The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.
It is fine now, and it is great to hear what the kids are learning in physics and math, and even cooler when they ask the old man for advice on a programming assignment. I would really love to have a couple of hours back though when we were all doing Lego robotics together. I miss those days.
I suspect there has always been pressure to not leave your baby with someone else and go off and do your own thing. The difference is now people are physically more distant from everyone else (I blame the ease of transportation) so being around close friends and family is the exception and not the standard.
Ever think that your baby may be thinking to themselves "Man, am I ever going to get a break from this guy?" also?
In general, modern advances have maybe added 10+ years to an average adult lifespan. The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though.
Is it? In a sense, the choice is still available to adopt the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you wanted. I don't know many who would want to do that.
Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us).
I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.
> Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures
Our minds and bodies were not designed. They evolved — slowly — under conditions of relatively harshness and scarcity that to a large extent no longer exist. The human "habitat" has changed radically in the past several hundred years. One might argue that we're no longer adapted to our environment. Evolution doesn't work quickly enough for that.
I'd also suggest there was widespread physical and mental suffering in the distant past. It wasn't the Garden of Eden in prehistory.
I would agree that we are no longer adapted to our environment, and this seems to be the cause of many "modern" forms of suffering that are unrelated to scarcity, like mental illness and diseases of over-consumption. To me this implies that we have done a bad job in creating an environment for ourselves. We replaced suffering caused by scarcity (something we historically had little control over) with suffering caused by deliberate choices.
The point isn't that aligning our choices with biological and psychological needs will end all suffering. It's that not doing so pretty much guarantees a lot of unnecessary suffering.
To say that evolution is a "red herring" is absurd. It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.
So has physics. Why stop at hunter-gatherers, why not go back to the Big Bang? Would you argue that we need to study astrophysics to deal with obesity?
It's not absurd at all to suggest that evolution is a red herring, any more than it's absurd to suggest that astrophysics is a red herring. Prehistoric archaeology is highly speculative at best. I'm not saying it's unscientific, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about prehistoric societies that we could be very wrong about, due to lack of direct observation and evidence, and thus it would a poor guide for our current and future societies even if we decided to base our behavior on our ancestors (which we shouldn't).
No one is saying that we should live exactly like our ancestors.
They did not had diseases of over-consumption, but they had diseases from under-consumption.
We would see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes you get a great network of cousins who hook you up with business opportunities.
Sometimes you end up enslaved by your mother in law.
But the point I do want to make is that our physiology and psychology is largely fine tuned by evolution for a certain operating environment. When we step outside that environment, it often introduces dysfunction in unpredictable ways.
An extreme example: as land animals we wouldn't survive very long at the bottom of the sea. More prosaic example: it's undeniable an environment with many more and tastier calories creates chronic health problems. Metabolic disease is virtually unknown in hunter-gatherers.
A rough heuristic is that removing purely adversarial elements from the evolutionary environment produces an improvements. Pathogens, predators, physical injuries, birth-related traumas, and famine. Removing or mitigating those elements are the main reason life expectancies have improved relative to hunter-gathers. But once you step outside the totally hostile elements, most environmental changes tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. Physiology and psychology rely on delicately tuned equilibria, which are easy to disrupt. The consequences aren't terrible, but do tend to subtly accumulate over time. Hunter-gathers die fast because they get a concussion and bleed out. Westerners die slow from the accumulation of plaque in their arteries.
Agreed. My point is just that we should look at physiology and psychology as guides, not anthropology (which is interesting but not necessarily prescriptive).
A diet of Twinkies and Coke is obviously terrible. But a finely tuned, balanced modern diet guided by nutritional science is likely superior to a primitive hunter-gatherer diet. There are plenty of people today who are in great physical condition; this is very feasible within our modern society.
Similarly, different modern countries often have differing familial arrangements, so we can look at empirical outcomes there instead of trying to guess at what our distant ancestors did, who had little choice but to do what they did, not having modern civilization as an option.
