Comment by hvaoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hvaoc | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest issue with all this is "We lost the community in the pursuit of individuality". It takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in kind a commune. Most of the days kids would be on the streets playing, eat / sleep in their neighbours house. Moms were able to manage house as stay at home moms (hardest yet under-appreciated job) relatively better because of this community care provided for children.

Easy to ask, Free to use community driven child care. People who are less-fortunate are better in forming communities than wealthier ones. Cities dwellers lose out on such things.

As a whole, we need to do better to support parents and extra more for moms. I would not hesitate to offer to keep my friends / neighbours / colleagues children under my care for few days / hours if they need it. No fuss / No fee - just classic pure help to my fellows.

Investing in children / women lot more than we do now is vital for all our success, sooner we realize it is better.

Cities dwellers lose out on such things

Depends on the environment. I grew up in a city, but your first paragraph matches my childhood pretty well.

Our neighborhood was a cluster of short, twisty streets, with narrow roads and broad sidewalks. Our street had about 40 houses/apartments (mixed zone), and at least 10 of those had school-going children. In my street, I was one of the oldest so I mostly played with a few other kids from "'round the block", but I never needed to go beyond a 100meter-radius from my home.

Our moms took turns doing the school runs, supervising the little ones when they were outside, even cleaning or babysitting if needed. But right now, I don't see much of this happening where I live: a faceless street with a broad road and narrow sidewalk, more than 100 apartments but hardly anyone knows each other. Maybe it's just because I don't have children so I don't look for it, but I hardly ever see children playing outside on the streets here.

I live in the suburbs, and that lifestyle is more or less impossible for my children. Everything is a car-drive away, which means that everyone drives which means that cars are everywhere. It's the opposite of a virtuous circle.

One thing that doesn't help at all: cars. I grew up riding bikes and skating on our street. The street was almost entirely free of parked cars. That same street now would have a dozen parked cars most days. Some houses will have a car or two in their driveway and another couple on the street. All of those cars reduce visibility to the point that I wouldn't let my kids play unsupervised on that street - risk of a car reversing out, of the kids riding out of a driveway into a passing car, of a skateboard hitting a parked car, etc.

Despite our best efforts, our kids are largely oblivious to the danger of cars. I don't know what's changed on that front.

>>Cities dwellers lose out on such things.

I think this is true only in certain Western countries. I was born and raised in Turkey, and was an apartment dweller until I moved to the US for college. Growing up, I knew all the neighbors in our four or five story apartment complexes, and I knew their kids. So did my parents. And the community aspect was pretty strong — when my parents both had to work late, I just headed over to one of the neighbor's condos and played video games with their kids, and sometimes stayed well past dinner.

In the US though I have trouble envisioning such apartment communities. Maybe they exist, but based on my own living in apartments in America myself, the experience is a lot more... sterile and cold.

That (sterile and cold) tracks with my experience in the US as well. I rented in various buildings for 16+ years and never knew even one of my neighbors.

But a year ago I moved into a 4-unit condo building (with the small owner's association covering both my building and the building next door), and I already know everyone in both buildings. Not particularly well because of the pandemic, but I expect things to improve once things go back to normal.

I grew up in suburbia, and things were a bit better then. The houses in our development up until I was 12 were close enough to each other, and there were enough kids, that we'd hang out all the time and ride bikes between houses more or less unsupervised. I didn't know it at the time, but I bet my (stay-at-home) mom appreciated the break when my sister and I would randomly wander out and hang out at a friend's place for a while. (And vice versa with the friends' parents.) But even then, it was limited to two or three other households. After we moved to another state during my teenage years, we knew the neighbors, but weren't all that friendly with them; I think in the six years I lived there before college I went into one of their houses once.

I don't know what the solution is... in the US there is a lot of emphasis put on individuality and independence, and about parents providing for and bettering the lives of their nuclear family members. While that does have some positive effects, I think you end up with a lot less communal child-rearing, which IMO is definitely a negative.

Your experience of the US is true insofar as I've experienced the larger cities in the US. Once you get out of the cities, into more suburban areas... at least where I grew up in the midwest... that kind of community sense you speak of becomes more prevalent in neighborhoods.

To be fair... I haven't lived in those kinds of places since I was a rather young (now I am rather old)... so things could have changed.

I think the root of that problem is also investing in reducing single mothers. The US has the highest rate of single mothers globally iirc and that isn't a good thing. Not only are these women likely raising a child in a single income, but they most often are raising them during times of their lives when they should be in college or forging careers...or frankly getting married.

Now this isn't some sexist rant that women should marry, but it's the antithesis of "takes a village to raise a child." Most of these single moms tend to have smaller social groups, have sporadic family ties, and often have mental health issues due to poverty that comes with being a single mother. It's harder than going to college and working full time but doesnt pay. And paying them off to live that lifestyle doesn't incentivize men to want to want to support a spouse. I really hate to say it in all my life, but I honestly think conservatives were right about the aspect of a family. It's vital and for some reason it's being tossed aside as though it's not needed anymore and that the root problem isn't somewhere else.

Yes, and we just threw away what little shared child-raising community we did have with Covid restrictions. Raising children isolated and alone is absolutely against every instinct, and (I think) incredibly bad for the long-term health and welfare of all involved.

We will see how this plays out, but in my experience so far, it's women who have ended up returning to defacto and fulltime childcarers. Our response as a culture to Covid may mark the high point of women's progress in the workplace.

This doesn't take care of the aspect of parents wanting to spend time with their kids. It's just "we need more daycare options so that mothers can focus more on their careers".

One of my strongest socioeconomic stances is that the nuclear family was a mistake.

But the opposite all too often results in a situation where family trees become power structures and that's how you time-travel back into the middle ages.

I am honestly completely lost as to how the extended family and/or communal living is "time travel back into the middle ages".

How is this related to op's comment?

I would have thought the connection between the sequestering of nuclear families in single family homes and the dwindling of communal childcare/rise of expensive commercial childcare options to be fairly obvious.

What would your preferred alternative be?

Extended family living, as was the norm for the vast majority of human history up until the mid 20th (and is still a fairly equal alternative in many parts of the world).

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