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Comment by tropicalbeach | Hacker News Reader

I mean most of the time there running around breaking things and being loud wouldn't say that's great. It's better when there older.

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You will miss these interactions as they outgrow you. No one looks back at their time when their kids were little, to miss that didn't tap more in their screen

There are way more things to do than "raise kids" and "tap on screen"

That mostly happens when they feel they don't get enough attention from you. Sometimes you really are busy with something else, like trying to prepare food for them or answering messages from your pestering boss. But often it is because you are trying to be clever at HN instead of giving them your undivided attention.

Or when they're hungry. Or over-stimulated, under-stimulated, tired, anxious over something that happened at school, hyped for the holiday season.

Guilt-tripping someone who shares that they're not always having a good time as a parent is not cool. Your comment is over-generalizing, and IMO quite mean.

Yet there is a very large societal problem here worth pointing at. Parental time with children in this society is bizarrely low by anthropological standards. You can get a look at the stark difference by reading the book "The Old Way," about a nomadic society.

I suppose a typical nomadic society is not like "mother and father with kids, the nearest relative a few miles away".

Childcare is easier when you have a group of adults taking care of a group of kids. And of course, parents have the primary responsibility, but it is not a 24 hour duty.

That counts, but parents spend most of their time with their kids. Moms gather and the kids come along and help to an extent. If you can take your children to work and interact with them while you're working, that's huge.

The upshot is that we have to do everything we can to give our children more of our time; we aren't a desperately poor society, we can do more. We have wandered far from our "species essence" and now wonder why so much is going wrong.

Traditional life involved kids being unsupervised at ages we find it unacceptable now (4 years old) and kids being in packed unsupervised for hours.

Not true in nomadic societies (too many predators.) Four or five year olds could tail along with older brothers when I was young.

Nomadic societies are no where near standard of human society. They are more of an exception. Also, they are such due to lack of other choice. As in, they evolved when the option of staying long term was not there. The anthropological argument about our exceptionality should not start with outlier society where the world around is too dangerous and there is no way for adults to make it safer.

Sounds like you think I'm trying to argue that most people on earth in 2022 are still nomads? Really, this was about anthropological (and, unstated, evolutionary) averages. Nomad's evolutionary and genetic inheritance is our own, very largely. There hasn't been enough time since agriculture came, enough generations, for widespread genetic change.

Anthropology studies past societies as much as modern ones, although the evidence is thinner.

'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)

It's actually higher:

https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids

I don't think nomadic parenting time is really a useful comparison.

Evolution prepared us for nomadic life, not this life. Do take a look at "The Old Way." How children are in a nomadic tribe; and our experience of what children are like is way, way different. They're better company, more mature, more useful, and vastly "better behaved" because they're not struggling constantly to compensate for weird raising conditions.

I don't think parental time is that much lower, but 'village time' is almost nonexistent outside of school.

While I somewhat regret the tone in my comment, the whole notion that pointing out that you sometimes at least are partially responsible for your circumstances is called "guilt tripping" is weird.

It's not that my kids never are unruly. But I can almost always track it down to some failure from my side. I was too busy with something, or simply distracted, so I forgot to give them their snack in time, or they got to bed too late the day before, or I didn't pay attention when they tried to tell me something they felt was important, etc.

And while I'm aware that my experiences aren't universal. The opposite notion that I often hear that tantrums are some kind of unavoidable natural disaster is even more absurd. Yeah, if I bring my kids to the store at 5pm to buy dinner without giving them any snack, while I'm hangry yourself, stressed, and trying to think of something not horribly unhealthy to eat, they might end up screaming on the floor in front of the candy shelves. But my thought then isn't "why am I cursed with such horrible kids". My thought is "ok, I screwed up today, because this was predictable and preventable, and by now I certainly know better than putting ourselves in situations like this."

I'm curious just how many hours of undivided attention per day you think you have to give? Because most small children will drain you entirely dry within a week, and you have half a decade or more of that to deal with.

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