Remember the American couple following in the steps of the ultrarich people who want to repopulate the world with their children?
Now they're in hot water after the father publicly smacked one of their kids.
Malcolm and Simone Collins previously told Business Insider that they were on a mission to have many children because, as pronatalists, they wanted to "set the future of our species."
"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now," Malcolm Collins told BI in 2022. "And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone."
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The couple have done several interviews in an effort to explain their objectives and speak on behalf of a burgeoning pronatalist movement.
But a recent interview the couple gave to The Guardian has been getting a bad reception.
In the story, the journalist Jenny Kleeman described Malcolm Collins slapping one of his toddlers in public after the child "knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple."
"Immediately — like a reflex — Malcolm hits him in the face," Kleeman wrote. "It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son's face that's firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything."
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Kleeman said Malcolm Collins resumed his conversation after telling his child, "I love you but you gotta be nice in restaurants," adding, "You're going to get bopped if you do that."
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The Guardian's description of the incident went viral on X — the platform owned by Elon Musk, whom Malcolm Collins was gushing over moments before striking his toddler.
"The pro-natalist couple hits their children," one X user said, sharing a screenshot of the article.
Another said: "Jesus Christ the kid is two!!!!! My kid is two!!!!! The idea of hitting her has simply never occurred to me and if you know any two year olds it should be obvious how obviously nuts it is to do this!!!!!"
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In an email to Business Insider, Simone Collins said that the toddler, Torsten Savage, was intentionally acting out and that tipping over a table with glassware on it "could be deadly in a house with infants," like their home in Pennsylvania.
"He is an incredibly sweet, smart, analytic kid, but he also has a major rebellious streak and is in the middle of his twos. This is all to say that yes, 100%, Torsten was pushing boundaries and not acting unintentionally," Simone Collins wrote. "Incidents in which we 'bop' our kids are unusual — usually when physical safety is at stake."
Malcolm Collins told Business Insider over the phone that he "bopped" his son on the nose to jar him, not to hurt him. He said he and his wife chose to adopt the punishment specifically after observing "animal parenting models."
"Basically, across the nose is what we aim for," Malcolm Collins said. "The reason I think it's better than a slap on the wrist is because it doesn't need to be painful to have the same impact. By that, what I mean is when somebody enters the space around your face, it is very shocking and very reorienting, especially if you're in an emotional loop, which is easy for kids to get into."
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He added: "The only way you could achieve the same effect by hitting a child's wrist is to hit it large enough to cause a significant amount of pain, which I wouldn't want to do, but I can understand why visually people might be, 'Oh, the slight hit on the nose or the face is really bad,' because it looks visually bad."
Both Simon and Malcolm Collins, who are white, said they found the backlash they received on social media to be racist, arguing that minorities often hit their children without facing the same backlash.
"We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy. It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups," Simone Collins said via email, linking to a CNN article from 2011describing research in which most respondents, regardless of race or ethnicity, said they'd spanked their children.
Malcolm Collins said the criticism was "uniquely offensive" to him considering "the majority of Americans practice some form of corporal punishment, as you can see from the statistics with specifically that being the minority groups of Americans."
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He added, "So yeah, I think it's an arguably racist position."
