Hacker News Reader

Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

The problem I see is that people simply don't have children anymore. We are surrounded by couples in their 20s-50s living in houses without children. When my kids want to visit friends they have to ride their bikes 1+ miles to the next family with kids (and we don't live in a rural area, we live in a densely populated suburban area) and from their those 2 kids will ride another 1+ miles to the next family with kids. I suppose the real culprit is people can't afford to have kids anymore (though we managed to have 7 kids on a single income, so it is possible).

View on HN

The problem I see is that people simply don't have children anymore.

Is that actually true, beyond this anecdote? FWIW, my own suburban neighborhood (a cluster of about 60 townhomes) has enough kids that there's usually a small basketball game going on in the parking lot. And often bikes left scattered around (until dinner time, when the kids pick them up and go home).

In my experience as a parent (my son moved out last year), there were always kids around, but they were scheduled down to the minute in sports, STEM enrichment activities, scouts, or church. And those kids from families that didn't have that kind of budget were glued to TV screens or computer monitors.

We tried to give our son free time to play, but there was nobody around to play with. The kids were there, just not available.

Now that we've moved to a smaller house, with THs instead of SFHs, it appears to be slightly better. More play in the parking lot. But, the kids still seem pretty tightly scheduled (almost all are in sports leagues year-round).

Yes this is true: https://www.infoplease.com/us/births/live-births-and-birth-r...

Anecdotally I've lived in a few different places, and it seems to vary a lot, even by neighborhood. In Utah there are tons of kids around. In Alaska there were neighborhoods here and there with lots of kids, and many others with practically no kids. I would guess that perception of kids varies a lot based on which neighborhood you move to, but yes overall it is declining.

one thing to watch out for here, though- sampling bias works out in the kids' favor.

More kids are in neighborhoods with... more kids!

For others who don’t know the lingo:

TH = townhouse

SFH = single family home

... I think

Correct.

And for the Brits, that would be detached (=SFH) and terraced (=TH).

Though in the US, we have lots of newer terraced/town-homes than I think you have across the pond (where they tend to be older homes in industrial cities). And we don't really do semi-detached (duplex in the US).

>people can't afford to have kids anymore.

I don't think this is the issue. It's much more a cultural thing, statistically richer countries have lower birthrates. But getting married and having kids is no longer accepted as "just what you do". Less people are getting married, that also may play a role.

I'd also imagine it's different in different areas. Might even map to incomes, or political leanings of different zip codes.

Also there's lots more to do at home than screw around with the spouse now.

For us it completely around income and time. Live in the bay area, have a long commute, can't afford to have a second kid even if I really want to. I'm very well paid.

If you did really want a second kid, you would have moved. You would have a trivial commute, fuel would be half the cost, and housing would be a tenth the cost.

Clearly, there is something more important to you.

That's the stupidest comment I've ever read. It doesn't really deserve a thoughtful answer and I find it pretty insulting to get lectured about life choices by someone that simply doesn't understand the situation.

I was tempted to lecture you about life choices, but I didn't. I said nothing about the morality, ethics, or wisdom of the choices you have made.

I simply said it is clear that you have determined that other things in your life are of greater priority for you.

I'm not sure what you mean by "stupidest". It isn't wrong. For me it is a trivially obvious observation, and thus kind of lame, but I'm a disinterested observer. Making the correct observation would be more difficult if I were deeply invested in the situation.

FYI, my 11 kids are supported on a single income, and I'm just an experienced software hacker. I don't even manage people or work overtime. Granted, I don't get to live anywhere near my childhood home of the Bay Area, but such is life. Just as you have done, I made choices according to my priorities, but my priorities are different.

I think a big part of it is that we spend so much time beating it into adolescents that they shouldn't have kids that it becomes a very large psychological hump to get over to become okay with the idea of having kids.

When you spend ten years telling people all the ways kids will ruin their lives, it doesn't really seem surprising that they'd be hesitant to have kids...

