Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

This quip uses deadpan, deliberately antisocial humor to invert a common cultural expectation: that adults should naturally like children and eventually want to raise them. By framing “learning to dislike children” as a prudent life skill, the line satirizes the financial and emotional burdens associated with parenting—“expense and aggravation”—and treats them as avoidable costs rather than noble sacrifices. The joke’s bite comes from its mock-pragmatic tone, as if misanthropy were a sensible investment strategy. Read more broadly, it also pokes fun at rationalizations people make to defend personal preferences (including choosing not to have children) by dressing them up as hardheaded wisdom.