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Comment by throwaway2519 | Hacker News Reader

> my kids started school at 4. I've put them in full time after school care as well, ending at 6pm

> you get them asleep before 8pm

> you can give them a book and that will keep them quiet

And then people wonder why kids don't listen to and respect their parents when they grow up. You're basically just giving school teachers full control to raise your kids at age of 4, and they only interact with you for 1-2 hours during the day and don't really know who you are. I guess I am just raised differently but I can't understand this type of parenting.

Why have kids at all, if all you do is try to get away from them and make them not bother you and live separate life especially at such an early age.

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Parents talk a lot about stuff that lets their attention be somewhere other than their kids because that's the hard part, not because they don't also want to pay attention and have quality time with their kids.

It's good for kids to see their parents with autonomy and goals of their own, and simply not exhausted. Doing so doesn't have to be antithetical to having a warm relationship.

If you're in a loop of surviving the demands of very small children, then even when they have your attention it can be hard for it to be quality time. Carving out some auto only lets you be intentional and actively thankful about the time you do spend with your kids.

>and they only interact with you for 1-2 hours during the day and don't really know who you are

As if 1-2 hours per day is "little"?

That's not in any way why kids "don't listen to and respect their parents when they grow up".

Kids spent even less "quality time" with their parents (a relatively modern boomer invention) back in the old times when they did fully "listened to and respected" them.

Hmm... I thought the 9-5, office work, working for other people/businesses are the modern inventions and for tens of thousands of years mankind spent 80%+ of the day with their offsprings/families/villages.

It's interesting to think that "quality time" which in this context simply means "2 hours per day together" should be enough. This is not how humans evolved.

As harsh as it sounds, the philosophical question above is quite legit: why have kids in the first place if they are then put into daycare until they are grown enough to not to have to care about them anymore at all...

>for tens of thousands of years mankind spent 80%+ of the day with their offsprings/families/villages

For tens of thousands of years kids played with other kids or hanged in the village watched by the older people in the community, while fathers did some guild style job or worked at the fields, and moms cooked and tended the house. They got together to eat and sleep at various points. For less fortunate families, kids started working as early as 8-10 years old. Little kids (even 8-12 years old) were also very frequently made to cater and babysit younger siblings while the parents were working.

>why have kids in the first place if they are then put into daycare until they are grown enough to not to have to care about them anymore at all...

This presupposes what it was supposed to prove, that 1-2 hours per day are not enough time.

It also comes from a place of big privilege, as for a hell of a lot of parents 1-2 hours per day are more than their hand-to-mouth work affords, so the point where it's like questioning why those bad parents of starving children that don't have bread are not feeding them cake!

> For tens of thousands of years kids played with other kids or hanged in the village ...

Weren't humans nomadic for the vast majority of our history, with agriculture (aka villages) coming about only a few thousand years ago?

Most evidence points to this. Villages even predate agriculture and all the work associated with it.

There were still human groups such as the BaMbuti living nomadically into the 20th century.

Yes, make it "for about ten thousand years". Was referring to standard post agriculture civilizations and most of the ancient / classical ones we know of.

If you’re living hand-to-mouth, that’s not a great environment for your kids anyway. Not being in that position is privileged, but it’s a privilege shared by all of the middle and upper class in western societies, which is who dominates this readership.

Not every comment needs to disclaim its privilege because the author speaks English, is literate, and has access to the internet.

>If you’re living hand-to-mouth, that’s not a great environment for your kids anyway.

Kids aren't supposed to be born to comfort and greatness, they're supposed to be born to life.

This talk is a talk of leisurely privilege anyway. If people in the past thought that "hand to mouth living" and harsh conditions mean you should not have kids, most of those making these claims today wouldn't be here, and the civilisation would be at medieval standards at best (since population growth is a crucial part of the economic engine in history - thou doesn't guarantee it).

Yeah, but hand-to-mouth is both relative and a continuum. It's not a black-and-white thing. More importantly, perhaps, having a high income and high expenses can lead to similar conditions and stresses as poverty, though, I suppose, it's better than actual poverty.

I wrote an article that touches on aspects of this a while back:

https://likewise.am/2018/12/01/seven-tough-lessons-from-ten-...

I've been doing all this as a single parent, and it's no fun. Most people would readily dismiss this as "not actually a hand-to-mouth existence", and indeed, I'm lucky to have this one and not some worse alternatives. But in terms of spending time with one's child, it can be just as hard.

little of any modern decisions is based on what humans have experienced, historically. We have evolved a set of core emotional firings that do not have much to do with how we live.