It isn't people can't afford kids; it's

a. The opportunity cost of having children is higher in rich countries. (E.g. If you are richer, you can say travel more.. but can't easily if you have kids! Also the income hit from having children is also much higher in rich countries)

b. Rich countries generally have higher social expectations for parental involvement. Kids cost more in rich countries because parents actually do more.

Keeping in mind I am no way a necessary fan of raising children in suburbia: My own parents moved from acreage into suburbia when I was 10 or so, but its not like distances were shorter out in the semi-rural area. And its not like many of us have a practical choice.

But of all its problems, what's the problem with kids having to ride 1+ miles to their friends?

When I was about 10-11, I was riding 2kms by myself (and then with my younger sister) in the Australian summer holidays down to a tennis camp. Sometimes it ran late and the sun went down, so my parents would come and pick us up in their car...just kidding, they bought me a generator to put on my bike and a reflector and I rode home in the dark.

When we moved again, I had a regular neighbourhood friend and we'd go and play networked computer games and nintendo during school holidays and after school during my teenage years (having two pc's you could network was quite advanced for the 1990's). But putting this into google, his place was 1.4 kms away from my house.

There was a video store 5 to 6 kms by car that had some rental games and videos, but of course we couldn't drive. But it must of been 4-5 kms by taking a shortcut through a nature reserve with our mountain bikes. And that's what we did. After a year or two, another store opened up a few kms in the other direction and we went there as well.

Even back then, video games were a huge part of my life...we were nerds in the absolute sense, but so were the mountain bikes and the exploring. Maybe we were lucky backing on to some nature reserves, but even in the staid morass of suburbia, are there too many places with nothing in a 10km radius? And even if the answer is yes, even that I'm a bit skeptical of. The nature reserve attracted us because it was a place without adults and it was a little bit dangerous, not because it was set up with activities or playgrounds.

In my mind, the distance wasn't a barrier to playtime. The fact that our parents would let us out to explore, and we subsequently went within about a 10km radius of our homes unsupervised on our bikes and without cell phones WAS the playtime.

The changing variable isn't the distances: its the supervisory culture and the fact that everything is now streamed conveniently into our homes on demand, and the fact that many of these products are now specifically engineered to try to turn people into screen viewing zombies.

Riding that far isn't a problem. But I grew up in a similar neighborhood and at that time our neighborhood was full of kids. There were so many kids on my street that there wasn't really any reason to go to the next street, much less a mile away.

> I grew up in a similar neighborhood and at that time our neighborhood was full of kids.

It's interesting how this happens, because there's definitely neighborhoods with a lot of kids about the same age. I can only assume it's the ways the markets function.

My neighborhood was full of kids growing up-- it was a brand-new housing development built to be compact and affordable that seemed to attract a lot of relatively young professionals who had recently started families and were in need of a cheap housing alternative.

In my town a lot of the more expensive housing might be snatched by kid-less couples, retired immigrants (I'm from Mexico, a lot of American immigrants move there to retire), etc.

Established neighborhoods will eventually see the older tenants move out (or, grimly enough, die off) but it happens in such a random fashion you never really see just a single influx of young families into the neighborhood, like you do with a brand-new development.

The biggest problem with 1km distance is that it prevents random meetings where kids just hang around and meet randomly often enough to get to know each other without planning. It also means that they will say fuck it and stay home doing their own thing. Not all that many kids like biking alone in all directions.

Lastly, low density likely means that the one kid available close enough is not good friend match.

While i agree that not ALL kids will like biking alone in all directions, I believe that a huge part of this isn't the kids themselves, but the environment they're raised in.

Raise a kid on acreage without electronics and internet and suddenly lo and behold, almost all of them will spontaneously go out and start exploring, and if they're all doing this they'll find and latch on to the other kids. And there's parks and playgrounds and church and sports and libraries and other places kids and families from wide areas tend to congregate.

And with all due respect: what is this idea of 'not a good friend match'? They're kids: they eat, sleep and play games. They're not professors or lawyers with 25 years of specialisation and gobbledygook talking past each other with their heads up their own arses about how important they are: unless they're violent and/or their family is dysfunctional, they're a good friend match. Isn't one of the first skills to teach a child the ability to negotiate, mediate, get along with others, irrespective of superficial differences or interests?

