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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

I suspect a lot of this is an unavoidable consequence of shifting from 3-5 kid families to 1-2. When you have 4 kids,

(1) you don't have enough time to helicopter all of them, some will just have to deal with their own problems

(2) having one disappointing kid isn't the end of the world. you have others to shift your expectations and hopes onto

But if you only have one or two kids... you simply can't afford any failures. If your one kid fails, you're a failure of a parent. So you spend as much time and (maybe misguided, maybe not) energy on them. I think this is a natural response, which makes me think it's pretty un-fixable unless family sizes increase.

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Part of it is also things getting so good in the world (most people in America don't have to worry about shelter or food) that people start to invent problems or find challenges to solve.

"Invent problems" seems to be a strange way to word things. It seems to me that with some basic necessities taken care of we have other problems to address?

But most people don't address those other real problems. They just fight negative sum game for social status.

I don't doubt those factors are intertwined, but I think it's a disservice to the human conscience to declare it unfixable except by somehow overloading our attention. Actually the answer is remarkably simple though obviously not easy: Stop pinning your self-actualization on your kids and recognize your role to help them discover their own personhood. There's only a short window where you know better than them anyway, so focus on preparing them to make their own decisions.

So I'm not discounting that that's healthier from a personal perspective, but I doubt it's a realistic change across a population.

I guess I'm mainly trying to say, I don't think this overparenting trend is society collectively going insane, it's a natural consequence of a different change, that of family size. So I suspect if you took a bunch of parents from 1900 and dropped them in 2015 with smaller families, you'd get roughly the same outcome.

The average parents in 1900 spent most of their time on manual labor, if I had to guess I'd say that had a larger impact on obsessing over their children than the number.

...because if there's one factor that correlates positively with national economic strength, it's population growth. /s

Um... population growth is very strongly positively correlated with GDP growth. It's well acknowledged that Japan and Europe's economic problems are mainly driven by aging and shrinking populations.

But I also don't see how this relates to my point. I'm not making judgements, I'm hypothesizing about the reason for a trend.

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