Why start/stop at the initial decision, when these issues go so much deeper.

Daycare isn't solitary confinement. The kids there are hanging out with other kids and the daycare employees. Kids who hang out in a variety of different social situations like this actually end up better adjusted than kids who only hang out with their parents the whole time.

I remember preschool (i.e. private daycare) as being a hell of a lot of fun. Same for summer camps. And if it gave my parents a rest away from me, then good for them. I still saw enough of them every day.

> It's interesting to think that "quality time" which in this context simply means "2 hours per day together" should be enough. This is not how humans evolved.

Just pointing out that this is an assumption and should not be taken as fact.

If this is a fact and it's obvious, I would encourage you to write down in detail the reasoning.

The best way to improve your thinking is to do this. Usually writing to explain encourages you to study your own presumptions. Digging into your presumptions usually leads to realizing that your world view does not take into account enough detail and forces you to seek out more detail. This detail usually changes your world view, which then changes how you argue things.

This question assumes that daycare is just, generically, a warehouse for kids. That is certainly true of some daycares. Some do perform a useful pedagogical function, more in line with what one can expect in more well-developed public state kindergarten/preschool/daycare systems in the Western European states. Moreover, as a sibling commenter pointed out, they get to see other kids there and develop socially--and this is particularly important given the propensity of most Americans to live in fairly insular suburban bubble-houses, and more generally the lack of a public realm and civic space that suburbia entails. It's not like they'd otherwise be out running around with other kids; they'd most likely be marinating at home in front of the TV.

I'd go so far as to say that not sending one's child to some kind of playgroup before school age is irresponsible.

American kids in the suburbs play with each other without being placed in daycare intern camps (at least out here in the west).

It surely depends on the suburb, and seems to be a regional phenomenon to some extent. It's definitely not true here in the southeast in my extensive experience.

No, you need to ask the opposite question. Why on earth would you think you need to hang around your kids all the time?

What is the correct amount of time according to you? Keep in mind school is off maybe 14 weeks of the year, plus weekends.

Where is the 1-2 hr figure coming from? Even for my oldest, who is in school, and on a day I work. I'm seeing him on average 2 hours in the morning before he's off to school (young kids wake up early) and then another 3 hours on average in the evening (and he goes to bed "early" by his peer standards). This doesn't count night time wake-ups. Then weekends/holidays it's all day, of course.

I read/heard recently that average daily quality time is 37 minutes in US.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. That also sounds appalling g to me to see your kids 2 hours a day and putting them to bed early on top of that.

8 o’ clock isn’t early for your average 5 year old.

It sucks only seeing the kids for 2 hours during a week day but people have to work, because that’s basically how society works for most people. However working parents more than make up for that lost time at the weekend.

The point the GP made about books is because with the best will in the world, sometimes you need your child entertained so you can get on with other stuff. Sometimes that is doing chores. Sometimes it’s just because after being woken up at 4 in the morning and then having spent 6 hours running around after your kids (often quite literally running after them), you do sometimes need 10 minutes to switch off before the next activity. An adults energy is only finite. Plus let’s also not forget that independent play is also good for a child’s development as well.

Also, before someone inevitably chimes in with the “why don’t you incorporate children into the chores?!” remark, yes, most parents will do this too. However sometimes you just need to get something done quickly. Or properly. Or without an argument.

People are responding to how the argument was presented, not the premise. The post contained a lot of presumptions, logical fallacies, and judgment.

Some examples:

> And then people wonder why...

> ...they only interact with you for 1-2 hours during the day

> ...don't really know who you are

> Why have kids at all...

> ...all you do is try to get away from them and make them not bother you...

Combined with the username, it almost looks like deliberate trolling.

Which logical fallacies would those be?

Off the top of my head - nirvana. The post presented an idealized, "perfect" benchmark drawn from the user's own subjective experience, which is a problem in and of itsef, and suggested that anything less is not worth having.

Modern kids have a historically unprecedented opportunity to learn about the world they live in. In order to do that, they need to not be with you.

Do you really think that time spent is quality? People tend to remember emotion highs and lows. You don't need a lot of time for that. That trip to the coast that they'll remember as adults actually only lasted a few hours. The rest of the time is mostly drudgery like cleaning up plates.

And regarding behaviour, you'll notice they behave better when exposed to groups of people who aren't their parents. It's an important aspect of socialisation to expose them to other people.

No clue why you're being downvoted.

