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Comment by kmarc | Hacker News Reader

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...

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>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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