Raise children in an environment with on demand streaming, and multiple televisions in their homes and all their neighbour's homes, and hit them with games specifically based around quick dopamine boosts and vying for maximising engagement and attention spans, and with a parenting culture that says they have to be supervised and scheduled, and lo and behold, they act just like conditioned rats in psyche 101 experiments do.

And what is 'low-density'? Again, in my childhood, I moved INTO suburbia from a relatively less dense location. And I haven't even gotten started on the 'horrors' that happened where I lived when I was under 10. I'm in no way religious today (and back then, for context, it was the uniting church, which is barely religious by american standards), but we walked a few hundred metres to a neighbourhood house where an old couple lived and had church services and kids groups for the neighbourhood children: imagine the preposterous concept of 'not a good friend match' when you've got 10-20 kids in a several km radius. I had one friend a few hundred metres down the road. And I don't mean like 'one acceptable friend': i mean, there was a kid several hundred metres down the road. We just walked to each other's houses.

When the community got enough money together to build a church and community space out of cinder blocks, well then we walked a km down the road and back again.

To blame the things like 'kids don't like biking in all directions' or 'distance in suburbia' or 'not good friend match' as the causes or barriers to quality youth playtime? NO! Absolutely not! If anything, the very things that are being labelled as barriers are are the very ESSENCE of quality youth playtime and we wonder where its gone.

Quality youth playtime is BORN of isolation, independence, lack of supervision, self-direction, imagination, boredom, and danger.

The CAUSE of its decrease is not these things. Its not even necessarily technology: we still had TV and computers back in my day, but when you and everyone else have to wait a week between episodes of your favourite show (don't know what it was like in the US, there was no cable in my country), and you have to cycle 4-5kms over hilly terrain to get a book or a video or a game for a week and then return it, you did so (back in the day, our kids network also pirated pc games between us all, but that's another story).

Its universal supervision, scheduling, protection, anxiety, short-term rewards, emphasis on private vs public space, exclusion of children from public space, on-demand universal supply of media and entertainment, absolute abundance of convenience and the attention economy that's driving it.

The rest are just excuses to stop us having to deal with the actual issues. I'm no friend of suburbia, but suburbia itself does not negate quality youth playtime. And the idea that these things are the barriers or causes is somewhat comical to people who actually grow up with significantly greater levels of those things as actual barriers...and still have quality youth playtime.

All your examples involve situations where there are many kids around. Parent talked about situation where area simply does not have that many kids . They were not born and thus are not available to play. You can't meet a kid that does not exist.

Even without electronics, beyond age of 6, nearby areas are explores quick and indoor activities are more fun then biking alone again through area you know pretty well. I knew few kids who liked that, but they were very much minority - and they were the kind of kids that don't seek novelty and aresponsibility fine with doing the same thing same way every day. Even without electronics, over age of 6-7, indoor has more options, more interesting options and is more fun unless there is company outside. Hence kids not rushing outside if a chance of meeting someone is low.

Not a good friend is a kid you don't like to play with. It is simply not true that all kids like to play with all kids nor that all they do is games and games are the same. It does not have to be something bad like bullying or being little assholes - through it can be. It can be something as simple as one kid doing mostly focused plays and the other widely running around. With many kids they will sort themselves to groups, with few they just end up doing own thing and not having interest in each other.

> All your examples involve situations where there are many kids around. Parent talked about situation where area simply does not have that many kids . They were not born and thus are not available to play. You can't meet a kid that does not exist.

How does school work in areas where there's only one kid? And how can that one kid ever learn to properly socialize when it supposedly never ever interact with other kids?

I mean sure, there's probably a situation like that out there with some home-schooled kids, but when I was a kid I also didn't hang out with dozens of kids, I had like 1-2 best friends with whom I'd hang out and that was already plenty enough.

Parents drive them for 30-60minutes to reach the school. The kid socializes in school or in after school activities.

I don't know much about home schooled kids, but afaik that is separate issue. They often live in communities with other home schooling families, it is often religious and thus implies many many siblings etc.