Add to it easy to cure sicknesses, injuries that are nothing more and would kill you back then, their higher chance to contact said injuries and it is unlikely they would be so much healthier.
Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy. Getting all the food a hunter gatherer in all seasons is hard.
In addition, childbirth in their society would both kill or forever damaged more women. They would also have harder time to leave physicly abusive situation, meaning likely more of it, meaning yet another negative impact on their health.
No.
Agriculture exists because it supports more people per unit of land than what the traditional way of life did (on average). This is as hard of a fact about history as you're going to get.
Now, you need to be savvy about what the statement is not saying. It is not providing a reason for an individual, or group of people, to make the switch from hunter-gather to agriculture. History did not lay that choice upon the discretion of people. It plays out in a much more complicated way.
Since the relatively natural land will only support so-many humans per acre, what happens when there are too many children? They move. Okay, what happens when that next region has too many children? Do they start making farms based on their ledgers of expected food production to population ratio - NO. The people who have political decision power are not the same people who starve or get their heads lobbed off as a result of their decision. If anything, a leader would prefer the neighboring tribe lose a few heads to adjust for the starvation problem. Do people start "switching" to farms anywhere in this? No. Only over a vast period of time, many climates, lots of movement, tribal reorganization, do people start... semi-nomadic animal husbandry. One day this will lead to agriculture.
All of this is vastly more complicated than it is on the surface, and the newly-established farmer occupation, when it comes around, could possibly be seen as the sucker at the table. There was constant tensions between "civilized" societies and their tribal neighbors, and only over the super long term does the higher calorie density of civilization win out. Even if their soldiers are shorter and stupider, there are more of them. We don't read about this, because recorded history picks up at a time when superior organizational capabilities of civilization is starting to give them a quality advantage as well (and as a side-effect, writing).
Anyway, easier way to get food and not get hungry or starwe is strong reason to switch lifestyle. Human societies of all kinds have been doing exact that decision over and over.
They're different, not really better.
Hunter gatherers definitely got more involuntary exercise. But modern people can choose to get better (more specialized/effective) and safer exercise than ancient people ever could have.
Hunter gatherers had to eat what was around them, and would involuntarily periodically fast. It's much easier and cheaper for modern people to have a varied diet. Many modern people also periodically fast. But you have to choose to do so.
Ancient people typically struggled with parasites and various diseases. That is largely not a factor in modern life. Modern people sometimes are affected by serious pollution issues - modern air quality from burning fossil fuels may be such a crisis. Airborne lead from leaded gasoline was almost certainly one. It's difficult to compare the effects of such problems.
There's also a pretty strong selection effect going on here: lots of people 100,000 years ago used to die. People would die in childhood, people would die in adulthood. This mean that women had to have lots of babies, which means women died in childbirth a lot.
So, I think it's true that, left to their own devices, modern people tend to be somewhat unhealthy. Mostly due to laziness. But modern people also pretty clearly have the opportunity to be much more healthy than ancient people.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
We are baby-sitting lots of adults that couldn't make it past 1-3 years old of age before the medical revolution. Some of them might never be able to be productive and only consume resources from their families or the public. So maybe evolution was not such a bad idea after all.
For example, I'm Mexican. Here it's quite normal to spend plenty of time with your extended family, live near them, have your parents help you take care of your kids for extended periods of time, etc. at least in my experience. We're an industrial nation and have modern medicine, but this is more a matter of culture and social attitudes I think.
It would be nice to live around extended family. People definitely do, but, here in the UK at least and excepting big-city-dwellers, it seems linked to lower economic status - people for whom one job is much like another.
Maybe eventually the link between where you work and where you live will be weaker, for more specialised jobs.
