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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

Adding two notes onto this hypothesis:

- I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.

- I've never lived in the American suburbs, but they don't seem very dense. I know that, growing up in Mexico, the kid density was great. Some of it probably has to do with the fact everyone had siblings. Matching ages with nearby neighbors is more likely when there's more kids too. We were outside all the time, older siblings introduced younger ones to the crowd. Friendships were made, broken and fixed. Adventures were had. More than once we got into situations that I knew my mom wouldn't be happy about too.

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> I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.

This hypothesis doesn't make sense, because all children were treated differently many decades ago, and by pure math the most common type of child is the first born. Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them. The fact is that parents were just less hovering helicopters in the past. I can attest to this as firstborn myself.

There is a wonderful Bluey episode about this - Fairytale - where the dad tells a real life fairytale about living in the 80's.

> by pure math the most common type of child is the first born.

I understand the sentiment you're trying to convey but I have to point out that's only true if the average family size is less than 2. The second it hits a full 3 that's very obviously untrue and most cultures in the past definitely had averages above 3.

> that's very obviously untrue

Only under a very uncharitable misunderstanding of what I said. If the categories are simply "first born" and "not first born", then first born ceases to be the most common as family size increases. But if the categories are "first born", "second born", "third born", etc., then first born never ceases to be the most common. And as I said, "Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them", so it hasn't been explained why parents were less risk-adverse in the past toward firstborn children (who have no older silbings to keep an eye on them). Every parent past and present had to deal with a firstborn.

Yours is the uncharitable understanding. The premise is "watched by adults" vs "watched by sibling". If family size is 3 then you have 1 who was watched by adults and 2 who were watched by a sibling.

And as family sizes increase, the family increases as well, so even the first born may not be treated as such, because they were always watched by cousins. Very quickly you can have a completely extant sub-culture in the children that is unaffected much by the adults.

People want to tell stories about the past, but they completely ignore the more recent past, specifically, Generation X, the notorious "latchkey kids", who also tended to belong to very small families, because the entire generation was the smallest in population of the recent generations.

US birth rates dropped dramatically between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, resulting in this small generation. (I attribute the drop to the increasing financial independence of women and the widespread adoption of birth control.) GenX family sizes were small, with few siblings. Yet GenX kids "enjoyed" (or suffered from, depending on your perspective) the absence of supervision for large parts of their days. Helicopter parenting didn't exist at that time. GenX is the glaring counterexample to the family size theory.

The past with extended families all living together — grandparents, cousins, et al. — is more distant than people are acknowledging.

your thought process is all over the place.

Gen-x was more independent because they were allowed to be, the family size doesn't have a lot of bearing on that, but more than that it's a non-sequitur that somehow gen-x is a counter-example to the idea that smaller families lead to higher value placed on child safety. child safety and independence are orthogonal ideas.

> Gen-x was more independent because they were allowed to be

Correct.

> the family size doesn't have a lot of bearing on that

Correct.

> child safety and independence are orthogonal ideas.

Incorrect.

your last statement is only true if you believe in a binary world.

In truth, a child can grab a can of soda out of the fridge without it being a safety concern.

> your last statement is only true if you believe in a binary world.

That's basically a nonsensical reply.

> In truth, a child can grab a can of soda out of the fridge without it being a safety concern.

Nobody is talking about children grabbing cans of soda. That's a non sequitur. The submitted article: "Children need risk, fear, and excitement in play".

I'm not going to play that game, the discussion had meandered over to safety and independence as orthogonal things.

we're done here.

My comments were talking about firstborn children. They literally have zero siblings.

is your claim that the firstborn child stops being the firstborn child when another child is born?

That appears to be what you're claiming.

> is your claim that the firstborn child stops being the firstborn child when another child is born?

No?

> That appears to be what you're claiming.

I have no idea where you're getting this crazy interpretation.

My point was that firstborn children don't have any siblings to watch over them, because they are the oldest child, and firstborn children didn't always have helicopter parents either. In other words, "watched by adults" vs "watched by sibling" was a false dichotomy.

your statement

> They [firstborn children] literally have zero siblings.

strongly implies children with siblings are not firstborn children.

As I said elsewhere, your thought process is all over the place. If you meant that firstborn children don't have _older_ siblings then you chose a poor way of communicating that.

But to rebut your statement, as someone else pointed out, firstborn children would often have cousins and neighborhood kids watch them.

> As I said elsewhere, your thought process is all over the place.

No, my thought process has been in exactly the same place the entire time.

> If you meant that firstborn children don't have _older_ siblings then you chose a poor way of communicating that.

My HN comments are not perfect prose, nor are they intended to be. Nonetheless, you can and in fact should assume that I'm not insane. What I meant was that firstborn have no siblings when they're born, and older siblings are the only relevant siblings as far as "watching over" is concerned.

> But to rebut your statement, as someone else pointed out, firstborn children would often have cousins and neighborhood kids watch them.

I've already addressed this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39553084

To me it gives the impression of a semi-mythical tale. Other than for occasional, specific babysitting gigs (usually paid), I've personally never "watched over" other children, whether a younger sibling, a neighborhood kid, or a cousin (all of whom lived at least hundreds of miles away). It's not something that happened in general. Kids are generally busy being kids themselves, doing their own things, and playing with their own friends. Perhaps in the distant past there was little in life except one's own extended family, but that past is long gone.

> My HN comments are not perfect prose, nor are they intended to be.

Oh well, I guess if it can't be perfect then no one has a license to tell you the reasonable reading of your words is completely different from what you meant. Improvement is only for those who don't think in binary terms.

I will say, growing up most of us have encountered that 1 kid who is just a bit weird due to the way his or her parents were raising them. I say this because that linked comment and your last paragraph display a belief of normalness that isn't normal. I'm sure it's your lived experience but I'm just as sure that's part of the problem with having parents who don't understand safety vs independence.

And as I said in the other comment, we're done here. Your thought process is all over the place and I think most of it is a difficulty to communicate and I'm not in the mood to even try.

> the reasonable reading of your words

"is your claim that the firstborn child stops being the firstborn child when another child is born?" is not a reasonable reading of my words in any way, shape, or form. It's an absolutely absurd reading.

> I will say, growing up most of us have encountered that 1 kid who is just a bit weird due to the way his or her parents were raising them.

How is this relevant? I'm not denying it, just wondering what exactly it's supposed to prove, if anything. My only claim is that the family-size psychological theory proposed by the OP is not true.

> I'm not in the mood to even try.

That much is obvious, given your aforementioned absurd interpretation.

> "is your claim that the firstborn child stops being the firstborn child when another child is born?" is not a reasonable reading of my words in any way, shape, or form. It's an absolutely absurd reading.

which is why I asked for clarification. Just because what you said is ridiculous doesn't mean I should know what you meant.

your communication sucks, get better at it. or don't, but the feedback has been given.

To your second point: I grew up in the American suburbs and had that. Probably not to the degree you did. I've noticed in the suburbs today that there are such few kids and it's just really quiet all the time. It's really sad to walk around the neighborhood or be outside and you don't hear kids playing.

People also seem to have fewer kids if they have them. That implies fewer cousin interactions like I had and also all those things you mentioned never happen. It's unbelievably sad.

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