>(and we don't live in a rural area, we live in a densely populated suburban area)

That doesn't necessarily mean much. Moving from urban areas to suburban ones already greatly reduces density and access to services and the sort of institutions we are talking about.

To give some sense of proportion, the average American suburb has[1] a density of about 2.7k people per square mile. That's about 2 1/2 times less dense than a Western European suburb (6.2k), and about eight times less dense than a Western European core urban area (18.8k).

American suburbia is extremely sparsely populated and fundamentally unfit to provide the cultural institutions that modern, small families and communities require. Calls for larger families is simply unrealistic, because the opportunities that each kid in a large family on a single income in a developed knowledge economy gets are abysmal. In our modern world, quality trumps quantity so to speak.

[1]http://www.demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm

+1. I'm from Mexico, where houses tend to be smaller and more tightly packed. There's essentially no yards or large patios, so not only do you live closer to other kids, but you're kinda forced to play in the shared street space, since you don't have that much open private space.

American suburbia is extremely sparsely populated and fundamentally unfit to provide the cultural institutions that modern, small families and communities require.

That's just your opinion. Thriving suburbs are practically sustained in toto by middle class (broadly speaking) people in nearby cities who want a greener, safer, larger space with better schools (at least by their perception) for their children on their given level of income.

Suburbia is fine, and those definitions are skewed by certain regions of the country. A older northeast suburb is similar to Europe. White middle class people just don’t have kids anymore.

Of my cousins (about 12 people), only half are married at 35-40, and three couples have kids. That’s not uncommon.

At some point, acquisitions and trips became more important than family. Personally, I think that it is really sad.

Where do you live?

New York. The family is mostly from metro ny and is scattered from DC to Boston.

Interesting. I live in Southern California (LA suburbs) and there are more kids (of all races including white) than what you describe. There are probably regional differences in fertility rate. I know California is probably lower than many other parts of the country.

Ahh... the Internet delivers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

... also:

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vWDFXMF6R7Y/Wp4PBC3EpyI/AAAAAAAAF...

This has nothing to do with children playing outside together. I grew up in a sparse suburban area in the early 80s and kids played together all of the time. Scheduled after school activities were only a few times a week and usually only for older kids.

> 2.7k people per square mile

Perhaps your source is per square kilometer? That seems really low for a suburb. E.g. Bay area cities (not particularly denser) are around 3k people per square kilometer.

For comparison, I live in a US suburb with a population density of around 1K people per square mile, and is a good example of a place where packs of children regularly play outdoors on any neighborhood street you care to walk down (maybe not as many who once would have, and children's screen time is a problem here like anywhere) despite the low population density. Some neighborhood characteristics: * 30 minute drive away from downtown. 40 min during rush hour. * Home prices here are much more affordable for single income families like us. Our monthly payment on a 6 bedroom house in the suburb costs the same as rent on the average 2 bedroom apartment in the city, and several $hundred less than the average 3 bedroom. * The farther away from the city center, the lower crime tends to be, and parents are more willing to send their children out for unsupervised play. More children are visible despite living in a much less densely populated neighborhood. * Local children's play groups are easy to find on social media, meetup.com, etc. * Major tech center 15 min drive away. * Supply of local jobs exceeds people available to fill them, resulting in below average unemployment, and greater than average incomes. * Bikable neighborhoods - many multi-use paths separate from car traffic, so we worry less about sending kids out on their bicycles to neighborhood parks or biking with young kids in a trailer. Often shared with horseback riders, which our kids are always excited about. Also makes for a more pleasant bicycle commute to work (at least, until I get closer to the city). * Trails and nature easily accessed - without getting in my car, I can and do run or bike from my doorstep up into mountain trails with a nice view of the valley.

