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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

If you have any children, I'd highly advise against it. I grew up near Detroit before my family moved into the middle of nowhere, and living out there was more developmentally stunting than anything else in my life. Having nowhere to go and nobody to talk to is a pretty huge roadblock for anyone's personal development, let alone a child living out their formative years.

Now that I'm more traveled I can understand the appeal of settling down away from everything, but I'm not sure if I can recommend it long-term. Maybe try moving out to a smaller town or village and seeing how that suits you.

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I agree, my parents bought a small farm when I was in elementary school and it was a pretty lonely existences. In part because of the physical isolation and part because my parents became increasingly fearful of the outside world as it pertained to me. I wasn’t allowed to go places or do things much outside of school and it was pretty terrible. So consider your family.

The other thing to consider is what type of life you are really signing up for. It sounds romantic, but it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. You can live in a rural area and have a small garden without going full homestead lifestyle.

You seem to have come out alright though? But you are on point that it can be pretty rough for kids, especially when the neighbors are far away or don't have any children in roughly the same age bracket.

It just isn't right to make a kid live that way, in my opinion. Growing up, you need a strong support group of non-family peers to help you through personal and extrapersonal struggles. I was lucky enough to attend a public school, if I was homeschooled then I may have lost my mind completely. I'd spend all my free time reading books and daydreaming before I pieced together my first computer.

My point isn't to dramatize all this, just to highlight that you should probably prioritize the wellbeing of your children if you have any. Homesteading is great when you've seen the world and want to relax in satisfaction from your detatchment to society. It's the worst thing in the world when you're a curious child oblivious to reality.

There are some degrees to this though: agreed that homeschooling is on another level. But plenty of kids live in rural environments and come out fine.

I think the biggest question is whether or not there is a sufficiently large base of other kids living nearby and whether or not kids can safely get around.

Cities have their own trade-offs and I'm not quite sure what the best spot is to raise kids after having seen a large range of options, all I see is a mixture of drawbacks and benefits for each.

Right now I live in a 40k people town near a major city. This seems to be a nice optimum: have the big city when you want it, but much better quality of life and more space. I'm not sure my kids would benefit from living more rural or more in a city, but if that changes we'll be happy to move to maximize their chances.

I grew up in Santiago, Chile, a city with a population of 7M and lived and went to school in the very center of it. Today I have nothing that resembles a social life and school was torture (never bullied, just bored to tears). I was only interested in math, programming, machines, and infrequently reading literary classics. Did this and that, standardized evaluations got me first place into college with a scholarship, even represented my country at international math contests. Good grades but hated every minute of school.

This, coupled with high prices for owning a house and crime in a dense city has prompted me to daydream everyday about going to the country and building my house. Even so far as entertaining the idea of becoming part of a religious group. Maybe someone needs to ground me? But every reason people mention (working hard, social life, school) doesn't change my mind, which worries me since it shows my bias might be too strong. I haven't mentioned the religious thing to my parents who are both atheists, they'll think I'm crazy.

EDIT: Teachers assigned fucking Hunger Games as reading, and people still do triangle similarity and solving second degree equations well into HS. I wish was homeschooled.

Such large cities are a real problem, especially in poor countries, but even in wealthy countries I would not want to live in them as an adult, let alone as a kid.

As for religious communities: be careful what you wish for.

You're assuming your parents would've been good at homeschooling.

That's the biggest issue with it, very few people doing it are trained teachers.

Source: my wife wanted to homeschool, I gave it my best, realised we were failing our children.

My experience of rural life in north-central BC says that the kids mostly don’t come out fine. The people living out there by and large have rejected society. Child abuse was rampant. A kid in my elementary class slept with farm animals to stay warm because the family was too poor to afford electric. Another was raising her siblings because her parent would fuck off for weeks at a time. Poverty, malnutrition, sexual abuse, abandonment, beatings, untreated injuries & illnesses, my classroom had it all.

Most adults who fuck off into the hinterland are not well-functioning, responsible, productive people.

Your 40k town and “sufficiently large base of other kids” do not describe rural living IMO.

> Your 40k town and “sufficiently large base of other kids” do not describe rural living IMO.

I did not mean to imply that it did.

From Megapolis -> Large City -> City -> Town -> Small town -> Rural -> Isolated

Is an enormous scale in experiences. My estimate is that the edges are the extremes in terms of downsides, which is why I ended up in 'Town' with my children. I've personally experienced all of the above (but, not all as a child though I can see just fine as an adult) and would not want to go near those extremes with children because I do not think I would be doing them a favor. Town and small town with a big city nearby are - from my perception - the optimum and anything else is more downsides than upsides as a kid.

> Most adults who fuck off into the hinterland are not well-functioning, responsible, productive people.

Yes, that goes for the majority. But I've also seen some awesome parents in locations like that, but that's a huge roll of the dice and still does nothing to change your surroundings.

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