Basic Trope: Children are seen as inconvenient and burdensome.
- Straight: Alice and Bob decide they do not like children, and have no interest in caring for, paying for, or cleaning up after them. Because of this, they both get sterilized.
- Exaggerated:
- Every main couple agrees with Alice and Bob, resulting in the sterilization of at least one spouse of each couple.
- Alice and Bob decide that all children should be killed, and destroy every child they see.
- Alice and Bob live in a country where children have no rights; even the right to life does not begin until age 18.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob decide to put off children until they're financially stable.
- Only Bob or only Alice thinks this way; the other disagrees.
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob are conscious and reasonable Child Haters who are simply being consistent in their logic.
- Alice and Bob are globe-trotting researchers; as such, their lifestyle does not allow them to conceive a child.
- The world is under a Malthusian catastrophe where there are more uneducated unemployed people serving as parasites than there is food and wages. Alice and Bob happened to be wise to see that it's merciless for them to make babies in this Crapsack World, and have to wait until there's enough resources for them to make a child who can be given enough resources and education so that they do not end up as an unemployed useless parasite.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob believe that Babies Make Everything Better.
- Alice and/or Bob would like to procreate while they still can.
- The child characters are the protagonists, while the adults do nothing.
- Not Wanting Kids Is Weird
- Subverted:
- Alice and Bob's neighbor Charles thinks that he overheard them talking about how "children are a waste". However, it is later revealed that Alice and Bob have careers that involve dealing with children, and/or are always happy to look after the children of their siblings, cousins, and neighbors.
- Because Alice and Bob are the only childless couple in their neighborhood, everyone assumes that they think this way. It turns out that Alice and Bob have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive.
- Double Subverted:
- But have no interest in having children of their own, and use the Children Are a Waste argument when their parents start with the whole I Want Grandkids thing.
- One night, they're Talking in Bed, and Alice mentions that their lives are pretty good even without the pitter-patter of little feet in the house ... and that they have some advantages that the parents in their social circle don't have. These include the ability to sleep in on weekends, hundreds of dollars in disposable income, adequate sleep (most of the time), and an easier time keeping the house clean, just to name a few. Bob agrees, and they decide to start using birth control again.
- Parodied: Every time Alice or Bob seems to be weakening in this view, an obnoxious or destructive child shows up to convince them otherwise.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Depending on the Writer, Alice and Bob may or may not want kids.
- Alice doesn’t want to have children, but she likes kids and has a job working with children. However, she claims to hate babies. However she then adopts one of her students after finding out that they are a Foster Kid.
- Averted: None of the characters think this way.
- Enforced:
- Writer on Board
- Author Tract
- The writers don't want to work with child actors.
- Lampshaded:
- "Alice and I have no interest in spending umpteen-gazillion dollars raising a child..."
- "No thanks. Bob and I will leave the responsibility of schoolyard bullying and victimization to those who have time to waste on the antics of their stupid offspring."
- "Children are the future. Today belongs to me!"
- Invoked:
- Alice and Bob are contemplating the possibility of having kids, but decide that they can't afford on their salaries to give a child a good home (even with both incomes).
- Alice and Bob believe that they aren't cut out to be Good Parents.
- Alice and Bob's country passes a Population Control law banning couples from having children until both spouses are at least 30 years old, have been married for at least five years, or some other plot-convenient restriction. This gives Alice and Bob time to think about it, and they ultimately decide they don't want to start a family after all.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice and Bob decide that they really want a child, and they'll make it work, even if they do have to take some parenting classes here and sacrifice some tropical vacations there.
- Discussed: "Do you think Children Are a Waste, Alice?" "No, I just know we can't afford a baby."
- Conversed: "Why don't Alice and Bob want a baby?" "I guess they just don't. I can relate."
- Implied: Alice and Bob frequently discuss their plans for the future, but never mention having or not having kids. This strongly implies that they do not want to start a family.
- Deconstructed:
- With people opting out of parenthood, there is a "graying" population and the governments are concerned about a shortage of workers and taxpayers.
- Alice and Bob live in a society where Not Wanting Kids Is Weird and are cast out and called out for being Child Haters (regardless of whether it's true or not) as a result.
- Outside their own country, Alice and Bob's stance about not reproducing isn't followed anywhere else in the world. In other countries, this belief is decried as immoral, unnatural or any other similar negative. Thus, their effort to preserve the Earth don't do much in the end.
- Reconstructed:
- Until they realize the Earth's got eight billion people on it multiplying geometrically, and that the large human population requires vast amount of resources that are only procured linearly. As such, the resources will eventually be exhausted, leading to a Crapsack World.
- In The Future, manual labour is automated; the only children valued are intellectual college graduates. Combine this with the fact of Earth's limited resources, and there's no reason why we should keep on overpopulating anymore.
- Alice and Bob are long dead when it happens, but the rest of the world eventually understands the problem of overpopulation, even though there are still people who don't believe in it.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's mother wants grandkids and uses hopeless arguments like "Look at how happy Carol is!" (while Carol is trying in vain to appease her whiny brat) to try to change Alice's mind.
- Played for Drama:
- Alice's mother wants grandkids and goes to great lengths to "help" Alice and Bob conceive a child; she slips Alice fertility drugs, sabotages their birth control, and tries to blackmail Alice into deciding against having an abortion. Alice's unwanted pregnancies lead to a lot of stress for her, and when she finds out what her mother is doing, she's furious and tries to get her imprisoned.
- Alice becomes pregnant, but has a Convenient Miscarriage. Because she hates children, everyone assumes that she had an abortion. She becomes an outcast.
- Played for Horror: Cold-Blooded Torture occurs, whether Alice and Bob inflict it on their peers for being parents or suffer for not being parents.
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