And of course there are disadvantages: * Commute time. It takes me 28 minutes to get to work in the morning, so I lose almost an hour per day to travel, but this is relatively ok compared to other cities. * Fewer public transportation options - must transfer from the train to a bus to get to my remote corner of the metro area. These days it's easier to take Uber to the nearest train station when my car is not available. * Fewer night life options within walking distance of home * Fewer dining options within walking distance of home * Businesses have difficulty hiring, with so few people looking for work who are not already employed. * Not near a coast

All of this is to say, if growing a family in a neighborhood with other families with children is a priority, there are absolutely affordable cities around the US where you can make this happen. Even on a single income. Even in low population density areas. Even without giving up access to a nearby metro area and all of the culture and services it has to offer. If you are not willing to move to any of those places, maybe there is something more important to you, as has already been said.

I grew up with no kids my age around (farming countryside in europe).

I often wonder how much of my solitary/introverted personality is the result of my environment.

Are you open to sharing more of your experience? I wonder if you were also homeschooled? Did you have siblings? How has it been as an adult (if you are now) in regard to how you grew up?

I don't mind. There are probably more fascinating or relevant life stories than mine but here it goes :

I should mention that I am trying to sum up as best as I can but I don't want to give the impression that I am resentful against my parents. They did what they thought was best.

I was raised in the countryside. My parents were able to have me avoid going to the nearest school (IIRC one the main teacher was alcoholic) and make me go to one slightly farther (30 minutes by foot).

My mom was a stay at home mom, driving me to school and picking me up for lunch.. I believe it lasted until the end of high school ?

So no kids my age near our house, going anywhere was virtually impossible with pretty dangerous roads all around the house and an overprotective mom, not a lot of time spent socializing at school either.

I do have one sister, but she is a compulsive liar and thief. I am not sure what the medical term would be for her condition would be, if any. I have even caught her lying even about stuff that made no sense to lie about since it was completely uninteresting and did not give her anything to lie about it .. She has also has the need to make everything about herself (except taking responsibility for literally anything). So we are not close at all, and she is one of the reasons why I went far from home as soon as I could.

Oh, I also did not have regular access to a TV while growing up. If I remember correctly I could watch it during the weekends ? I never had one in my room, or a computer for that matter. We did have one family computer I ended up spending a lot of time on. Not on programming though, I only started learning that in my early 20s.

I do remember being extremely bored at school .. I learned my 2 first languages in a large by myself, by reading books. So I don't have a good grasp of tenses. My accent is also pretty terrible in languages I have learned by reading.

I don't think I am near 'genius level' intellect (whatever that means) by any mean, but I could have surely used a different learning structure.. I mostly remember reading tons of books, both at home and at school and half assing everything until after high school.

Soo, as an adult, I believe I am reasonably well adjusted ? I can be emotionally distant though. Something my girlfriends have often had issues with. Not in a toxic masculinity way of 'men don't cry', but more that it is often pretty hard to know what is on my mind. I can easily spend lots of time alone too.. I need to make a conscious effort in order to involve myself in group activities and making new friends can be very hard (especially now that I have moved from Europe to San Francisco).

How I am as an adult is an extension of how I was as a kid. It is very hard to distinguish nature and nurture. I do make lots of efforts to correct course on the parts of my personality that I don't know and I think I am becoming less and less socially awkward as time goes on .. It is hard to self evaluate yourself on this though.

That may just be situational. My neighborhood has a mix of everyone from childless 20-50 couples, retired folks, and families. There's a basketball game going on right now out in front of my house, in fact, with a half dozen elementary/middle school age kids.

To offer a counter-anecdote, my street is a veritable spawning pool. Four or five houses have kids, there are probably 10 kids primary-school-aged and younger and another 4-5 high school aged kids. It's very location-dependent (obviously).

Interesting thought, if you double the workforce, but not double the available jobs, salaries will go down. In game theory, the first ones to start working would be winners, but after a while everyone will be losers.

I don't know how to identify them ahead of time, but there are definitely pockets that are densely populated with children, and I lucked into one. My kids have loads of neighborhood kids to play with. The place we moved from across town has no kids to speak of. I'd draw the same conclusion as you, if I still lived on the other side of town.

When I went back to my parents' home around new years, you could definitely tell the demographics have changed. 35ish years ago it was a newly built neighbourhood; now, the kids (like me) have moved out and while new families have moved in, it was still a lot quieter around new year's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com