famous.
    • In "Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays", in response to a baby riot at a concert, an organization composed entirely of Child Haters led by Lindsey Naegle band together and managed to eliminate every child-friendly thing in Springfield (for instance, restaurant attendees who bring children are forced to eat in their own room in the back, and toys were recycled into office furniture) and try to pass a law that would do even worse. It almost worked, but it was thwarted at the last moment when Bart, Lisa, and the other kids in Springfield hugged all the adults, infecting them with "kid germs." The adults collapsed with sickness and became unable to vote, causing the campaign to fail. This wasn't the first time Lindsey had tried something like this, but it was the most blatant example.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Innocents of Ryloth", clone trooper Boil is less than thrilled when his comrade Waxer makes an effort to befriend an orphaned Twi'lek girl the two run into while scouting. He does warm up to Numa… eventually.
    "You made a friend, mission accomplished. Can we go now?"
  • Superjail!: The main character, upon seeing a child for the first time since he has been one, wants her burned alive the second she makes herself known. The context is that it's the Warden's birthday and, being a drama queen, he's in despair over aging. Seeing a little child reminds him that he's "old" — who knows what he'd normal think of children.
  • In the Transformers: Animated episode "Mission Accomplished", Captain Fanzone admits to hating kids when Sari Sumdac, who was dumped on him by the Autobots because of an order from the Elite Guard to leave Earth and the disappearance of her father, starts bugging him by making a list of demands such as her own phone and an allowance.

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Igor Peabody

Becoming principal because you hate kids? Alright...

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