I too wonder why anyone would want children if they don't actively want to spend time and raise them.

Raising children is not about being a helicopter parent like many Americans understand it. It wasn't even in the US like that, until the 80s or so, when media people and book authors inspired profitable guilt to parents, and the boomers started making pandering and spoiling their kids the norm.

If we're talking about kids less than school age, then sure, parents are with them most of the day. After school age however, 1-2 hours per day with the kids is not "not spending time", it's rather more time than kids historically got.

In fact most kids will turn out Deliverance-level weird if parents insist of spending more time with them. It's up there to messing up your kids with homeschooling... Kids are not there to keep parents company, or for them to make into your image. They are beings of their own, and have interests of their own, and they should be let to do their thing.

> it's rather more time than kids historically got.

But... But... Any reference to this? All I can see here that some people think that "history" is how their great-grandparents were.

No!

After industrialization and urbanization, so less then a couple hundred years ago did humans start this new lifestyle. You don't even have to travel back in time, just travel to places where tribes and their commons are still around (to a certain extent). You will see, that "history" is far away from going to an office 9-5 and then spend 2 hours with your offsprings.

If you check the people from the 15th century, 1950s villages, or even the "tribes" you mention, you'll find that the children are either helping (small tasks, actually working, after a certain still young age), hanging out with members of the community at large, or mostly playing around with other children.

They don't hang out with the parents after a certain age, and they don't helicopter them...

Most of the work children did was for the parents. That’s spending time with them.

That's neither, but it is better than what we have today, let me explain: I was raised by my grandparents in the countryside, the worst part was my parents randomly showing up every 2-3 weeks or so, letting me always longing for them.

Now, as to the relationship with my grandparents, even if I was doing chores for 1 hour alone, it was no big deal at all, as long as I knew they were in close proximity or other significant adults were in close proximity.

Again, what really sucked was when my grandparents were out in the fields in the summer until dusk and I didn't know when they would show up.

As long as the child has ACCESS to the attention of significant adults, he can develop longer and longer duration of time when he doesn't really need the attention, it's absolutely normal and beneficial for the emotional development of the child to grow independent of significant adults, but the child absolutely needs to have a firm support base in significant adults and know he can rely for their support.

Maybe it's my bad experience with overcrowded daycare/kindergarden, but educators there were absolutely not in the role as significant adults, maybe in places where there are more educators per child, better trained, they can take that role as a significant adult.

Even in industrial society 2 hours is much more than people spent with their kids as recently as the 1960s.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

Grandparents etc were much more involved then compared to now.

> It's up there to messing up your kids with homeschooling...

Presumptuous much? Have you met a wide range of homeschooled kids?

It's being downvoted because it seems exactly like the kind of advice a non-parent gives to parents before they have to deal with the reality of the costs of children and how modern work is structured.

It's unsympathetic, unhelpful, and doesn't sound like it's based on anything except the author's prejudices about how "things should be".

Raising kids is hard.

As other posters have pointed out it's at least partially wrong, too in the sense that historically non-parents were much more involved than they are now.

Please be kind in life. Can you understand the hurtful implications of your comment to the person you are talking about?

Sort of agree, but sometimes hard replies can be the slap-in-the-face that makes people rethink what they're doing. Someday these parents may look back on the lovely little people they created and remember how much effort they spent trying to avoid being around them.

I am assuming you aren't a parent. We spent so much time with our daughter during her early years because we thought like you do. My wife didn't work, etc. Those were terror years. One day, my wife said she couldn't bear it anymore and asked that we bring her to the nursery for a few hours 1 day a week. My daughter LOVED IT. Her speech, everything about her development improved greatly. Every nursery day was the happiest day. She just wants to stay there and play. Now she goes twice per week. We wish she could go more often because it's great for her but we can't afford that

You would assume wrong about me not being a parent and you also assume wrong that you "thought like [I] do] based on a few sentences on a public forum.

Don't think of it as "I don't want to be around my kids" but "My kids will develop better with other experiences than just me".

I didn't say, nor did I imply either one of these statements in your false dichotomy.

This is utterly ridiculous. You live in the same house as your kids, they can and do get a hold of you literally at any time of the day. Yes, even when they are in school, they can get the school to call you for some issue.

To paint having 3 hours to yourself each schoolnight as somehow not wanting to be part of their lives is a cheap attempt at making people feel guilty.

Also, introverts need time alone. Quiet time. This is equally true for parents. It's not just a preference; it's a need. Without this, introverts are literally incapable of taking care of themselves or another human being.

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