When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm between them if it's big enough) so you probably pick one of them. The 4th you never see because he runs a business making cart wheels or something in the next village over. The 5th left town to get a job in the port by the sea when he was 15 and you haven't seen him since. And of your daughters that survived childhood will all move in with their husbands. If you run the numbers for them it's the same thing.
Multi generational households don't work at scale simply because of the numbers involved. Anyone pretending that that's how most people lived prior to the industrial revolution doesn't understand how many kids people had back then. At best you might get 10-25% of households having a grandparent around depending on the infant mortality rate at any given time. The birth rates and life expectancy just don't support more. 10-25% certainly isn't abnormal, but implying it is the default is Olympic level mental gymnastics.
I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revolution, the pattern is very strongly not multi-generational. Young couples expected to set up new households together, not to live with their parents.
(The royal family & such of course were different, and still are.)
This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing.
Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.
What you are asserting is what historians widely believed before they actually looked at the data, around the 1960s. They said this by looking at the more recent past of less developed places (like rural Russia, pre-1917) and assuming that the far past of England looked the same, and thus that nuclear families became common only recently. And they were wrong.
Of course, there are many places even further away than Russia. Lots of other cultures did have multi-generational families as the pattern, and many still do.
Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this.
First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
Everyone who has direct experience of this time has been dead for half a century at least.
>First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Define "extremely common". What percent of people in a given society in a given time period do you think grew up in one?
>Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
Nobody is debating this. Of course prior to the industrial revolution people moved around less so your friends and neighbors are more likely to be your cousins and if grandma is nearby she'll wind up babysitting more. I don't see this as being meaningful to this discussion since they are outside one's household.
>This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
Back this up with numbers. Grandma has to live somewhere, but for an child in any given agrarian society to be more likely than not to have have grandma living under the same roof birth rates need to be low to the point of apocalyptic.
>The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
Is the fact that it's an American obsession supposed to be a bad thing?
Yes, multi generational households were far, far more common from the grandparent's perspective in the past because elderly parents living alone was far, far less common. But from the perspective of the child growing up they still far from the default. The birth rates are simply too high for them to have been default. Nobody here is saying mutligenerational households are bad but the people who think they were default have a skewed understanding of history. Calling something that just has to happen by mathematical necessity "unnatural" (i.e. the comment my initial comment replied to) seems a little over the top.
TIL: I'm dead.
Most places were much closer to equilibrium, with about the same number of people farming a given district from one generation to the next. Something more like 3 adult children, one of whom never has a family, is what you should imagine. And then it's easy to picture multigenerational households being common. As they were, in many (but not all) parts of the world.
In many small towns or suburban cities, 3 generations live nearby, with all the aunts and uncles. Help with care is always next door, and children are raised with dozens of frequent visitors or caretakers. I'm quite jealous of the quality of life of my inlaws / extended family for these reasons.
I think the media making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything.
The US president is certainly guilty of this, and it appears to be a GOP strategy to exacerbate and prey on this fear [0].
0 - https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-26/republican...
I have a single kid (turned 20 recently). I can tell you it's totally crazy figuring it out on your own. I approached it more methodically than most (IMO), and I don't think I made too many mistakes, but here's the thing: the mistakes I made didn't have to happen, had there been this shared body of knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation.
The whole tiger mom/dad routine is so horrible for children. The lack of autonomy can have dire consequences later in life, and I think we're just starting to see that.
I know my tendency is to treat this like a problem, which needs data and analysis, refinement and tuning. But, if we were 10 generations into that process, I feel we'd have something to show for it. As is, every generation starts from zero (I think most people generally wing it).
Do you have any pointers off the top of your head for resources on the negative effects of tiger parenting, or about parenting in general? No worries if not, I just figure it would save me a lot of effort in my own research
maybe for your demographic (and the demographic for hackernews readers), but many American children are born to teenage and early 20s mothers.
The median age for women of first age of birth in the United States is 27.6 years. The average "childbearing years" duration is 5.3 years. If we assume an age of 10 for average increase in independence, we get 27.6 + (5.3/2) + 10 == 40.25 years.
