‘Pronatalist’ parents are under fire after the dad publicly slapped his toddler — and they think the criticism is racist

“I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn’t fix the problem, we could be gone,” Malcolm Collins previously told BI in 2022. The couple has done several interviews with the press in an effort to explain their objectives as a couple and speak on behalf of a burgeoning pronatalist movement.

But a recent interview the couple gave to The Guardian is getting a bad reception. The Guardian described a scene when Malcolm Collins slapped one of his toddlers in public after the child “knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself.”

“Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face,” The Guardian’s Jenny 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.”

Malcolm Collins resumed his conversation with the stunned reporter after telling his child: “I love you but you gotta be nice in restaurants. No, Toastie. You’re going to get bopped if you do that.”

Soon afterward, the episode went viral on X — the platform owned by Elon Musk, whom Malcolm Collins was incidentally gushing over moments before striking his toddler.

“The pro-natalist couple hits their children,” one X user said, sharing a screenshot of the article.

“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!!!!” another shared on X.

In an email to Business Insider, Simone Collins said the toddler, named Torsten Savage, was intentionally acting out, and tipping over a table with glassware on top of it “could be deadly in a house with infants” if it were to happen at the couple’s Pennsylvania home.

“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.”

Over the phone, Malcolm Collins told Business Insider that he “bopped” his son on the nose to jar him, not to hurt him. The couple chose the punishment specifically after observing “animal parenting models,” he said.

“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.”

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.”

The couple both said they found the backlash they faced on social media to be racist since, they argued, minorities often hit their children without 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 published in 2011.

Malcolm Collins said it 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. So yeah, I think it’s an arguably racist position.”