Comment by famahar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by famahar | Hacker News Reader

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I hope we one day see a radical new form of raising children. Historically it was truly a village that raised a child. I never understood how my parents raised 5 children. But looking into it more, there was always a community of people that raised me. Community and mutual aid was huge in the small town in Ethiopia where my parents came from. Coming to Canada, that didn't change. Uncles, aunts, older cousins, long time family friends. Communes have a similar structure but usually get a bad rep. Good podcast episode on the topic

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/ezra-klein-kriste...?

"We could be raising our children cooperatively in dwellings designed to enhance rather than inhibit social connection. We could be more sustainably sharing our resources and teaching our children to value collaboration over competition. We could be living in wider lateral networks of love, care, and support; fighting the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life. Most of us are not.”

> I never understood how my parents raised 5 children.

My 2*(grand)mother raised 11 children. From what I've heard from other family members, the key to success is not giving enough emotional and material support to each child.

What I'm trying to say is: the expectations on children quality of life are also much higher vs 100 yrs ago.

And I think that is the key to dropping fertility: Once you experience relative wealth, you increasingly want to give the same to your kids.

It's not that we can't afford more children, but that we can't afford to give more children and ourselves the level of comfort we've come to expect.

I could afford to give quite a few children the standard of living we had when I was a kid, but while it was fine for it's time, it's not what I'd want to go back to for either myself or my kids.

It's also why I don't think this is a crisis in the long term on a global basis, though it may become one for individual countries:

Once wealth catches up to a level where we have sufficient buffer, I think we can balance things out.

My grand-grand-parents solution was to make my grand-mother drop school at 13 to help take care of the other kids.

The problem with those types of communities is that they often have a high level of social control. We see a pattern where most of the social development first happens in the cities (sexuality, culture, new ideas) and then slowly spreads to smaller communities. The constraints of small communities leads to many "escaping" to the cities to improve their lives.

Israel experimented with communally raising children within the Kibbutz system, but as far as I know the results weren't super encouraging and few places still do it

Kibbutz's failed because there's no incentive to do any work, same with every other form of communism that's been tried. Reworking daycare to be a more holistic experience than it currently is is a very different idea.

With what legal authority? Even the Knesset back then couldn't pass more ambitious laws. Let alone in 2023 or in most other countries.

Communal childcare in kibbutzim is not related to economic success - I know people who grew up like that, they gave up on it because the results for the kids were seen as negative. Even in rich kibbutzim with plenty of resources they've phased out communal childcare and children live with their parents.

What about introverted subset of people who prefer to be left alone, to not participate in wider social networks, who want to have a family and a door that shuts?

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