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Comment by Nomentatus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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