Childs counted among his early influences Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane and Robert LeFevre.

In his essay "An Open Letter to Ayn Rand", Childs rejected Objectivism as being true libertarianism, asserting that the establishment of government is in violation of self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.

[3] In the 1960s, Ayn Rand wrote an essay entitled "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business".

[6] After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo with the intention of eventually becoming a college professor.

[8][9] After his death, libertarian scholar Tom G. Palmer wrote: "Roy Childs was one of the finer members of a generation of radical thinkers who worked successfully to revive the tradition of classical liberalism [...] and who dared to launch a frontal challenge to the twentieth-century welfare state.