Do you maybe not want kids on a rational level, but still want kids on an emotional level?
The way I see it, bringing a sentient being into this mad world needs to have a good personal reason, it shouldn't be the default that you need to find a reasons against.
A good personal reason to have a child, I think, is having an intense desire to have a child, and an intense desire to nurture and help your child grow into a good human being.
I give at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities (see GiveWell.org for recommendations; see GivingWhatWeCan.org for a community of others doing the same). I think that's a better use of my money than taking care of one human being. I get more time for myself (no need to take care of my own children). I help in cost-effective ways to help the next generation live a better life; it's a good balance for me. Needless to say, having a child wouldn't conflict with giving to charity, but it's easier.
Your kid doesn't have to live in a utopia to be worth making.
>I think that's a better use of my money than taking care of one human being.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Your child(ren) (and their child(ren) and their's, etc.) also have the potential to earn and donate money to effective causes. Those donations might end up greater than the ones you can accomplish in your own lifetime.
Of course, "net good to current and future humanity" is only one part of the equation.
I'm more altruistic than average. Regression to the mean says my kids will be less altruistic. And it would be rude to manipulate them into doing anything. I would surely do my best to instill the values I think are good, but in the end, it would be their individual choice.
As I look back on the last ~40 years of my life, it's mostly about struggles sprinkled with brief periods of joy lasting no more than a couple of days at most. Most of the time, I'm studying to get good grades so that I can get scholarships, without which I'd not be able to go to college; helping my widowed mom with her chores (including taking care of younger siblings) because she is occupied with making money to survive; and even now that I'm an adult with a stable income, I spend most of my time working for someone (selling my 8+ hours a day to my employer) while worrying about if I'll have enough money saved by mid-50s when I hope to be able to enjoy life a little more (e.g., going on vacations) with some spare money to spend.
All I'm trying to say is that life is a struggle for most people (the poorer family you were born into, the truer that statement becomes). We never have moments of peace because we have things to worry about constantly. I'd never bring another human being into this mess unless I can have a discussion with my future progeny before s/he is conceived (which is, of course, impossible). In other words, unless some ghost/spirit is begging me to let him/her incarnate because s/he see value in this rat race, I'd not make this decision one-sidedly.
As a tangential note, I am a strong proponent of euthanasia and hope that one day, it'll be commonly accepted by the society.
I turned 29, so I used this time to build a tiny bit of self-sufficiency through side businesses. Still have ways to go but there's finally meaningful revenue coming in -- enough to quit terrible jobs and take sabbaticals, but not enough to quit forever yet. It's so hard.
Have you considered this? Building out multiple sources of revenue? Your story resonated with me, and our upbringings have been difficult.
Presumably a parent of adult kids would retort that it's not just about the N hours of face to face, but also being proud of each milestone they hit (graduation, job, kids, etc), talking about the kids with their partner, and thinking about them.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services
Why do anything in life at all? We're all going to die anyway!
I don't see anything wrong with this line. It's not because you don't see your kids often when they're adult that it wasn't worth having them, or that you don't appreciate the little time you still spend with them.
Personally, I didn't want kids but now it's something that I regret somewhat. Being a man, I wrongly assumed the option would always be there.
I do obsess on how to make that slope more gradual (i.e. offer higher utility to my adult off-spring) without impeding their growth and maturation.
Older folks definitely get a second wind when they are once again in need to help care for the grandchildren. But when these grandchildren get older, the grand parents are needed less and/or are less interesting to tweens. Another empty nest situation to navigation, ahem.
I'd like to paraphrase an old HN comment which said that maybe eventually a culture will develop in which industrial and post-industrial transitions would not drop fertility, that is, the propensity to have more children than needed for mere reproduction. With every post-industrial country having fertility rate below reproduction level, such a culture would eventually take over the world.