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Comment by gajjanag | Hacker News Reader

There is one aspect that helps with this in certain cultures, namely grandparents. Grandparents are usually thrilled to spend time with young grandchildren.

This is an age old mechanism that mostly alleviates two problems simultaneously - old age care, and the two working parents situation.

The other option (which also works nearly as well) is what other commentators mentioned - European style subsidized childcare/old age support.

The USA shuns the first culturally (I get strange looks from people when I say I am happy working and living with my parents), and shuns the second culturally as well as politically. Some awareness/willingness to learn from history/other cultures would fix that, but I am not holding my breath.

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Grandparents only work if your parents retired or your grandparents are alive and functional. Current generations millennials and Z have grandparents dead(shorter average lifespan, waiting with having children) and working parents(economic situation, better healthcare). Not only that, but you also need to live close by. We are migrating way more than before, there are whole cities in Europe and US left with retirees. You also need to have a larger house to host grandparents. Millennials have a worse economic situation than boomers.

Current life of young people look like:

  — Get expensive degree
  — Move to expensive city for jobs
  — Hard to find partner
  — Cannot afford to start family, postpone children
  — Have children without family support 
  — Get into high level of debt

There two things happening

  — People have less or no children. This lead to increased taxation and increasing retirement age in many countries. It often causes social unrest when governments try uncontrolled external immigration to fill the gaps. 
  — People try to live frugal lives, reduce spending and try to save for retirement individually. This disturbs housing market and stall country economy and destroy luxury brands.

Also your parents have to not suck. My ‘greatest generation’ grandmother took care of me a lot when I was a kid, and my children’s two boomer grandmothers really can’t be bothered. Yet another anti-boomer trope, but so real in my life.

I don't have kids, but my parents treat my brother's kids like plague rats to be avoided. It's very sad because the kids love them but the ship sailed on changing who my parents are now a long time ago.

I wish more people that pull out the moralizing "everyone should just" would understand that just maybe the rest of us don't have a life that looks like theirs, and not for reasons under our control.

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