how to exclude all child categories of a category from showing up in the loop

I came across the need to exclude all child categories of a single category from showing up in the loop on the home page of my blog.

The solution was to place this code right before the loop:

if ( is_home() ) {
	$child_cats = (array) get_term_children('14', 'category');
	query_posts(array('category__not_in' => array_merge(array('14'), $child_cats)));
}

(14 being the parent category of the child categories to be excluded)

For example:

<?php

	if ( is_home() ) {
	$child_cats = (array) get_term_children('14', 'category');
	query_posts(array('category__not_in' => array_merge(array('14'), $child_cats)));
}

	while (have_posts()) : the_post(); $postcount++; ?>

Thanks to sivel in #wordpress irc for the code. I’m sharing it here because I could not find a solution to this anywhere in support.

Keywords: exclude / hide all child categories of a single category from the loop / from appearing on the home page.